By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, August 13, 2016
The early Cold War wisdom that “we must stop politics at
the water’s edge” has never been entirely true. In endeavors as human as
politics, no such altruistic aspiration ever will be. But Senator Arthur
Vandenberg’s adage does reflect a principle critical to effective national
security: The United States is imperiled when partisan politics distorts our
understanding of the world and the threats it presents.
We’ve been imperiled for a long time now. The most
salient reason for that has been the bipartisan, politically correct refusal to
acknowledge and confront the Islamic roots of the threat to the West. It has
prevented us from grasping not only why jihadists attack us but also that
jihadists are merely the militant front line of the broader civilizational
challenge posed by sharia supremacism.
Inevitably, when there is a profound threat and an
overarching strategic failure to apprehend it, disasters abound; and rather
than becoming occasions for reassessment of the flawed bipartisan strategy,
those disasters become grist for partisan attacks. From 2004 through 2008, the
specious claim was that President Bush’s ouster of Saddam Hussein created
terrorism in Iraq. Now it is that President Obama is the “founder of ISIS,” as
Donald Trump put it this week.
The point here is not to bash Trump. He is hardly the
first to posit some variation of the storyline that Obama’s premature
withdrawal of American forces from Iraq led to the “vacuum” in which, we are to
believe, the Islamic State spontaneously generated. Indeed, this narrative is
repeated on Fox News every ten minutes or so.
The point is to try to understand what we are actually
dealing with, how we got to this place, and what the security implications are.
There is no denying that American missteps have exacerbated a dangerous threat
environment in the Middle East to some degree. It is spurious, though, to
suggest that any of these errors, or all of them collectively, caused the
catastrophe that has unfolded.
The problem for the United States in this region is Islam
— specifically, the revolutionary sharia-supremacist version to which the major
players adhere. There is no vacuum. There never has been a vacuum. What we have
is a bubbling cauldron of aggressive political Islam with its always attendant
jihadist legions.
The question is always: How to contain the innate
aggression? The fantasy answers are: (a) let’s convert them to Western
democracy, and (b) let’s support the secular democrats. In reality, the region
does not want Western democracy — it wants sharia (Islamic law), even if there
is disagreement about how much sharia and how quickly it should be imposed. And
while there are some secular democrats, there are far, far too few of them to
compete with either the sharia-supremacist factions or the dictatorial regimes
— they can only fight the latter by aligning with the former. At best, the
secularists provide hope for an eventual evolution away from totalitarian
sharia culture; for now, however, it is absurd for Beltway Republicans to
contend that ISIS emerged because Obama failed to back these “moderates” in
Iraq and Syria.
The fact that top Republicans use the term “moderate”
rather than “secular democrat” should tell us all we need to know. They realize
there are not enough secularists to fight either Bashar Assad or ISIS, much
less both of them. For all their justifiable ridiculing of Obama’s lexicon,
Republicans invoke “moderates” for the same reason Obama uses terms like
“workplace violence” — to obscure unpleasant truths about radical Islam. In this
instance, the truth is that the “moderates” they claim Obama should have backed
include the Muslim Brotherhood and other anti-Western Islamist factions,
including al-Qaeda. Of course, if they told you that, there wouldn’t be much
bite in their critique of Obama’s infatuation with the Muslim Brotherhood . . .
and you might even start remembering that, during the Bush years, the GOP
couldn’t do enough “outreach” to “moderate Islamists.”
The Middle East is aflame because of sharia supremacism
and the jihadism that ideology always produces. That was the problem long
before there was an ISIS. The Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria, like other
Middle Eastern dictatorships, kept sharia supremacism in check by alternatively
persecuting Islamist insurgents, turning them against each other, or using them
to harass Israel and the West. In Iran, to the contrary, the shah was
overthrown by a revolutionary Shiite jihadist movement that he failed to keep
in check.
Bush, with what started out as bipartisan support, ousted
the Iraqi regime without any discernible plan for dealing with Iran, Syria, and
the wider war — delusionally calculating that Iran might actually be helpful
because of its supposedly keen interest in Iraqi stability. Iran, of course,
went about the business of fueling the terrorist insurgency against American
troops. Saddam’s fall unleashed the competing Islamist forces that continue to
tear Iraq apart. The thought that we could democratize the culture was fantasy;
far from taming sharia supremacism, the government we birthed in Baghdad was
converted by the Iran-backed Shiite parties into a mechanism for abusing
Sunnis. Naturally, the Sunnis turned to their own sharia supremacists for their
defense.
It is fair enough to argue that Obama should not have pulled
U.S. forces out of Iraq just as the security situation was badly deteriorating
in 2011. But a big part of the reason that Democrats thrashed Republicans in
the 2006 midterms, and that Obama was elected in 2008, was mounting American
opposition to maintaining our troops there. Critics, moreover, conveniently
omit to mention that (a) the agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw
our troops on a timeline unrelated to conditions on the ground was made by
Bush, not Obama, and that (b) Bush reluctantly made that agreement precisely
because Iraqis were demanding that Americans get out of their country.
The war became unpopular in the United States because it
seemed unconnected to U.S. security interests: so much sacrifice on behalf of
ingrates, while Iran exploited the mayhem to muscle in. There was no public
appetite for a long-range U.S. military presence. What would be the point, when
Bush had given the increasingly hostile Iraqi government the power to veto U.S.
military operations to which it objected, and had agreed that our forces would
not use Iraqi territory as a base of operations against Iran, Syria, or any
other country? (See 2008 Status of Forces Agreement, articles 4 and 27.) This
was not post-war Europe or Japan, where the enemy had been vanquished. Most
Americans did not see the point of further risking American lives in order to
stop anti-American Shiites and anti-American Sunnis from having at each other,
as they’ve been doing to great lethal effect for 14 centuries.
ISIS (now, the Islamic State) got its start as al-Qaeda
in Iraq, the primary culprit (along with Iran) in the Iraqi civil war. ISIS
thus long predates Obama’s presidency. Furthermore, the oft-repeated GOP
talking-point that al-Qaeda in Iraq was defeated by the Bush troop surge is a
gross exaggeration. Our jihadist enemies could not be defeated in Iraq, because
Iraq was never their sole base of operations. Since we’ve never had a strategy
to defeat them globally, we were never going to do more than temporarily tamp
them down in Iraq. They were always going to wait us out. They were always
going to reemerge, in Iraq and elsewhere.
One of the places in which they regrouped was Syria. That
made perfect sense, because Syria — the client of al-Qaeda’s long-time
supporter, Iran — was always a waystation for jihadists seeking to fight
American and Western forces in Iraq. Meanwhile, there was an internal Syrian
uprising against the Assad regime. To be sure, the revolt had some secular
components; but it was thoroughly coopted by the Muslim Brotherhood (as analyst
Hassan Hassan comprehensively outlined in Foreign
Affairs in early 2013).
Notwithstanding the Republicans’ ISIS myopia, it was not
the only jihadist presence in Syria — not even close. Al-Qaeda still had a
franchise there (al-Nusrah), along with several other tentacles. Importantly,
in its rivalry with breakaway ISIS, al-Qaeda has adopted the Muslim Brotherhood
approach of ground-up revolution — the antithesis of the Islamic State’s
top-down strategy of forcibly expanding its declared caliphate and implementing
sharia full-scale.
As Tom Joscelyn perceptively explained in 2015 congressional
testimony, al-Qaeda is attempting to spark jihadist uprisings in
Muslim-majority countries while appealing to local populations with
fundamentalist education initiatives. Like the Brotherhood, al-Qaeda leaders
now preach a gradualist implementation of sharia, which is more appealing to
most Middle Eastern Muslims than ISIS’s inflexibility and emphasis on sharia’s
barbaric hudud penalties (mutilation, stoning, scourging, etc.). Understand:
Al-Qaeda is just as anti-American as it has ever been. In Syria, however, its
shrewd approach has enabled the network to insinuate itself deeply into the
forces that oppose both Assad and ISIS. So has the Brotherhood.
These forces are the “moderates” that Republicans,
apparently including Trump, claim Obama failed to support, creating the
purported “vacuum” out of which ISIS emerged. The charge is doubly specious
because Obama actually did provide these “moderates” with plenty of support.
The GOP rap on Obama is that he failed to jump with both feet into the Syria civil
war and take the side of “moderates.” But jumping in with both feet, at the
urging of Beltway Republicans, is exactly what Obama did on behalf of the
“moderates” in Libya. How’d that work out?
Our challenge in the Middle East is that sharia supremacism
fills all vacuums. It was this ideology that created ISIS long before President
Obama came along. And if ISIS were to disappear tomorrow, sharia supremacism
would still be our challenge. It is critical to be an effective political
opposition to the Obama Left. But being effective
means not letting the political part
warp our judgment, especially where national security is concerned.
No comments:
Post a Comment