Yesterday, President Obama requested that additional troops be sent to Afghanistan, the New York Times reports [1]. The actual number of soldiers is unknown, but according to the Times piece, “senior advisers to the president have said Mr. Obama intends to commit roughly 30,000 more troops.”
News from this conflict gets worse and worse with each passing day. This is a war that our top military commander admitted [2] in August that we are losing. This is a nation which the Russians and the Brits both failed to “defeat” in the past, while employing many of the strategies we have planned for the next phases of the war (as Daily Kos [3]‘ Markos Moulitsas and former CIA agent Jack Rice [4] pointed out on MSNBC last week [5]). This is an imperial adventure that a majority of Americans no longer support [6].
But my sense of the practical idiocy of Obama’s decision is overwhelmed by my sense that our politicians’ current understanding of foreign policy precludes these idiotic decisions. Our leaders, right and left, fail to realize that President Bush’s “War on Terror” was exactly wrong because it involved, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, an illegal imposition of American force on another nation. (Not that the 9/11 attacks, also an illegal imposition of force, were any better… but as every child learns, two wrongs don’t make a right.) The responsibility of other nations to sort themselves out ought to be respected, and the United States would be much better off setting an example for the world in this way. Unfortunately, Obama has done very little to change our approach, as today’s news underscores.
It was our fundamental misunderstanding of this — through our disproportionate military and economic support of Israel (which is viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a colonizing power in the Arab world) among other imperial actions in the Middle East — that radicalized Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 terrorists [7]. Why can’t Obama recognize that these wars get harder to “win” the longer we fight them?
The only way to stop the bleeding, then, is to admit defeat and lay down our arms. The same principle ought to be applied in Iraq. Like someone watching a Dane Cook comedy special Clockwork Orange-style [8] — and honestly, what worse a vision of hell is there than that? — we are stuck in a Vicious Circle [9]. And our policy, to this point, has been no less awful than that man’s comedy.
In a way, the problem with our current strategy for “democratizing” the Middle East is very similar to the problem with our current strategy for “rescuing” the economy. As economist Peter Schiff has pointed out [10], the only thing worse than a devastating recession created by a credit bubble was our response: to extend and loosen credit. Similarly, I would argue, the only thing worse than the terror attacks of 9/11/2001 — whose conditions were created by a century of Western encroachment in the Middle East — was our response: to extend and increase Western encroachment in the Middle East.
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Calvin Pollak [13]
Latest posts by Calvin Pollak (Posts [14])
- Against libertarian exceptionalism [15] - September 14, 2010
- 9/11/01 was the opposite of a sobering moment [16] - September 11, 2010
- Does internet freedom = political freedom? [17] - March 12, 2010
- One dude’s foreign policy views vis à vis his libertarian moral code [18] - February 12, 2010
- Senate approves more sanctions against Iran [19] - January 29, 2010