![The President has decided to fight jihadists threatening to kill Yazidis with bombs instead of hashtags. But it's not clear why. [Credit: Business Insider]](https://i0.wp.com/www.dougsbriefcase.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/credit-business-insider.jpg)
Sunni radicals are threatening to massacre an obscure ethnoreligious group known as Yazidis. The President has decided to fight the jihadists with bombs instead of hashtags. But it’s not clear why. [Credit: Business Insider]
Another August. Another flirtation with war. In the psychodrama that is the Obama Presidency, our hero vacillates between war and peace, detachment and intervention, riding out the storm and steering into its teeth. The rest of us are left to guess whether he will respond to the next humanitarian crisis with bombs or hashtags. There is, as Mrs. Clinton notes, no “organizing principle” to lend coherence to our foreign policy.
Last August, the President let us eavesdrop on his internal dialogue over Syria. He wanted to topple Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, whose atrocities had stunned the world. The President declared his intention to bomb Syria without Congressional authorization. Then he decided to ask Congress for a resolution approving the action and scheduled a national television appearance on the eve of the vote to appeal for its passage. But he soon changed his mind again, deciding that the whole bombing thing was a bad idea after all and asking Congress not to pass the resolution.
That indecisive sequence of decisions, his former Secretary of State now tells us, was a “failure” that led directly to the ascendancy of the Islamic State (IS), the anti-Assad force against whom we are now at war in Iraq. The President has decided not to reprise the Syrian “failure,” but he struggles to explain why. Here is one of his attempts:
Let me be clear about why we must act, and act now. When we face a situation like we do on that mountain — with innocent people facing the prospect of violence on a horrific scale, when we have a mandate to help — in this case, a request from the Iraqi government — and when we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States of America cannot turn a blind eye.
We’re bombing the IS, the President stated, for the following reasons: 1) Iraq’s government asked us to; 2) “innocent people are facing violence on a horrific scale”; and 3) we have “unique capabilities” to prevent that from happening.
Let’s take those in order, beginning with the notion that Iraq’s government invited us to initiate the bombing campaign. That’s a bit misleading. Iraq did invite us to intervene against the Sunni insurgents – last year. The President balked. Within months, the IS had overrun vast swaths of Iraq.
Moreover, Iraq doesn’t currently have a government and that, in part, is our doing. We decided to meddle in their electoral process, insisting that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki step aside in favor of another Shiite that would meet with Tehran’s approval. Maliki, whose party polled first in the April elections, was squeezed out earlier this week and Haider al-Abadi given 30 days to form a government. Until such a government is formed, Baghdad will remain hamstrung.
“The prospect of violence on a horrific scale,” sadly, is hardly confined to Mt. Sinjar. Its scale and brutality are met or exceeded in many places throughout the world. One need look no further than Iraq’s neighbor, Syria, to find brutality that, in the President’s mind, didn’t merit our intervention.
Finally, our capability of bombing Iraq is hardly “unique.” Many others, including Western nations that joined in our combat efforts in the last Iraq war, have the capacity to bomb Iraq but have so far sat this one out. What is unique is our willingness to return to war in Iraq, despite the previous war’s overwhelming unpopularity at home and abroad.
The President has offered a fourth rationale for the bombing sorties: protecting Americans. In this case, he is referring to the hundreds of “military advisers” that he himself dispatched to the country. The argument is somewhat circular — we are now bombing Sunni jihadists to protect the Americans we sent to help fight the Sunni jihadists. If their safety is of paramount concern, he could simply bring them home.
That is the course we have taken in Libya, a country we bombed in 2011. In that case, we targeted government forces that were inflicting casualties on rebel troops. The effort turned out to be a military success but a disaster in every other sense. Muammar Gaddafi’s ouster led to chaos of such lethality that the State Department last month evacuated its employees and warned Americans to get out of the country immediately. One hopes that our latest Iraqi adventure doesn’t come to a similar end.
It is hard to know what our ends are. So far, they seem to consist in relieving a siege of the Yazidis. But it’s not clear that the President intends to withdraw from Iraq if our bombers and ground troops – sorry, “advisers” – manage to rescue the Yazidis. The President has been broadly hinting that if the Iraqis sacked Maliki, we might offer more robust military support. Now that Baghdad has obliged us, our Secretary of State suggests that such may indeed be in the offing. “We are prepared to consider additional political, economic and security options,” Kerry said, “as Iraq’s government starts to build a new government.”
It is not clear what these additional “security options” might be or where they might lead us. What is clear is that the Administration has abandoned its longstanding policy of putting Iraq in the rear view mirror. Until quite recently, they had rejected the Bush Administration’s policy of supplanting a brutal dictator with a popularly-elected government inclusive of all factions. The American electorate resoundingly spurned that vision and continues to lament its cost. They embraced President Obama’s decision to withdraw entirely without leaving any residual troop presence. That decision led directly to the madness that engulfs Mesopotamia.
We’ve plunged into that madness, for reasons that remain obscure. In that sense, our new Iraq adventure fits perfectly with a rootless foreign policy bereft of an “organizing principle.” We pressed the Israelis for a ceasefire, but urged the Ukrainian government to violate one, a decision that has led to numerous civilian casualties, a widening refugee crisis and the risk of a larger war. We rose in full-throated denunciation when the Israelis struck near a UN school, but stayed mum when Kiev forces shelled a hospital.
These contradictions would be more understandable if we had clear objectives and goals. We don’t. This isn’t entirely the President’s fault. We all seem a bit uncertain of America’s purpose in the world. Republican hawks rarely pass up the opportunity to call for military strikes wherever trouble arises. A new breed of conservative isolationists increasingly sound like their counterparts on the Left, who congenitally oppose American military intervention. The less ideological among us simply seem weary of war.
President Obama has the unenviable job of defining our interests, setting our course, and winning Congressional approval of his decisions to employ military force. The task continues to confound him.
He could begin by recognizing that the US, for all its errors and flaws, has generally been a force for good. That is something, Mrs. Clinton suggested in a recent interview, that the President hasn’t accepted. “You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward,” she said. “One issue is that we don’t even tell our own story very well these days.”
We can’t tell our story convincingly if we don’t believe it. Ours is a story of triumph over the twentieth century’s two most tyrannical forces: fascism and communism. The world today is more free because of the values we profess and the sacrifices we made. We have so far been less successful in meeting the challenges of jihadism, veering between “pulling back” and “belligerently putting [ourselves] forward.” We have yet to devise a strategy for confronting this menace. But we should have confidence that we are right and they are wrong and that we will prevail. Absent that confidence, our actions will continue to seem random and ineffectual.
Second, we should return to constitutional values. The decision to dispatch troops into harm’s way is not the President’s alone. Saving the Yazidis from extermination would be a good thing, but the President is not free to do good things absent legal authority. That authority resides in Congress. Getting Congress to approve the use of military force is messy, as the President learned last year with Syria. Messy and necessary.
Many in Congress don’t want to own these decisions. Even members of the President’s party want to keep their options open, supporting the mission, but warning that it shouldn’t go too far or last too long. They already are viewed as underdogs in the November elections. The last thing they want is to answer to voters for a war that goes badly.
So they and their Republican counterparts have the luxury of being bystanders – supporting the effort if it goes well, damning it if things don’t work out. The Constitution requires more of them. It demands that they go on record either in favor of war or against it. President Bush, for all the criticism he endured, understood this. He obtained authorizations for the use of military force in 2001 and 2002.
If the President believes the IS poses a threat to US interests, he should state that clearly and ask Congress for the authority to fight them. If he believes that such action is unnecessary, too costly or not worth the risk, then he should be clear about that as well. He has often boasted of “leaving Iraq to its people.” He should return to that policy if he reckons that war with the IS would not advance our interests.
What he should not do is to order up a poorly defined military mission without Congressional authorization.
When it comes to Iraq I much rather prefer the “indecisiveness” of Obama than the steadfast “resoluteness” of George W Bush. There are no easy answers and solutions to some problems in the world, and it is unrealistic to think that we can just come up with simple goals and objectives which will fit all countries and situations. And there are inherent contradictions among solutions to he various goals that we may have.
I agree completely though that it is Congress which should declare war and dispatch troops.
The reason why some of us oppose war is not because of some congenital defect, but rather because of the disastrous effects of the wars that have been waged. We are broke, borrowing heavily from other countries, and there are far better ways to spend our money than to be “resolute” and invade Iraq, a la George W Bush.