The Middle East Mess

You’ve heard the cliché, “hindsight is always 20/20.” This has become a kind of mantra for all the pundits who now agree that invading Iraq in March 2003 was a really bad idea especially since Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz concocted the WMDs that never existed simply to justify their “shock and awe” extravaganza.

As President Obama prepares to send another 400 plus “trainers” to Iraq, the radio/tv talkers and op-ed writers are outdoing themselves with 20/20 hindsight on all the Bush administrations post invasion goof ups.  Number one in the “stupid stuff” category is the disbanding of the Iraqi army of some 400,000 well trained troops and highly efficient officers.  Now it turns out that after the Bush-installed Iraq overseers humiliated the top Iraqi military brass and kicked them out, those generals are now directing ISIS operations in Iraq and Syria and rather efficiently.  The American-trained new Iraqi forces seem to have no stomach for a fight and drop their weapons and run away whenever they get into heated battle with ISIS.

No matter how accurate hind sight may be, we have to deal with what is happening now so Obama’s solution is to send in more “trainers” to train more incompetent Iraqi soldiers. This brings us to another famous quotation.  In his 1905 work The Life of Reason, George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” 

Let’s flash back to the 1950s and 1960s.  (I served in the Navy from 1959 to 1963 and remember it well.)  That’s when America decided it was going to save the world from Communism and established Military Assistance Advisory Groups (MAAGs).  The most famous one was in South Vietnam.  You all know rest of the story.  We started with a few “advisors” (as they were called then) and ended up sending about 2.5 million military personnel to fight South Viet Nam’s war.  In case you have forgotten, despite all our vast military might and our American exceptionalism we lost that war.  In fact we were ignominiously routed because, as many historians pointed out afterwards, the war was fought with passion on the other side—not so much for political ideology, but because they wanted to force out the “invaders” that is, the Americans.

We are now seeing the same pattern.  We are sending in “trainers” to train Iraqi soldiers who have no passion to defend their country and who must fight an enemy who not only has the passion to achieve its goals but is also fired by religious zealotry.  In other words, we are getting involved in yet another military adventure that we simply cannot win.  (Several of our generals are saying the same thing with some qualifying it by adding unless we send in massive numbers of troops which is unacceptable to the American public.  Massive troop commitments didn’t work in Viet Nam why would it work in the Middle East?)

Things are even more complicated when you consider the convoluted animosities of Islam.  The dreaded ISIS is a Sunni organization.  The vast majority of Muslims in the world are Sunnis (87 to 90 percent).  So now we have to get Sunnis to fight against Sunnis which is problematical at best. (Saudi Arabia our so-called ally is Sunni so factions in that country have been bank rolling ISIS).  Shia have the majority in Iraq and Iran.  But the Iraqis aren’t very good fighters despite their American trainers and we can’t enlist Iran in the fight because they might get atomic weapons and our Republican hawks want to bomb them rather than negotiate because they love Netanyahu.

Another thing going against us is our cultural mind set.  We expect not only instant gratification but also instant goal achievement.  (Remember George W. and his “mission accomplished”?)  Other cultures do not think our way.   Here is what North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong said in 1966.  “How long do you Americans want to fight?  One year? Two years? Three years? Five years? Ten years?  Twenty years?  We will be glad to accommodate you.”   This applies to Middle East mentality as well. Sunni and Shia Muslims have been at odds with each other for 1,500 years.  Do you think they are in any hurry now?

Since we Americans like price tags on things, the Pentagon just released figures that put our cost to fight ISIS at $9,000,000 per day and that we have spent $2.7 billion just since airstrikes began last August.  Your tax dollars at work.

Unfortunately, it is far easier to define the problem than to propose a solution.  Many Americans, myself included, believe we never should have gotten involved in the Middle East mess in the first place.  But we did and we can’t change that.  There are others who say we created the mess by invading Iraq and Colin Powell was right that “if you break it you own it” and we have a responsibility to fix it.  I don’t agree with that because we have been trying to “fix it” with very little help for 12 years so more years going virtually alone and more millions of American dollars isn’t going to work.

But let’s take another look at the Viet Nam analogy.  We ignominiously pulled out in 1975.  We lost that war, period.  Face it, America is not invincible.  Forty years later we are doing business with Viet Nam and tourism between the two countries is booming.  Our government was wrong insisting that losing Viet Nam meant the Commies were going to take over the world. 

We are once again in a war we cannot win.  Why can’t we just admit we made a huge mistake, get out and let the Middle East resolve its own problems?