More War, More Enemies
As intelligence agencies rush to connect more dots on a page so crowded with dots that they already almost touch, Americans need to focus on the real problem, our foreign policies. We have made ourselves the enemy of over a billion people, nearly a quarter of the world’s population. Aside from President Obama’s Bush-sounding, bombastic speech, there is simply an overload of information: too many names, too many threats from citizens of too many nations. Indeed, overloading our defense systems may be part of al-Qaeda’s strategy.
As many Muslims see it, Washington kills innocent civilians all the time. American hypocrisy enrages them almost more than our bombs, no matter how much we claim that we only aim at bad guys. Our problem is the same as one faced by mighty Hercules in ancient mythology – for every enemy we kill, 10 more spring up in their places, each hating America even more. Hercules’ solution was to stop his killing and leave the country.
Almost all Muslims have been outraged by our foreign policy in Iraq and Gaza. Several years ago, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman wrote of a Palestinian woman and her children screaming for help into a cell phone as Israeli soldiers were breaking down her door to expel her from her home. Friedman reported that the recording was then played over and over again by radio stations in the whole Muslim world. Such recordings and now videos from the attack on Gaza must also be on the Internet and are surely used by al-Qaeda for its training and motivation courses.
Conservatives demanding ethnic profiling of potential terrorists used only to be concerned with Palestinians and other Arabs. Now there are Iraqis, Pakistanis, Somalis, Nigerians, Afghans, Yemenis, Saudis, and European converts, all potential suicide bombers. Meanwhile America cuts itself off from more and more Muslims both in terms of their traveling or studying in America and in terms of our losing out on business in the oil-rich nations. In Iraq, little business goes to America, and all the new oil contracts have gone to non-American companies; in Saudi Arabia, most new oil contracts now go to non-American companies; and in Iran, Washington prohibits U.S. business from most trade. In Yemen and Somalia, no American will feel safe for years to come.
On the possibly mistaken assumption that this can’t go on forever, fighting ever more peoples, looking into the future I think Afghanistan is gonna be the Dien Bien Phu of all this. The high-water mark, if you will. No fancy-ass COIN strategy is gonna work, things are just gonna get more and more inconclusive if not clearly worse showing that anything less than a decades-long huge commitment would be needed, and we’ll start retreating.
Might well do so under the cover that we did win or etc., but it’ll be a lie. And the Republicans might still be pointing out it’s a lie and saying we should just keep fighting and fighting, but there’ll be no belly for it amongst the voters. Just as I think there’s no real belly for bombing Iran anymore.
The costs are coming home to roost, people are starting to realize that there’s more important domestic things than going to endless war in innumerable countries over occasional underpant bombers, and we’ll commence to directing our delusions towards domestic things, like the idea that we can spend our way out of bankruptcy.
Until, that is, the next big terrorist strike because in the meantime … we won’t really have changed a thing in our policies that got us the first one on 9/11. And the terrorists and etc. will have also missed having so many of us over there where we were so much easier to get to.