This is a damning critique of the last forty years, written by a 1969 West Point grad, combat vet, PhD., and father of a son lost in Iraq. He acknowledges upfront that for all our high-minded eloquence, our involvement in the Middle East is about oil. Although the US's oil hegemony was challenged with the 1973 embargo, the actual militarization of US policy in the Middle East was never under consideration until the Iranian Revolution. Ironically, the event that forever changed American policy, the takeover of the embassy in Tehran, was a student, and not government, initiated activity. When the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was added to the mix, Carter announced that the Persian Gulf was considered strategically critical to the US and any interference with our access to oil would be met with a forceful military response. Danger and dependence drove the conclusion. The US military response was to create Central Command (Centcom) for action in the Middle East.
The first failure in the author's eye in our preliminary war in the Middle East was Afghanistan because our success against the Soviets led to the Taliban. Next was Reagan's optimistic intervention in Beirut that led to the bombing of the Marine barracks and our quick departure. The stated intent was to provide a peacekeeping force in the midst of the civil war in Lebanon. No one anywhere would ever conclude our men accomplished anything. The Reagan administration followed up with the multiple bombings of Libya in response to an act of terror in Berlin, but it did not prevent the sabotage of Pan Am 103 a few years later. The mishmash of the Iran-Iraq War saw the US declare neutrality under Carter, back surreptitiously, and then outright, Iraq under Reagan. Eventually we provided arms to Iran through Israel all of which led to a deadly attack on a US destroyer by Saddam Hussein. Saddam apologized, we blamed the Iranians with no particular rationale and initiated a shooting naval war against them that culminated in our shooting down of a commercial passenger airplane. A ceasefire ensued and all of America patted itself on the back for keeping the Straits of Hormuz open and enforcing the Carter Doctrine with firmness and force. In 1991 in the First Gulf War, the American led coalition utterly destroyed the armed forces of Iraq. But we ended it early, without a follow-up plan. Kuwait was freed, but Hussein and the remnants of his army were still intact. Indeed, they engaged in a violent suppression of a Kurd and Shiite rebellion against Saddam that we stood by and ignored. Many believe the US left Saddam in place as a counterweight to Shiite Iran.
Whatever our intent in letting Saddam stay, we paid a heavy price for the decision for over a decade. We started what the Air Force has labelled an 'air occupation', by enforcing a no fly zone over the country that entailed hundreds of thousands of sorties. The 1990's saw the US Everywhere concept evolve. The Soviets were defeated and we could solve many problems with our awesome military power and good will. In Somalia, we had our nose bloodied while trying to intervene in a tribal civil war. We intervened twice in the former Yugoslavia. The decade closed with Clinton declaring war on Al Qaeda.
After Sept.11, the new Bush administration, seeking to eliminate evil, declared a global war on terrorism. A brief air war in Afghanistan led the Taliban to abandon the country's principal cities and forced bin Laden into hiding in Pakistan. Bush declared matters resolved and turned to Iraq. Clearing away the platitudes and lies, we invaded Iraq to establish the effectiveness of preventive war, to show that we could effectuate regime change, and to show the Muslim world it was not exempt from the same governing themes that the rest of the world lived by. Iraq was not a danger, it was an opportunity. The regime and its army were disposed of in three weeks. We had no plan for the occupation. The insurgency immediately ensued. It would be another decade before we left. The following year, 2004, saw the insurgency deepen and the theme of bringing freedom and democracy to the Muslim world thoroughly undermined by the photographic evidence of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Thereafter, the insurgency morphed into a Shiite-Sunni civil war, with jihadists from nearby countries joining in. A full six years later, in the second year of the Obama administration, the US combat mission was declared over. By 2011, there were no US troops left in Iraq.
During the campaign in 2008, Obama had declared that the war we needed to fight was not in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. So, in 2009, he increased the number of American troops, but not to the degree that his commanders desired. He also stated that the surge would be of limited duration. It only accomplished an increase in US and civilian casualties. At the end of 2014, Obama declared that our longest war had come to a responsible conclusion, even though 10,000 Americans remained there. As Obama backed away from the two wars, he expanded drone operations and extended American activities to Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon. When ISIS struck in 2013, we were back in Iraq as the hawks in the US screamed about Obama letting American control of the Middle East slip away. The author suggests that the US foreign policy establishment has a collective memory of about ten days.
From the time of George Kennan through the end of the Cold War, the US established and maintained massive wealth and military power with the objective of outlasting the USSR and averting war. "Freedom, abundance and security went hand in hand." Shaping the future became the new mantra and rationale for the massive military establishment. We believed that the determined use of our power would set all things right. We defeated fascism and communism and should be able to defeat or fix all else that comes along. We have power and we wield it righteously. And the war for the Greater Middle East has become a way of life.
The author feels very strongly that everything we have done has failed and his principal rationale is our inability to fix the underlying problems of the Middle East: absurd post-Colonial borders, poverty, religious conflict, corrupt regimes, Israel's existence and the Iranian Revolution. The problems are intractable and cannot be resolved by intervention. Nonetheless, every president from Carter to Obama delusionally attempted to do the impossible. He closes very strongly by arguing that there is nothing for us to do in the Middle East. Between climate change and the rise of China, there are much more important things to attend to elsewhere. This book is well-written, relatively brief and quite thorough. It will remind you of some events that have slipped away from our collective memories, and sadly, points out that we have been actively fighting for a very long time, and have very little, indeed virtually nothing, to show for it.
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