Look, Peter, it’s not that George McGovern (or I) would “cheer” President Obama’s announcement that he’s going to do what he can to protect the Yazidi, the Turkmen, the Christians, and the Kurds from the murderous rampages of the Islamic State. There is nothing to “cheer” for here. But, yes, these guys are every bit as bad as the Khmer Rouge. Quite possibly, they are worse. And our country (if not our president) is just as responsible for creating the conditions that led to the Islamic State as we were for creating the conditions that led to the Khmer Rouge.
There are many things that Americans cannot do, or cannot do well. But we can’t be prisoners to our past mistakes. When an army in loosed on the world that has the intent of murdering or enslaving anyone who won’t convert to their perverted faith, you cannot look the other way. Certainly, George McGovern would understand that. But he would find nothing cheerful about this situation.
And what is our moral obligation in Palestine, Peter? You fckin’ idiot.
I’m glad to see we’re going to try to do what we can. Clinton prevaricated on Bosnia and it cost many lives. I’m sure we won’t put men in on the ground and I won’t say we should, but we have resources to at least slow those murderous thugs down and we ought to use ’em.
Let’s not leave out the initiation of the conflicts:
Fifteen years on there are still 5,000 NATO troops in Kosovo and the country remains desperately poor. And some, possibly considerable, organ trafficking has been/is happening there.
Market oriented economy, survival of the fittest, ethnic cleansing — one just seems to roll off the other.
We had a chance to prevent genocide with fairly little cost and did so, which made us almost as bad as the Bosnian Serbs — possibly worse, because US intervention, foreign hegemon, Western bigfooting, imperialism, that sort of thing, whereas the Bosnian Serbs live there.
The thing to do when you have a chance to prevent genocide with fairly little cost is to do nothing. And be seen to do nothing. This immunizes us from any charges of intervention, foreign hegemon, Western bigfooting, or imperialism.
The key thing is, we have to atone for our earlier sins, and no one said that would be pretty.
I mean, yeah, if you’re a Bosnian Mulism, or an Assyrian Christian, or a Yazidi, it kind of sucks, but hey, what can you do?
“The thing to do when you have a chance to prevent genocide with fairly little cost is to do nothing. And be seen to do nothing.”
I’m still trying to decide if you are serious about that. It sort of appeals to me since I don’t actually do anything to prevent or cause genocide. I’m just a mildly interested spectator watching the craziness the elite of humanity inflict upon those in the middle east. One of these days we will ask them to stop doing that.
The rub is that asking never works.
We have to make them.
let go of the idea that can intervene in an isolated way we will continue to inject ourselves in what appear to be simple moral conflicts but which are in fact the product of complicated historical processes that cannot be fixed with interventions.
So we get the inevitable references to the Khmer Rouge or the Nazi’s or some other notorious group.
And it must be said, the ISIS are bastards. But they exist in part because we intervened for the stated purpose of taking down another bastard.
We have to get out. We have to realize that there is no such thing as a simple isolated humanitarian intervention. Taking ISIS down a peg helps which group – do we even know? Did anyone foresee ISIS when we intervened in Iraq in the first place.
The answer to both of these questions is, of course, NO.
But the images float across our television screens and we think we have to do something. The temptation seems overwhelming. But in a year or three when we look back we see all manner of unintended consequences.
And we will probably know it was a mistake. And once again we will remember that just wanting to “do something” is in fact the reaction of child.
Yes:
All those that cheered on the invasion/occupation of Iraq dismissed the DFHs that kept raising the specter of Vietnam. We couldn’t define exactly how it would evolve; only that it would be long, costly, deadly, destructive, and have many unintended consequences and developments. The Khmer Rouge was one of those from the Vietnam War.
While Khmer Rouge is remembered for its horrendous four years in power, what came before and after and who sponsored what is forgotten. Mid to late 1960s secret military incursions and bombings into this sovereign country. The March 1970 coup led by the anti-communist Lon Nol that ousted Prince Sihanouk. In April Nixon publicly ordered bombings of Cambodia. A civil war ensued for the next five years. 4/12/75 US embassy personnel evacuated Phnom Penh by helicopter and the capital fell to the Khmer Rouge. (The much more remembered US evacuation of Saigon was on 4/29/75.)
Torture, genocide, and starvation were perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge government. The China sponsored Khmer Rouge was defeated in 1979 by the Soviet sponsored Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Such beautiful countries and lovely people that the US had to turn into enemies, wage a ten year war against them, and leave them to sort it out with four more years of horror. And here we are and have been for ten years doing the same thing to other peoples and countries.
Did everyone miss President Obama’s press conference where he explained how it was ultimately going to have to be an Iraqi solution?
Seems to me a lot of commenters are falling into the we are all or nothing trap.
Haven’t you noticed that what Obama says and what he does are frequently not in sync?
And somehow that “Iraqi solution” means: Obama pledges long-term campaign to fight Iraq’s spreading jihadist crisis.
So…turn those images off, off, off!!!
Please.
“…we think we have to do something???”
There is no “thinking” involved.
It is only another in a long line of Government Media Complex mass hypnotic efforts at work.
If for whatever realpolitik reasons our controllers wanted ISIS to win, do you really think that the images to which you refer would be on the float across “our” TV screens? Of course not. ISIS would be being portrayed as the good guys, l just as were those thug gangs opposing Assad in Syria.
Or…depending on strategic and tactical decisions made in secure back rooms…they would not be on the screens at all.
It’s all a show.
Only the blood and death are real.
The rest?
Just more three card monte, on a massive and deadly scale.
How do you know when the government is lying?
When you are listening to them.
AG
the people who talk about our “moral obligation” like to think of themselves as “the adults in the room”, but this is the reality
Now if we would at least deny our long fast civilian killing friend ammunition I could be be more comfortable.
There is only one mission that makes sense in northern Iraq. The US can destroy the US-made weapons that the Islamic State captured in Mosul and are large enough to be obvious targets in what is a war pretty much limited to roadways and adjacent land.
Take a gander on Google maps for the terrain around Irbil and Sinjar.
According to news reports, airstrikes today were aimed at artillery and mortar positions and convoys. There will be an attempt to upen a safe corridor for the Yazidis to move deeper into Kurdistan to receive relief brought in through Turkey.
The US military installation in Irbil is now worrisome because it provide the “first casualty” justification for putting more boots on the ground. Especially putting in more Special Forces and CIA. The Pesh Merga and Shi’ite Militias that the Iranians are assisting can likely deal with Islamic State fighters if they (1) separate Sunni supporters who now are having buyers remorse from their alliance and (2) reduce the Islamic State core fighters to use of small arms.
NATO air strikes with cruise missiles and laser guided bombs proved effecting in degrading Gadhafi’s artillery and mortar positions even within neighborhoods of Misrata that had been evacuated as a result of the fighting.
I worry less about pressure from the anti-war side causing humanitarian disaster through omission than that John McCain and Lindsay Graham and Democratic hawks looking for political cover stampede the administration into wider conflict. We’ve seen this dynamic with regard to Iran and with regard to Ukraine.
“George McGovern” is a pretty irrelevant argument and reflects the stupidity of some of the President’s knee-jerk defenders.
It is going to take some leadership and restraint on the President’s part if this action is to work effectively. And it’s still dicey. The temptation to resist is doubling down when something doesn’t produce results. And the temptation to go it alone when there might be new relationships that bring a wider bit of stability to the world. The Iraqi government is relying on the Russians and the Iranians and keeping their distance from the US. Some sort of implicit notion of theaters of action the builds on the already existing regional alliances might work back to a way to stabilize Syria.
The biggest roadblock to wider stability is Netanyahu’s opportunism in Gaza. There must be some firmness and leadership to get a result there. When is enough enough with Netanyahu’s taking US aid for granted?
When is enough enough with Netanyahu’s taking US aid for granted?
When AIPAC doesn’t hold the pursestrings to being elected to federal office in the U.S., that’s when.
Don’t wait up.
ASG
Thanks for your analysis.
Just a reminder. We have been at war in Iraq for 24 years, not counting the assistance we gave Saddam Hussein in the Iraq-Iran war the we ginned up for arms sales and wanting two oil states to fight it out to make Saudi Arabia happy and goose oil prices.
Afghanistan is only the longest continuous war that we have been involved in. But with the no-fly zone and the military assistance and oversized embassy, we essentially never left Iraq after Gulf War I.
Yes, 24 years, nearly a whole generation knows no better than that the US is militarily involved in Iraq. And Obama is the FOURTH president to order airstrikes on Iraq. Hillary Clinton will be the fifth, a stunning pendent to her Bill.How can this futility make any sense? Somehing is deeply wrong here, almost perverse. If this is anyone´s idea of humanitarianism, I´m a moneky´s uncle—or my idea of humanitarianism is to let Gaza burn and burn and burn somemore…
But, yes, these guys are every bit as bad as the Khmer Rouge. Quite possibly, they are worse. And our country (if not our president) is just as responsible for creating the conditions that led to the Islamic State as we were for creating the conditions that led to the Khmer Rouge.
Wow.
The first two sentences are false and the last is pernicious, hateful nonsense.
A personal best?
A perverted faith… So now we are deciding what is or isn’t an acceptable version? Why don’t we just say that we oppose murder.
I have no interest in any version of islamism, christianismm budhism, hinduism, judaism, or any other silly -ism. If you all want to turn this into a religious war, leave me out of it.
We know what causes religious fanaticism: Religion.
Perhaps he is concerned to perpetuate the myth that the more violent outbursts of Islam are not really Islam, at all.
Kidnapped! Islam has been kidnapped!
That’s part of it. On CNN early this morning, the anchor took a moment to assure the viewers that this was not the real islam.
There are days I think letting these violent religious fanatics run rampant across the middle east for a while might actually be a good thing in the long run. Maybe forcing non-perverse religious fanatics to deal face to face with the perverse ones might finally kill off silly beliefs in magic once and for all. Nothing else has worked.
And there is this.
The European Enlightenment and ensuing religious tolerance in Christian civilization came after more than a century of religious warfare spawned by the Reformation.
If the world is lucky, this century’s wave of religious violence, mostly Muslim-on-Muslim, may at last have similar results.
You and I will be long dead, of course.
The lobbying to destroy the Middle East has begun.
To Stop Iran Gaining Nukes, Stop Rewarding It for Lying
Who is the Democratic party’s lobbyist for the MEK terrorists? Did they get to Shelton? Or is he taking pay for this service?
We need some sort of alliance with Iran right now and no doubt the Saudis are stirring the pot to prevent a US-Iran rapprochement.
Hugh’s still pissed that he failed to extract the hostages from Iran because inter-service rivalries made the kind of mission that President Carter envisioned impossible. Does anyone know whether the services can talk to each other without going through Washington? Remember the US Navy phone call during the Grenada operation?
Who is Hugh Shelton shilling for? The Neocons? The Saudis? His MIC friends? All of the above?
I wish I could remember which lobbying firm had the MEK account. The usual suspects would be Lanny Davis and Podesta. But my memory says it was someone else, who was also big in the Democratic establishment. And search engines are so screwed now that you can’t track that sort of stuff down anymore.
Howard Dean.
Wasn’t thinking about advocates, was thinking about who it was that holds the PR account.
Update on the situation per AJ America. Pesh Merga ground troops have established a secure road (with US air support) into the mountains near Sinjar and have already evacuated 5000 Yazidis to more secure areas.
Obama has refused to put a time frame around the operation, which everyone (likely erroneously) is assuming to be a permanent involvement.
A detail that I had missed is that Maliki is a provisional Prime Minister, the parliament not yet having come to an agreement on the results of April’s election. Normal parlimentary process could quickly settle this if the politicians could agree on a replacement (and the allocation of government portfolios that goes with this sort of decision in a multi-party system). Might also be some issues of regional autonomy that must be settled before there is a Prime Minister named. The political process is there if the politicians have the courage to use it.
Hence Obama’s call for regime change since the pm clinging to power is sending Iraq into the shitter faster.
If the US were an Empire, it’d be because we’re still very, very interested in getting our very own(ed) puppet Chalabi in there still.
But we aren’t am Empire, we’re just a small little Republic minding our business and making life better for the citizens!
CNN now has a story about ISIS in the States and their ability to initiate attacks here. One person thinks they have already entered the US from Mexico. Who knows? But we do know that they are well funded and have well heeled backers. And CNN notes that one IS member has called for retaliation.
It may be that having smacked this hornets nest, our only option may be to go to war with them. That means boots on the ground and maybe allied with Iran, even Russia for heavens sake. So if the choice is: let the Kurds die or fight, which is it? And does that mean we have a cause against Saudi and their friends? Bummer.
That sounds like RW hysteria about the border. And setting up for an anti-Muslim campaign of intimidation and discrimination. Does CNN name the IS member?
CNN is trying its best unsuccessfully to steal Fox’s audience.
The media is trying to whip up war frenzy and hysteria in order to draw eyeballs to its advertisers. Succumbing to that creates pressure for extreme responses that generally turn out in the end to be counter-productive.
“In the homeland” is the buzzword to keep the currently ineffective homeland security regime continuing to waste billions of dollars on federal contractors.
The choice is not as extreme as let the Kurds die or fight?
And the key part of the President’s order is to strip ISIS of the US-made heavy weapons they captured in Mosul. That process is beginning, starting at the battle front.
There is some indication that the Saudis are now concerned about the monster they have created in Syria. At least the Saudis are asking for help in securing their 500-mile border with Iraq.
Like I said, Who knows? But there are a number of stories about this sort of thing you can see by checking Google. I happened to see this one on CNN tv and a related story on CNN.com:
“It is a clear message that the war is against Islam and the mujahideen. The mujahideen must strive and seek to execute proactive operations in their own home, America, to discipline America and its criminal soldiers,” Abu al-Ayna al-Khorasani, an administrator of Shumukh al-Islam, the top-tier forum for ISIS propaganda, wrote on his account Friday, according to a translation by the SITE Intelligence group.”
And they have the resources to carry something out if they wish to. Kurds death in the balance? Well let’s not hope that. But they seem like a hostage.
The SITE Intelligence Group seems to be connected to a guy named Emerson (through previous employment) who is a key figure in a network of groups promoting Islamophobia and discrimination against Arab-Americans with little basis in facts.
Yes, I’m sure that ISIS would love to have an agent in place who could strike America in the homeland. But let’s not get hysterical about this.
But in fact the military action that the US is involved in in northern Iraq is not against Islam at all. The invocation of the word “mujahadeen” just means ISIS guys.
Whipping up Islamophobia and conflating it with border issues is one of the worst ways to respond to what is happening in Iraq. It plays into the clash of civilizations frame that ISIS is pushing.
As for ISIS resources, take news articles with some grains of salt. And remember that it doesn’t take major resources to create a stir in the US as 9/11 showed.