It’s the ultimate rule in American national politics: There shall be no legitimate questioning of starting yet another war, even if all of the recent ones are the exact reason the United States is in its current situation with Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). All signs increasingly point to the fact that the US will be dragged into another ground war in the Middle East despite the administration’s insistence that it does not want to caught up in one.
The Pentagon announced on Tuesday a new ‘expeditionary force’ (a propaganda term to avoid saying ‘ground troops’) that will apparently operate apart from any Iraqi or Syrian rebel-allied fighters and be able to conduct cross-border raids in either country. It’s worth harkening back to the last military intervention — one that has now completely backfired — to question if more US soldiers on the ground in multiple countries will only exacerbate the problem, rather than be part of the solution. No, not the Iraq invasion, even though it obviously caused destruction on a massive scale and precipitated the rise of Daesh. I’m talking about Libya in 2011.
Since the US overthrew dictator Muammar Gaddafi — hailed at the time as a “model” for US intervention — the country has descended into chaos, where large portions are now completely under the control of Daesh. The New York Times carried a detailed story on its front page last Sunday, describing a dire situation with no functional government and various groups vying for power that fight each other rather than teaming up to fight Daesh.
The Libyan intervention was the signature foreign policy move of Hillary Clinton’s time as the Obama administration’s secretary of state, where she pushed hard for military action when others were advising against it (and there was a very good argument that the whole war was illegal, given Congress not only did not approve it, but the House actively voted against it ).
The chaos in Libya has been almost completely scrubbed from the 2016 presidential campaign and public debate over the use of more military force in the Middle East, even as Republicans continually churn up another issue involving Libya: The increasingly contrived Benghazi scandal.
Republicans, despite having their daggers sharpened for Hillary, have studiously ignored the actual elephant in the room: That not only did their own Iraq War pave the way for Daesh, but America’s subsequent conflict in Libya that Hillary championed has created yet another safe haven for the terrorists America is now fighting against. As Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote in the Week, besides Rand Paul: “The other Republican candidates cannot bring themselves to question the results of force” — because they can’t help but advocate for more bombs at every turn.
One of the few foreign policy analysts to question this hypocrisy, as well as the constant call for more troops for a never-ending series of wars, is Daniel Larison, who wrote on Tuesday: “Recognising the role of failed policies in making terrorist attacks more likely is vitally important in the wake of such attacks, and yet that is the time when there is the strongest opposition to doing so. Despite the fact that the Paris attacks appear to be a direct response to French bombing in Syria, there is enormous resistance to acknowledging that earlier French intervention played any role in provoking the attacks. Instead, the answer has been to retaliate with more bombing.”
So now there are troops headed back to Iraq to fight and to Syria for the first time. Soon there will probably be troops headed to Libya as well, if that New York Times report is any indication.
There are some differences in this situation than in the past. In Iraq, America at least is not overthrowing the government this time (though if the past is any indication, the alienation of yet another generation of Iraqis and the creation of more terrorists is likely). In Syria, America is fighting both sides of a civil war — with no one even coming close to explaining what the end game looks like and how America can avoid making the situation even worse than what it already is.
But the fact remains that US military interventions have created the generation of terrorists that fight against it now. As America gears up for the second or third generation of creating this same problem, when will the cycle stop?
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Trevor Timm is executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit organisation that supports and defends journalism dedicated to transparency and accountability.
