Fight for the Yazidi?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, October 15, 2015

The Democratic primary contestants very much wanted to spend their first debate talking about all of the variegated splendid things that they would like to give to voters in exchange for their pulling the appropriate lever, and CNN and Anderson Cooper obliged by asking no questions about the national debt and almost no questions about foreign policy. Other than the ritualistic utterance of the word “Syria” and Jim Webb’s reminiscences about a life he took as a soldier in Vietnam, the Democrats pretended that the rest of the world doesn’t exist. But the world goes on existing, with maddening persistence.

Even the State Department under the feckless leadership of John Kerry, who is running neck and neck with Mrs. Clinton in the great Foggy Bottom sanctimony-and-cluelessness sweepstakes, must from time to time notice that Mohammed al-Murder & Co. don’t give a fig what interest rate U.S. college graduates are paying on their student loans. (And, really, is there a more oppressed and beset group of people in this world than American college graduates?) No, Jihad Inc. is going to go right on raping its way around the world until — unless — someone stops them.

The State Department on Wednesday issued a horrifying report on the state of religious minorities. There’s the usual stuff — Hindu chauvinists aren’t very nice to Christian converts in rural India, the Chinese don’t think much of the persnickety Muslims in the western part of their country, Buddhists in Sri Lanka are totally not what the American coffeehouse Zen set expects Buddhists to be like vis-à-vis murdering members of minority groups and burning down their homes — and then there’s the horrifying stuff of relatively recent vintage: ISIS and its campaign of kidnapping and raping Yazidi and Assyrian Christian women and children as a form of evangelism by brutality, a project executed with such cruelty that hundreds of women and children in captivity have committed suicide in order to avoid enduring one more day as a sex slave, hanging themselves with the very hijabs their captives force them to wear between rapes. In Nigeria and its environs, Boko Haram — the name, let’s remember, means “books are forbidden” — has stepped up its own rape-and-murder campaign.

Ah, but what they really want is a free college education, yes?

No.

Domestic policy is a relatively easy, paint-by-numbers affair. If you are on the right, you look for ways to reduce the political footprint in the economy, to empower and invigorate American enterprise and civil society, and to support the family as the fundamental social unit. If you are on the left, you consider your constituent groups — these whining college graduates, those shiftless welfare cases, these grasping union bosses — and you promise each of these baby birds with ever-open beaks nice things to be paid for by whomever it is they hate the most this year.

Foreign policy is a different matter. Is there some fundamental U.S. strategic interest in rescuing the Yazidi from the Hell on Earth in which they find themselves? Not really. If combating ISIS is our program (and that is not entirely clear), then you probably want to focus your resources on the Kurdish peshmerga and YPG forces; the Yazidi are sympathetic victims, but they do not appear to be on the verge of becoming an effective fighting force. It is tempting to take the position that where there is no obvious U.S. national-security interest, then we should not act at all, because it is neither our business nor within our effective power to gallivant around the world righting every wrong.

But the question is not whether to intervene every time something offends our moral sensibilities: The question is whether to intervene here, in this instance, on behalf of these people.

Of course, we are intervening. The Obama administration has just announced the deployment of U.S. forces in Cameroon to fight Boko Haram, and U.S. forces already have been deployed, in a limited fashion, in several African countries. If Obama-administration history is precedent, expect: not much. At the same time, U.S. forces are fighting a desultory campaign against ISIS while trying not to do anything that redounds to the advantage of ISIS’s main enemy near at hand, the government of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. Foreign Policy asks: “Is the U.S. Ready for an Endless War against the Islamic State?”

Answer: No. But what’s Plan B?

George W. Bush’s democracy project is a failure, and it failed because of the naïve and idealistic notion that Western democratic liberalism could be inculcated among Islamic people whose political ideas are shaped by religious, ethnic, and tribal rivalries that make such notions as equality before the law and universal rights absurd. Barack Obama’s retreat project is a worse failure, and it failed because of the naïve and idealistic notion that the right kind of man making the right kind of speeches could earn his Nobel Peace Prize post hoc. The harder view, that the men in Washington should imitate the men in Moscow and Beijing and act only to secure narrowly defined national advantages, may or may not be a failure, depending on how you feel about leaving all those Yazidi girls to be raped to death.

That’s the United States in 2015: an unparalleled military force, and no idea what to do with it. But here’s another State Department report, for what it’s worth.