A very important and probably for the first time, significant discussion broke out on This Week… It was truly stimulating because for the first time in memory some real strategic, as opposed to political, questions were asked and although few were answered, at least they were debated.
The fact is that we seem to have very little, actual policy in place with regard to the Middle East. Our failures there go all the way back to 1947 and a desire to avoid getting involved in the Israel problem while England was busy mucking it up. But our real failure started in 1953 when our CIA at the behest of Britain’s MI6 engineered the coup that unseated Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s legally elected premier because he didn’t agree with allied foreign policies with regard to the Soviets and didn’t look like he was going to allow US oil interests to run roughshod over his country. We replaced him with Reza Pahlavi, the Shah, a corrupt puppet whose failures led to the religious mess that currently exists. None of this is conjecture, It’s all thoroughly detailed in many books and even more reports.
So as far back as you can see, we have made a mess in the Middle East and today’s lack of policies isn’t any better but not surprising. We should never have attacked Iraq or Afghanistan. Bush and Cheney got us in there, mostly to get a foothold in the oil industry. We didn’t get it then and we don’t need it now. The stupidity of invading Afghanistan right after we helped them beat back the Russians is beyond comprehension and to hear that senile idiot, Cheney talking about how he never made any mistakes, is maddening. To listen to Bill Kristol babble about the idea that we should have stayed in Iraq because of what is going on there now, is even more incomprehensible.
We should never have invaded Iraq but we did and, of course, we destroyed it. It was a functioning country. Sure; it was run by an evil dictator, but it was a functioning country. What we didn’t take into account, what we didn’t even know, because our pathetic intelligence network had not thoroughly explained it to Bush, who never understood it anyway, was that the country was split by two fanatic religious factions that had been fighting each other for over 700 years, that hated each other more than they hated the infidels and that given the smallest crack in the nations security would try to kill each other harder than they would try to survive.
Now, there are Americans who think we should go back into Iraq, lose American kids lives, just so we can create peace between two crazed religious factions that don’t want peace. Reporters like Katty Kay speak of the atrocities being perpetrated on civilian populations there and in Syria like they’re our fault. Sure we have some responsibility for them, mainly because we have, unfortunately, set ourselves up as the world’s policeman and we did follow the criminals Bush and Cheney into a war that destroyed that country, but if any outside force is at fault it would be the UN which should have stepped in long ago and which should have a much stronger force than they do. The UN has always been a failure, mainly because the strongest nations especially the U.S., have not backed it at all, which allowed the weaker nations, trying desperately to protect whatever small foothold in the world they still possess, to slow all action to a halt.
The U.S. going back into Iraq would only give the natives a new reason to hate us. It might slow their religious war slightly but as soon as we left, and inevitably we would, they would be back at each other again. The same is true in Syria and what about Afghanistan?
In Afghanistan right now, Hamad Karzai, the president, is playing games with our troops lives. We, for some ungodly reason have offered to keep a small group of troops in his country to train his almost un-trainable army and he is holding up that agreement. Are we nuts? Get our kids the hell out of that mess right now. What the hell are Hegel and Obama thinking? Karzai’s government will fail as soon as we leave and maybe the Taliban will take over and maybe they’ll have a humongous civil war but so what? Afghanistan is one of those places where nothing like human reason has any place in the equation. These people are more interested in their barbaric tribal customs than in living like humans and there is no reason why we should be expanding our resources, human or otherwise to try to change their minds.
Americans have never learned that you can’t think for other people. All it ever does is get us in trouble; still we continue to try to do it. We’ve been in Afghanistan for over a decade and we haven’t been able to teach the Afghans how to fight any way but their own. So what? They’re pretty damn good at it. So far they are beating the crap out of us. Neither we, nor the Russians have been able to beat their rag tag tribes with all our modern resources. If we had any brains we’d pack up and get the hell out of there as soon as we could load the planes Not endangering another American kid and not spending another cent should be our only motive.
The idea of leaving a small American force there to get massacred has to come directly from the Pentagon or the military industrial complex playbook. They’d love to see a few score of out kids massacred by the Taliban. It would give them an excuse to get right back, ass deep in a war we have hoped to be finished with, but which would make our arms manufacturers a whole hell of a lot of money.
Look, the problem in all these countries is that the British set them up after the Raj, using a mapmaker instead of a politician or a religious council. They drew borders without considering what tribes were friendly and which hated each other so they ended with people in each of their manufactured fiefdoms, that hated each other for tribal, religious and ethnic reasons, all in the same country. There are Kurds in almost every Middle Eastern country when they should all be in one, Kurdish country. There are Sunnis and Shiites in many countries when it would have made much more sense to have all the Sunnis in Iraq and all the Shiites in Iran. That way when things boiled over they could have nice neat border wars instead of all this messy civil war.
The Brits system was to create these false borders, put some brownnosing flunky, who spent most of his time kissing their assess, in charge, and then sit back and do business as usual. What they should have done is develop real leaders instead of the pathetic sycophants they installed as their puppets. They gave up their colonies but they still wanted to control them. They didn’t care about individual country’s needs, just about the profits that could be extracted from them. We have continued this practice, equally unsuccessfully. It seems we never learn from history. Bush, along with starting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rattled his toy saber all over the world. Maybe we don’t know what Obama is doing in those foreign capitals but they definitely knew what Bush was doing because he announced it to everyone in the world and they hated him for it.
We cannot have a foreign policy based on invading everyone who says something we don’t like. It’s bad for our economy and it’s bad for the rest of the world. Ever since the end of WWII, when we began to have something that vaguely resembled a foreign policy, it has been based on the needs of, and dictated by, our national corporate interests. This has seldom worked for anyone except the big corporations that supplied the financing and bribes that actually fueled most of our overseas operations. Big oil, big minerals, big sugar, big mining, overtly supported by our State Department and when necessary our armies, plundered third world countries and when they had exhausted their natural gifts, they set them up as sources of cheap labor for greedy American manufacturers to undercut U.S. labor and move jobs overseas. I hope I haven’t allowed you to form an unfairly friendly opinion of the rest of the industrial nations because they were doing exactly what we were, just not as well.
In countries where local patriots saw what was happening and tried to set up their own governments we shouted “Commie” and armed opponents to their attempts at good government. This was the way we plundered Cuba and Central and South America for the sugar, oil, lumber and eventually drug interests. It is the same way we have treated the rest of the world, helping industrial plunderers subjugate whole nations for the sake of the corporate bottom line.
This is not a national foreign policy; this is a corporate business plan. And it has left our country feared and hated even by those to whom we give enormous amounts of money; money that we like to think of as charitable help but that the less naive understand as bribes.
So here we are, victims of our own national corporate greed, without any sane foreign policy, trying to lead a world that, with good reason, hates and fears us even as it wants us to feed it, but also leave it alone. It’s obviously time for America to step back and let the world take a breath. The fact that there are terrible things happening all over the globe and that innocent people are suffering is something that we have to accept. We also have to understand that we can’t solve every problem of every country, especially considering that we are the cause of many of them.
Of course, in order to do this, to step back, we will have to fight our own corporate structure which more and more is expanding into countries all over the globe and aside from creating some low paid jobs, is doing very little good. The world needs some time off from America and the U.S. sure needs a break from being everybody’s big briother.