Sliding Toward the Abyss

My stepson called me last night to discuss Eric Cantor’s surprising loss in the Virginia Republican primary and that occupied our attention for a good while – it shows the establishment GOP that they have to deal with the Tea Party honestly or go down in flames – but the conversation turned when I told him that the city of Mosul had been taken by al-Qaeda, that 500,000 people were fleeing the city and that the Iraqi security forces, trained and equipped and supported at such a high cost in blood and treasure these past eleven years, had also fled the city, abandoning their vehicles, weapons, equipment and even their uniforms in their haste.  He was very sad at this news since he worked in Mosul as a contractor for Kellogg, Brown and Root for two years (he worked in Iraq from 2003-2007 during the worst of the insurgency) and knew military and civilian personnel who had been killed trying to secure the city, and the realization that all the sacrifices made toward that goal had been wasted struck him hard: The black flag of al-Qaeda now flew over his former compound.

America is repeating one of its worst traits in the loss of Mosul, that of abandoning a major strategic objective before the objective is met and leaving the affected people to their fate.  John Kennedy authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and at a critical moment, withheld naval and air support that doomed the operation.  In 1975, despite firm and repeated assurances to the contrary, Gerald Ford denied military assistance to South Vietnam as it was invaded by the North, guaranteeing a Communist victory and the worst strategic defeat in our history. Jimmy Carter refused to support Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as he faced a fundamentalist Muslim revolution in Iran because Carter disapproved of the human rights abuses committed by the Shah’s security forces, though the U.S. had overthrown the previous government in favor of Pahlavi and the Shah had been a major ally against Soviet expansionism in the Persian Gulf for twenty years. This ensured the rise of the most radical Islamic regime in the world, the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism and the greatest threat to Middle East peace ever. George H.W. Bush encouraged the Shiite tribes in southern Iraq to rebel against Saddam Hussein in 1991, as well as the Kurds in the north, then stood aside and watched as they were slaughtered in the thousands by Saddam’s tanks and gunships.  Over and over, America fights and bleeds and dies for an objective and then goes home before the objective is achieved, with dangerous consequences for us and deadly consequences for the people we leave behind.

Maybe establishing an Arab democracy in Iraq was simply impossible, maybe overcoming the kleptocracy was simply too hard, but after 9/11, it was worth the attempt and was certainly worth a better effort than arbitrary retreat.  Thirteen years of combat and massive investment have failed to change the corruption inherent in Afghan tribal culture and having declared unilaterally that the war is over, America leaves that benighted country in the hands of a resurgent Taliban to complete its misery.  In both of these cases, we chose to walk away, we could have stayed and fought the enemy on his own territory and kept the worst of Islamic extremism from our shores and we could have done so indefinitely, but our President lacks the stomach for that.  He is interested, rather, in disengaging from conflicts, in disengaging from the hard and flinty work of defending our interests, in assuaging hurt feelings in the Muslim world, in exchanging five hardened Taliban commanders for one American deserter, in emptying the cages at Guantanamo to please his friends at Berkeley, in giving up.  Projecting American power into the teeth of our enemies nauseates him (as his commencement speech at West Point last month attests), and beyond disdain for the military – cutting their budget by $1 trillion by 2022, closing the National World War II Memorial during the government shutdown – he just doesn’t think that America and her commitments are worth fighting for.  Those Iraqis who welcomed the Americans in 2003, who trusted us and helped us and believed that a democratic Iraq was possible, who now are running for their lives, are simply gullible and eminently disposable fools.  Those Afghans who suffered under the Taliban’s savage rule, who cooperated with us against them, who wanted a brighter future for their daughters than mutilation, slavery, ignorance and an early death, who now face the return of those pitiless sociopaths to the seat of power, live in a country very far away, whose customs we don’t understand and who are so ungovernable that even Alexander the Great gave up and returned to Babylon. Those Syrians who believed the President of the United States when he said that use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would constitute a “red line” that would invite swift retribution, whose children have been massacred by Assad’s poison gas and who lie in their graves unavenged, cannot be distinguished from the Hizbollah, Iranian and al-Qaeda thugs now overrunning the country and aren’t worth a confrontation with Vladimir Putin; ditto Ukraine.  Priest-King finds these people boring and tedious, their circumstances too complicated for his lofty intellect, annoying distractions from the important work of dismantling the world’s lone superpower and shaping his legacy.  So he looks away, maybe for political reasons but maybe because he knows the job is too big for him, maybe because florid speeches and empty threats are no replacement for guts, maybe because he is the wrong President for our time.  America deserves better, certainly Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine deserve better, but as we contemplate what could have been, Mosul burns.