How did that war on terror go?
It is commonly accepted that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were disasters, and that the “war on terror” (whatever that means) wasn’t won. But are these things true? Here’s a discussion that might be of interest. See what you think.
By the way, about the idea that the Bush administration thought the Iraq aftermath would be easy (“a cakewalk”), I beg to differ and I wrote about it in this post from 2005.
The problems in the present campaign against Iran – and they are many – stem from the fact that Iran is a much bigger country than Iraq with a larger population and a more religiously fanatical leadership unafraid to kill vast numbers of its own people, plus the IRGC has a structure that makes it exceptionally difficult to break, with power to control or threaten to control the vital Strait of Hormuz. In addition, we no longer tolerate having any boots on the ground, or nation-building of any complexity or length, and the Iranian leaders are well aware of that fact.
What the Iraq and Afghanistan wars devolved into was years of taxpayer money poured into military contractors and NGOs for services of dubious value to American security, regardless of how the military components of these wars actually went, with eager participation of both parties in Congress.
I do not think there is an electorally significant fraction of Americans eager to repeat these experiences in Iran or anywhere else. I forget what is supposed to happen after “fool me three times”.
NIketas:
We have military bases all over the world and many are of much more dubious benefit. I happen to think our postwar presence in both countries – Iraq and Afghanistan – did have some benefit, and was being maintained without a huge footprint. However, I’m not arguing – nor do I think the panel in that video is arguing – that we should have stayed indefinitely. But both pullouts were utterly mishandled.
FWIW, the “War On Terror” is never won. Ever. Terror is a concept. To its devotees an incredibly useful one psychologically. Fighting it is fought upon cultural battlefields, in the war of ideas, where it is unlikely to ever be vanquished.
Regarding Iraq and Afghanistan? Disasters. Unmitigated. Still being paid for, and years possibly decades from being paid off. Oh and the credit card balance keeps getting added to while it’s happening btw. My favorite is still that we “spent 20 years and $2.5 trillion to replace the Taliban with the Taliban”. It’s sardonically funny because it’s true.
Democracy promotion and “nation building” are fools errands. The Middle East is not a place where its denizens deserve the former or are really capable of the latter. It’s a cultural dumpster fire, and Bush and the neocons proved what many who advised otherwise had been saying so for years before.
Everything is a waste in those wastelands. Most especially dollars. Even more so blood.
Except the twelvers and IRGC with a nuke and ICBMs are not the same as the Taliban or Sadam, but peddlers of conventional wisdom ignore that fundamental. Because hindsight is perfect.
Reasons.
Unwillin Bar-Kiss:
They make that point in the video – that of course it can’t be “won.” It’s always ongoing. But has it been mostly successful in the last 25 years? That’s the question they try to answer.
If you haven’t watched the video, you might want to take a listen. You might still end up disagreeing, of course.
This has been a recurring theme on Commentary for some time now – that Iraq has largely been pacified and that the lack of large successful terror attacks on U.S. soil is evidence of some real success in the war on terror. This is the first full podcast devoted to the subject as far as I know.
I thought the podcast was great and very thought provoking. I love Commentary. One of the very few organizations, along with this website, that actually get any of my money. Thanks for posting.
I lived it. I don’t need to watch the video to know I’d disagree. It might taste different in Ukraine and Hormuz and elsewhere, but it smells the same and I’d subjectively suggest there’s more now than there was before.
And as long as this country refuses to act pragmatically in its own interest, not what others convince it to think are its own interests, it will probably get worse.
The ME is the worst place on Earth. Its people suck. A nuke could scarcely improve the place.
How many times do you let your teenager wreck the car before you stop letting him have the keys? Oh, he swears he’s just going to pick up his study buddies for a late session at the library. What, you don’t think he should study? Doesn’t studying benefit him?
How about we seek a solution that provides at least most of the benefits of studying at the library without letting him borrow the car which he swears he won’t wreck this time like he did the last two times?
Commentary gets paid to put this stuff out with a straight face–their revenue is mostly from grants, donations, and assets and not their magazine, with the vast majority of their spending on salaries, especially John Podhoretz’s–if they kick some of that funding my way I’ll pretend to believe it with a straight face, but not for free.
— Unwilling Bar-Kiss
But state-building is entirely possible there, and has been done many times. Bush allowed the establishment class to convert what should have been a straightforward state-building exercise into a nation-building operation. He also allowed the Left to get away with years of lying about it.
We don’t have the option of not being involved in the ME. 911 is proof of that, to say nothing of the economic and religious factors involved.
The War on Terror is the same war as Israel vs. Hamas, and America vs. Iran now. It never ended. Obama and Biden’s handlers surrendered on certain fronts, but the war continues.
“We don’t have the option of not being involved in the ME.”
Absolutism like this is what continues producing failure. We’ve been doing the same thing over and over again for almost 60 years in that sandbox expecting different results. We are insane. Of course “the war continues.”
For god’s sake, let them kill each other. They were homicidal head chopping goat thieves before finding oil and it turns out they’re still homicidal head chopping goat thieves pumping it too. They’ll be homicidal head chopping goat thieves once the oil’s all gone. We sell them the weapons to do it and we can keep selling them I’m sure. We promise, Lockheed, we promise!
I thought we would keep one of our more major air bases in either Iraq or Afghanistan indefinitely into the future. Preferably in Iraq. That would have had some significant value.
We used to launch aircraft from Turkey with some reliable certainty in the distant past, until we couldn’t most of the time. Even Italy isn’t that certain now, IIRC.
I suppose the question might be what would things look like if we’d stayed home.
Problem is that this isn’t a war o ‘terror”. It’s a war against militant Islam and they never quit. Can you imagine what would have to happen to hundreds of millions of Muslims to convince the rest of them that they’d been on the wrong path the last fourteen hundred years?
The benefit of the decades-long mutli-billion presence in Iraq and Afghanistan aside, I have a hard time believing that the concurrent importation into the US and the West generally of millions of Muslims with practically no vetting might have offset much of that benefit. Almost 60% of America’s 4.5 million Muslims have arrived since the year 2000.
“I lived it.”
Excuse, f’en me, Israel is part of the Middle East too.
Use your brain for more than something under your cover.
“Teenager and the car, …” Such an astounding insight.
We are not worthy.
When the Islamic Republic of Iran finally gets its nukes and starts World War III and our cities are radioactive ruins, I wonder if anyone will have second thoughts about whether “boots on the ground” was really such a bad idea?
There is no such thing as nation-building. There can be institution-building. The function of military institutions is outside my wheelhouse. I have seen some online chatter of late by a self-identified Afghanistan veteran who was employed training Afghan troops in the army the U.S. Government attempted to assemble. It was his contention that there recruits were untrainable but the information about their chronic and severe performance deficits was not passed up the chain of command. By his account, it was not merely unit cohesion which was lacking, but the willingness and ability of the recruits to acquire skills. Don’t know if this guy is for real, but it is one avenue to consider.
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In Iraq, the performance of Iraqi state forces, while not stellar, was eventually sufficient to break the back of the original insurgency and ISIS. I recently saw some data on quarterly lethal violence in Iraq. If the data is true, the level of violence is now 94% below the mean of the last 23 years. Conjoined with ordinary street crime, the man in the street is now less likely to die by homicide than is the resident of many a Latin American country.
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In terms of intramural disorders, the most violent places in the Near East, North Africa, and Central Asia are Yemen and Sudan, both peripheral and both lacking in human capital and resources (in comparison with other states).
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The most troublesome places as far as the west is concerned would be Iran (which has seen a dramatic decline in its capacity to project power through clients) and Turkey (which has acquired a new client in Syria but has long been fairly circumspect in asserting itself).
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Israel has had some dogfights with the Syrian air force, has staged raids on Iraq and Tunisia (in 1981 and 1986 respectively), and has been a participant in our campaigns in Iran. These aside, it has since 1973, however, it has been preoccupied with paramilitaries as opponents, most notably those which have been an extension of Iran. It was shy of 108 years ago that Britain and France completed their conquest of the Fertile Crescent; the Yom Kippur War happened about halfway between then and now.
People treat public speeches and their rhetorical flights as if they were inter-office memos. We are not and never were in a ‘war on terror’. We were in a war contra particular power centers and their clients.
Does “HC68” – or anyone – believe that “911” would ever have happened had the U.S. pursued a policy of non-involvement in the Middle East? U.S. involvement in the Middle East preceded “911” and was very much more a cause of it (although not, it should be unnecessary to point out, a justification for it) than an unavoidable consequence. And while “HC68” prefers to “say nothing of the economic and religious factors involved,” those “factors” are far from self-evident, and the ineluctability of American Middle East involvement is even farther from axiomatic. Some advocate of that involvement who doesn’t share “HC68’s” reticence needs to offer a sincere explanation, preferably shorn of name calling and condescension.
Regarding the “problems in the present campaign in Iran” (the last paragraph of the main post), the U.S. attacked Iran militarily apparently without any conception of achieving a military victory, or even of what such a victory might look like. We just wanted a “deal,” a “deal” with a government that proponents of this war continually, and increasingly, describe as a cabal of fanatical, soulless, world-destroying lunatics. We went to war with these demons not because we wanted to, and were willing to, defeat or subdue them, but because we wanted to do business with them. It turns out that they might not want to do business with us, however much we bomb them (or vulgarly, and sometimes obscenely, make empty threats of bombing them). We never wanted a military victory, and the soulless lunatics won’t give us a “deal.” (Why anyone would want a “deal” with a bunch of soulless lunatics is another – very good – question entirely.) Apparently no one foresaw this eventuality. There’s the problem in the present campaign in Iran.
I found the video unconvincing. Two things they didn’t really address:
1. We never really defined what success would look like. That allows them to look back at bad things that didn’t happen, and say “see, it worked.” Anyone can play that; it leads to no understanding.
2. They skirt the issue of “nation building”. To most, it meant exporting American style democracy. That is certainly the way most of its advocates argued for it. And it never did address the fact that we don’t know how to do that. They all said “Look at Germany and Japan”. Without, of course, looking at facts that were present earlier and not later, or vice versa. (E.g., the fact that both those countries were worried about Communism. Not an issue in the 21st C – though perhaps it should have been more of one.)
At the time I was challenging people by demanding when they would issue an apology to Woodrow Wilson, the original architect.
Nam still spreads it’s venom!
JDinPA can put his American involvement (anywhere) is the cause of 911 where the sun don’t shine, and then he can retrieve it and eat it.
He must have forgotten Jimmy Carter, the Ayatolla, the Shaa of Iran, and the US Embassy. Or is it Israel, JD?
FO and die JD.
In such discussions as this, it is perhaps useful to keep in mind what is arguably Clausewitz’s most famous dictum: “Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.”
“Excuse, f’en me, Israel is part of the Middle East too.”
I meant every word I said. Perhaps Israel should cowboy the fuck up and handle its business like the 80 year old “Sparta of the Middle East” it is. They have my permission to go as whole hog in the ME as they’d like, and take the repercussions wearing big boy pants without crying to sugar daddy (like they did in ’73) to bail them out. Alone.
Maybe they can threaten the Samson Option again like Golda did again, but the old gal ain’t around no more. Maybe Bibi’s up for it!
Double down on dumb.
Being a veteran only goes so far.
Your mask is off.
Anything else to share about the Yom Kippur war, long before you time in service, cowboy?
A major difference between WW2 and now is an excessive care for the enemy civilians. Something we didn’t give a damn about with Germany and Japan. Same thing that hamstrings the IDF in Gaza.
Another is no rat bastard democrats doing all they can to provide aid and comfort to the enemy while undermining the national effort. Note the moron congress critter from VA that went on MSNOW on Sunday and declared that Iran has no nuclear program. Tucker idiot calling it a phantom program. Lying shits the both of them.
My conservative friends asked me who was the worst president in the last 50 years, thinking I’d say Obama or Biden or Clinton. It was George W. Bush hands down. He started out with both houses of congress on his side and accomplished little domestically unless you want to say teaming with Ted Kennedy to overhaul our education system was a win. His prosecution of both wars was overly long, abysmal and costly in blood and treasure. Victor Davis Hanson (my go-to guy on such matters.) occasionally mentions the misuse of our ground troops, e.g. having troops go door to door in places like Fallujah. This is why the use of ground troops in Iran is out of the question. Bush squandered that option for a long time.
Remember him referring to the planning as “strategerizing”? It made us so prod of him.
“Anything else to share about the Yom Kippur war, long before you time in service, cowboy?”
Yeah, Israel would’ve lost it but for the United States. They’re welcome.
Oh, so you know that Israel would have lost without US aid, just like in 1948? That is the problem with the past; it is fixed but the what ifs aren’t.
And you point is what cowboy? That Egypt was robbed? That Israel is just like the rest of the Middle East?
Do share cowboy.
Another cowboy’s hobby horse.
Re JDinPA writes: “Does ‘HC68’ – or anyone – believe that ‘911’ would ever have happened had the U.S. pursued a policy of non-involvement in the Middle East?” Because we caused it.
Let’s put that popular claim to the test. Since Bin Laden originated the 911 attack on the US, and his organization Al Qaida carried it out, what else did they say their motive was? Besides some variation on “Offense to Allah” or “The Great Satan” or plain old personal revenge.
Historian Raymond Ibrahim was hired for work in the Middle East section of the Library of Congress after 911. In great part, because he was fluent in Arabic.
Concerned that Americans were unaware of the post-911 Big Picture, he published “The Al Qaida Reader.” In it he shared an extensive collection of Al Qaida propaganda intended to recruit new Jihadi in various Islamic countries.
These documents show that Al Qaida did not sell the cause by revenge against the US, but actually by any opportunistic motive you could imagine, in the Muslim way of offense.
The takeaway example I best recall is an “offense” you very likely couldn’t imagine. AQ broadsheets in Algeria appealed to the Ummah that former colonial powers like France flew airliners over your country. (Probably adding that it went to Israel.) “Come and fight these dirty Kafirs” because of that!
In forensic debate, the AQ propaganda strategy we would call a spread defense of the argument for Jihad. Namely, listing EVERYTHING a Muslim could be offended by. Everything — not one or even two things.
In short, this refutes the popular claim by John Mearshimer that we, the US, caused 911.
But did these facts become common knowledge during the Bush GWOT years? Of course not. It was almost completely drowned out by the left’s hyenas (eg, NYTimes and some mild abuse cases in a notorious former Saddam jail. 50 or 60 front page headlines).
I can never forget that the most senior and respected Democrat Senators — Jay Rockefeller (WV), Dick Durbin (IL), and Ted Kennedy — all called President George W Bush “worse than Hitler” or “worse than Stalin” or “worse than Saddam” as part of their hate campaign in the run up year to the 2004 election.
That was then. Recalling the assassination of Charlie Kirk just 11 months ago, the Left’s hate campaign has only gotten more unhinged since. Conclusion? The Left are evil. They want me and you dead, so I want them dead, too.
Egypt and Syria were helped every step of the way by commie Russia. No commie help, no Yom Kippur war. My father was at the puzzle palace at the time. When I asked why Israel let the Egyptian Third Army off the hook, he said Russia told the US, stop Israel or they would.
Yeah, Israel would’ve lost it but for the United States.
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Egyptian troops made it about 15 miles into the Sinai peninsula.
WRT “nation building”. It has a definition. Get with the program. It means “failure”. Any time you don’t like something the US is doing overseas, you call it “nation building” and….presto, by definition, it’s a failure.
We can help build or rebuild infrastructure. That’s not it. Pretty much every country in the world except us has at least a few weeks’ exeperience with parliamentary government. Don’t need us for that. Might need help getting their security squared against, say, ISIS.
Spreading US’ values… Iraq has a pretty good constitution. Until it gets to women’s rights after which it “defers to religious law”. Which in its legal system would make you sick. How to spread western values there…..? That would be “nation building” if anybody could figure out how to do it or waste a dime trying to convince the child rapists and haters in every aspect of society. So….make sure they have western-style business suits available and call it done.
Re Richard—
The developmental leadership shown by Israel has fueled the expansion of the Abraham accords. People cannot deny that the best educated, most productive, most healthy, and best living group of Arabs in the world are the two million living inside Israel.
THAT’s the model these ME nations hope to emulate and improve. Modernity is calling out to the old Bedouin tribes.
Would this have happened without removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq? And Israel’s blazing economic success? No.
I’m for targeting Iranian leadership from the bottom on up at this point now. Sure, if a BIG DOG shows up — kill him for sure. Surely there are Iranian informers who can say where a sgt and his commander live — ‘you know’, the two who led a recent murdering of a group of protesters.
Kill as many leaders of that IRGC unit as possible. Captains, sgts, Lts, and on up. Asked Grok and Claude AI’s to help me draft a plan for that. Guess what, that’s against ‘sOmEtHiNg’ (?!?!) and not fair or proper etiquette!?!?!?! AIs won’t go into how to do it or whatever.
Hunt them down and kill them .. give sgts and up food for thought and screw the rules…geez!? Yes, AIs, I’m talking “thousands” of them…
Operation Nickel Grass did not happen in a vacuum. Israel was against a wall and they knew it. Nickel Grass was the result of an Israeli ultimatum, and America blinked. It wasn’t help, it was desperation. Russia had nothing to do with it.
Operation Nickel Grass did not happen in a vacuum. Israel was against a wall and they knew it. Nickel Grass was the result of an Israeli ultimatum, and America blinked. It wasn’t help, it was desperation. Russia had nothing to do with it.
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Egyptian troops got nowhere after 13 October and Syrian troops made no progress at any time during the war.
I know I’m in the minority here, but I still believe the Iraq War was justified and has had positive results.
9/11 was a radical event that demanded a radical response. We needed to get a toe-hold in a region that sponsored terrorism. We’ve largely succeeded.
I mostly agree with the arguments advanced in the video.
Russia, cowboy? That was the USSR, aka, The Evil Empire, anything else? Nothing to do with their proxies?
This is how history is worked by a cowboy.
Whether it is justified or not retrospectively, the states of the Near East, North Africa, and Central Asia suffer their own political pathologies. They weren’t manufactured by the United States and they manifest themselves without regard to whether or not the United States is a consequential actor in a given locus. The whole paulbot thesis is silly.
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As for Israel, there is no necessary conflict between it and any state in the region. It had businesslike relations with Iran from 1948 to 1979, a situation terminated unilaterally by Iran; Iran might have withdrawn their ambassador and boycotted Israeli goods, but they had more extensive and violent objects; this was not done for reasons of state. It does have conflicts with paramilitary bodies: (1) those whose raison d’etre is to attack Israel and (2) those who are cat’s paws of Iran, whose conflicts with Israel are wholly discretionary.
Who should I believe, my father a professional war planner assigned to the Joint Chiefs and who had just moved from Strategic Air Command HQ and who told me this on the day it happened or …
Wonder if one could match those furiously insisting the Allies didn’t do enough to prevent the Holocaust, or at least reduce its effects substantially, with those insisting we stop helping Israel?
I think we could in political leanings, and in personality types. Not necessarily in the same sentence, though. Maybe,
TJ: In forensic debate, … would call a spread defense of the argument …
And, alas, the NYT and the Demo’s covered for them in rebuttal.
Does “HC68” – or anyone – believe that “911” would ever have happened had the U.S. pursued a policy of non-involvement in the Middle East?
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(1) Define such a policy
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(2) Explain what about American policy would persuade a Saudi freebooter living in Afghanistan to commission suckers to crash planes into office buildings in New York.
— Chases Eagles
True. Also normal.
World War 2, the ACW, etc. are historical exceptions. Most of the wars America (or other states, for that matter) ever fought were waged with limited means for limited ends. Total war to utterly crush the enemy or give him a choice between surrender or obliteration is the exception.
That isn’t new. Sun Tzu talked about that distinction centuries ago.
“Art Deco”:
(1) We could have maintained normal diplomatic and trade relations with the countries in the region without underwriting any of them, participating in the overthrow of any of their governments, joining in any of their wars, or basing any of our troops there.
(2) Speculating about bin Laden’s mental impressions is a fool’s errand. My point in responding to “HC68” – and I have to believe you know this – was not that American foreign policy entered into those impressions, but rather that “HC68’s” suggestion that what happened on September 11, 2001, necessitated U.S. involvement in the Middle East stood the chronology of relevant events on its head because our country was deeply involved long before that atrocity. Our involvement wasn’t the efficient cause of the atrocity, but I don’t see how any thinking person could argue that it didn’t make it more likely that we would be the target of an attack.
“more likely” – pretentious stupidity.
How much, more likely, bozo? Somewhat? 1%
more likely, 10% more likely, 300% more likely.
They only hated America slightly before Americans set foot on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia? They only hated America a little while the CIA was providing armaments to the muja pedos fighting the USSR in Afghanistan?
Oops, ARAMCO had been there for many decades making sacred Saudi Arabia a petroleoum power, before OBL became the wealthy murderous SOB.
We could have maintained normal diplomatic and trade relations with the countries in the region without underwriting any of them, participating in the overthrow of any of their governments, joining in any of their wars, or basing any of our troops there.
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Outside of Tropical Africa, the ratio of foreign aid to gross national income is usually quite small. Prior to 1973, American aid to Israel was inconsequential. It grew to contextually large portion over the next 11 years as part of an effort to broker a peace deal between Egypt and Israel. Egypt was another notable aid recipient in that era, but on a contextually smaller scale. The ratio of American aid to gross national income in Israel was cut by more than 90% over a period of 30-odd years and, after about 1992, consisted of credits to buy military equipment from American manufacturers. Osama bin Laden’s hatred for Israel wasn’t contingent on that.
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Bar and air base in Turkey (whose focus was Soviet Russia), we had no military bases in the Near East until 1990. One of Osama bin Laden’s bugaboos was that American troops were present in Saudi Arabia. Between 1990 and 2002, their number averaged about 6,200, in a country where the expatriate population is measured in eight digits.
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In 1990, the Baath regime in Iraq conquered and despoiled a neighboring country with a large quantity of oil reserves. They were forcibly ejected seven months later. This bothers paulbots because reasons.
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The U.S. government followed a laissez faire policy in re the Taliban from 1996 to 2001. They still attacked us.
— JDinPA
I don’t know why I’m bothering to respond to this nonsense, but here goes a partial reply:
Of course we were involved in the ME before 911. From cold necessity.
1. The enormous oil and natural gas reserves there make the region critical to the world economy. That’s a fact, not an opinion. There are other interesting resources in the region as well.
2. The region is centrally located in the ‘world island’ of Eurasia and Africa, and thus strategically important. During the Cold War, Soviet dominance over the ME would have been a major problem for the USA. Like it or not (and I don’t entirely like it) our economy is intricately interwoven with that of the rest of the world, and has been for well over a century. Even if we could get by without ME oil directly, enemy control of that oil, whether Soviet in the 20C or Islamist (or anyone else who does not care for us) still affects us in basic ways.
3. The ME, like it or not, is where the three main Abrahamic religions have their roots and where they come together in uncomfortable interactions now. ‘The West’ is short for ‘Western Christendom’, though our ruling class doesn’t like to remember that. Those religious forces will pull us back toward the ME even if we tried to wash our hands of it.
4. It’s trivially true that if we had taken a hands-off policy in the ME, 911 would not have happened. A lot of us would never have been born, either, for that matter. Such a world would be a different place at the detail level. But we and the Islamist movements would still have been hostile to each other, because we threaten the Islamists simply by existing. Instead of 911 would have come other attacks.
Even if we had never had significant troops or personnel or economic interests there, our TV shows and music and culture would still directly impinge on them. It’s a small world after all, as the song goes, post Industrial Revolution. We can’t avoid affecting each other.
The same issue applied to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, we undercut the Communists just by existing, and visibly being richer, freer, and more secure than they were. That all by itself made a mockery of Communist boasts about being the new scientific social policy.
In some ways, it’s worse with the Islamists. Not all Muslims necessarily subscribe to the core tenets of Islamism, but those tenets do have some Koranic support. Christianity makes no promises to its adherents of supremacy in this world. Indeed, we are promised that in many times and places we would be persecuted. Likewise, Christianity can acknowledge a separate ‘temporal’ (meaning temporary) secular authority that is not automatically illegitimate. The ‘two swords’ doctrine goes back to the Middle Ages.
The strains of Muslim belief embraced by the fundamentalist Islamists do maintain that Islam should be supreme in this world. This makes the objective fact of Western political, technological, and social primacy in this world something like an existential challenge. Either their particular strains of Islam are wrong, or something is demonically wrong in the world to permit such perversion to prosper.
So no, they would not be willing, or even able, to ‘leave us alone if we leave them alone’, save on a very temporary basis, and that would be true without regard to our own policies there.
Defenders of Islam often claim that Islam is tolerant of other Abrahamic faiths. That’s a half truth. Historically, there have been times when Jews fled Christian lands to Islamic ones because they were less persecuted there, but that was centuries ago and a different world.
Likewise, the ‘tolerance’ of the Islamists requires that Christians and Jews live in ‘dhimmitude’. Dhimmitude has meant different things in different times and places, ranging from ‘not so bad’ to ‘ghastly’, but it explicitly rejects any equality.
(Note also that ‘live in dhimmitude’ is the tolerant strain of Islamist fanaticism, the hard-core think more in terms of ‘convert or die’.)
Have Western, and American, policies in the ME sometimes been counterproductive? Of course. No political policies are ever perfect.
But that’s not the source of the hatred.
Which brings us to Israel.
The region hates Israel for two main reasons. One is that it is specifically a Jewish state that does not live in dhimmitude. The old religious divides.
The other reason is that Israel is also a basically Western nation-state, richer, more powerful, more technically advanced, more politically and socially potent, than their Islamist neighbors. It’s the same acid bath that the USA generates for them, only right next door.
Which means that no, we could not get peace from the Islamists by abandoning Israel. It would just be a massive signal of weakness.
We just don’t have, and have not had for well over a century, the option of disengaging from the Middle East.
“Art Deco”:
So, the U.S. did everything I said it should not have done had it pursued a policy of non-involvement in the Middle East. Whether or not Osama bin Laden had any of that specifically in his mind when he hatched the idea of 9/11 doesn’t seem to me worthy even of academic interest. If you want to persist in maintaining that involvement in those and other ways (e.g., support of the 1953 Iranian coup and the Shah’s regime for decades thereafter, then support of Saddam Hussein’s war against the Iran of the Shah’s successors) in an area of the world in which hatreds are lustily embraced and lovingly, violently and perpetually nursed did not to some degree paint a target on the back of the U.S., the elephant in the room among the world’s nations, then persuading you otherwise is beyond any power I might justly be accused of possessing.
I do have three questions, though, posed sincerely and not at all in an ironic or mocking manner:
1) What was the laissez faire policy of the U.S. government in re the Taliban between 1996 and 2001 that you refer to?
2) When did the attack of the U.S. by the Taliban that you refer to occur?
3) Regarding all the things you mention in your comment – economic and military support of Israel, economic support of Egypt, basing of troops in Saudi Arabia, the first Gulf War of 1991 – what American interests were served by any of them?
JDinPA doesn’t and cannot recognize the USSR was an evil in the world. But he can and does prattle on and on.
So, the U.S. did everything I said it should not have done had it pursued a policy of non-involvement in the Middle East. Whether or not Osama bin Laden had any of that specifically in his mind when he hatched the idea of 9/11 doesn’t seem to me worthy even of academic interest.
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I’m sure you fancied this remark was coherent.
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If you want to persist in maintaining that involvement in those and other ways (e.g., support of the 1953 Iranian coup and the Shah’s regime for decades thereafter, then support of Saddam Hussein’s war against the Iran of the Shah’s successors) in an area of the world in which hatreds are lustily embraced and lovingly, violently and perpetually nursed did not to some degree paint a target on the back of the U.S., the elephant in the room among the world’s nations, then persuading you otherwise is beyond any power I might justly be accused of possessing.
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(1) There was no ‘Iranian coup’ in 1953.
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There were CIA operatives in Tehran in August of 1953. What their net effect was is a matter of counter-factual speculation. See Reuel Marc Gerecht’s account of the CIA’s mundane reality when he was there employed.
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Iran ca. 1952 was passing through an attempt at constitutional government, a project which (prior to 1978) failed abjectly nearly everywhere in the Near East, North Africa, and Central Asia outside of Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, and Cyprus, and was not a rousing success in the places it had some durability. The prime minister of the time, Mohammed Mossadeq, prorogued the legislature in the spring of 1953 and attempted through various avenues to disestablish the monarchy. All of this was unlawful and the Shah of Iran was within his rights to dismiss the prime minister (who attempted to hold on to power contra law). The machinations of the American and British governments were on the side of institutional continuity.
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Of course, none of the leftoid or paulbot antagonists of American foreign policy ever actually define ‘support’. We had ordinary diplomatic and trade relations with Iran over a period of 25 years. The Shah set up a secret police service in 1958 and had some counsel from American officialdom at the time. In the galaxy brains of leftoids and paulbots, this is a matter of great moment, even if a dozen other countries in the region had such agencies. You can have a look at the assessments of Freedom House published in 1973-78; Iran was a normal range country in the region in that respect and the Shah’s successors never had any use for benevolent government.
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And here we have the same rhetorical strategies employed in regard to the Iran-Iraq War. In 1967, the Iraqi government broke diplomatic relations with the United States for whatever reason they had and intercourse between Iraq and the United States was minimal for the next 18 years. The Reagan administration attempted a rapproachement in 1985 (most of the way through the Iran-Iraq War) which included an exchange of ambassadors, granting some credits in the realm of trade in agricultural goods and agricultural imputs, &c. This banal set of policy adjustments is of great moment for the galaxy brains because any excuse will do to stick the bill for some disagreeable event with American officialdom. (If we’d done nothing in re Iraq, the galaxy brains would have blamed our officials for that too).
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You’d be more persuasive if your theses sprang from some source other than your personal conceits or personal resentments.
As has been discussed above, a significant aspect (though certainly not all) of US support for Israel is related to the Cold War and geopolitics.
(E. g., see this important review of a biography of Richard Pipes:
https://www.civitasinstitute.org/research/russia-and-the-solitary-historian
H/T Powerline blog.)
The same holds true with America’s relationship with the Shah of Iran (which is why Jimmy Carter’s decisions vis-à-vis that country in the late 70s—not to mention France’s role in the disaster) were so egregious.
With this in mind, while it is indisputable that Nixon’s decision (contra Kissinger) to resupply Israel as fast and as completely as possible enabled Israel to turn the tide in October 1973, why can’t this decision be viewed on several different levels, including geopolitics but also, perhaps even more importantly, as an issue of VISIBLY maintaining alliances, i.e., sustaining an ally in its hour of dire need?
IOW, we may be viewing 1973 through 21st-century eyes; IOW, conspiracy theory may often be very attractive—it may even be true in certain cases—but there are usually other reasons to explore, verify and analyze events (e.g., the Liberty attack). And needless to say, the USSR has since been supplanted by some other very bad actors.
while it is indisputable
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It is?
Yes, absolutely.
My assertions are “indisputable.”
Your speculations are specious. ;0
Well, perhaps someone with a granular understanding of the war (preferably a combat veteran / military historian) might be able to make categorical statements. I think it’s rather rum to say Egyptian troops would have been riding into Gaza and Beersheba absent rapid American equipment resupply. To be sure, our interlocutor never specified what he understood ‘lost the war’ to look like.
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Please note that resentment of the United States is widespread in this world w/o regard to history or current conditions. Everyone has excuses for their complaints. The media and the faculty write lawyer’s briefs for them. What Thos. Sowell once said: recrimination is the default reaction to reversals of fortune; constructive reactions are unusual.
Re: 9/11 was US fault
This ignores the basic facts of Islam. Lands that Muslims have conquered are in the House of Peace (dar al-Islam). Lands they haven’t conquered are in the House of War (dar al-harb) — to be conquered eventually. This is Allah’s mandate and promise to Muslims.
In Bin Laden’s first public speech after 9/11 he was still complaining bitterly about the fall of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) in which Christian forces retook Spain in 1492 — long before the US was founded.
Muslims will keep coming at any non-Islamic country or even other Muslims of the wrong sect. Usually Muslims have an excuse and explain themselves as victims, but basically that’s the way Islam rolls.
Ask the Jews in old Medina.
Ask the Christians in old Constantinople.
My wake-up call to leave the left was the archetypal post-9/11 article, “Why do they hate us?” Read the Quran, the Hadiths, even a decent encyclopedia article on the history Islam to know better.
It’s not Us; it’s Them.