Last week, the day after the US began dropping bombs on Syria, Chris Matthews opened his daily political talk show on MSNBC by telling viewers he was reporting from a Washington that is now a “wartime capital”. A few minutes later, one of his guests — like most Matthews guests, a DC-based political pundit — spoke of US President Barack Obama having placed the nation “on a war footing”.
It was an odd construction. Placing the country “on a war footing” used to mean petrol rationing, adverts urging people to be careful what they said and government-organised drives to collect scrap metal. At the risk of stating the obvious, nothing remotely like that is happening today. To his credit, Deputy National Security Advisor Tony Blinkin rejected the war comparison when he appeared on CNN on Sunday, saying that there is no plan to send hundreds of thousands of American troops back to Iraq or to launch an invasion of Syria. What is striking is the degree to which no one on either side of this debate seems to care. Voices favouring escalation call what America is doing against Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) ‘war’ just as frequently as those who oppose it, Blinkin’s comments notwithstanding.
Indeed, all the talk in America over the last two weeks has been of war: How America is now, once again, fighting one; whether attacking Daesh from the air will be enough to ‘win’ and, most of all, debating when it will all end and how much the “homeland” has to fear from Daesh, Al Qaida, Jabhat Al Nusra and Khorasan — the latter being a terrorist group that is either the worst of the lot or completely fictitious, depending on whom one asks.
With mid-term elections in the US barely a month away, Daesh has become an issue in several congressional campaigns. Republicans from states like Texas have accused their Democratic opponents of being ‘soft’ on Daesh and terrorism for failing to support increased border security (this ignores both the fact that spending on border security has increased vastly under Obama and that there is absolutely no evidence that Daesh is trying to infiltrate the US from Mexico).
In a senate campaign in Georgia, the Republican is accusing the Democrat of supporting terrorism, though to reach that conclusion, as Gail Collins wrote in the New York Times, one must follow an “intricate pot-hole paved path” of logic that includes believing that a foundation established by former president George H.W. Bush has been actively encouraging would-be suicide bombers.
An enormous amount of attention is suddenly focused on Americans who have allegedly flown off to the Middle East to join Daesh. The number ‘several hundred’ is often thrown around in political debates, though a few weeks ago, the Pentagon said the true figure was approximately 12. What no politician dares say is that even if the larger figure is accurate, keeping track of that many alleged militants seems like a pretty manageable task for America’s intelligence services. Be that as it may, there are now campaigns in places as different as New Hampshire and Iowa where stripping Americans who join Daesh of their US citizenship (something that is more or less impossible under US law) has become a campaign issue gleefully wielded by Republicans and fearfully embraced by Democrats.
Even by the usual standards of political debate, it is all a bit depressing.
This is not to say that legitimate questions are not being asked. These include strategic questions such as: What, exactly, does the US hope to accomplish? Or: If it is really going to take a year or more to train a few thousand fighters to take on Daesh and, theoretically, Khorasan, will that actually do any good?
They also include political questions, such as: How did a president elected with a mandate to get America out of Middle East wars find himself proposing a brand-new, multi-year, military commitment to the region during his sixth year in the White House? And: If the administration succeeds with its claim that a 13-year-old Congressional resolution authorising attacks on Al Qaida also extends to Daesh — which did not exist in 2001 and has been formally renounced by Al Qaida — does the constitution’s requirement that Congress alone can declare war mean anything at all?
The problem is that, all too often, these are not the questions anyone in authority (or running for office) is trying to answer in any serious way. In the five weeks between now and Election Day, the challenge for Americans will be to ensure that the discussion of real issues does not get side-tracked by silly questions that have more to do with settling local political scores than solving the problem. America is not, and is not going to be, on a ‘war footing’. The sooner America gets past that, the sooner Americans can begin discussing real issues.
Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches political science at the University of Vermont.