American military force to pummel Jihadists from the skies can create as much terror as it foils. Our intervention can actually backfire and make us all less safe. How many Jihadists, for example, did the Iraq War create? Our intervention gave al Qaeda a foothold in Iraq and then, by creating a majority Shi’a state for the first time, helped spawn Sunni support for the Caliphate. If the Iraq War was designed to counter terrorism, it failed. It may well be that any Shi’a majority state in Iraq will always be at war with its Sunnis. Expecting this new government to be any different is mere window dressing for the immense and powerful centrifugal forces beneath. If the impact of military force were that simple, we could wipe out Jihadism from the face of the earth. But force is never that simple, it’s especially complex in the countervailing myriad of factions and nations and sects of the Middle East, and it wins no friends, and merely makes more enemies. What Ambers is talking about is a global version of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. We are “mowing the lawn” with this kind of action, which spawns more hatred of the US, does not lead to a political settlement, and in fact makes such a settlement less likely, and therefore future “police actions” inevitable. It’s a cycle of violence breeding violence, in which we enable and empower Jihadism, rather than insisting that this is a problem first and foremost for the Muslim and Arab world, not us.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 17:09:21 +0000
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