Last Tuesday night, May 26, PBS showed a Frontline documentary called “Obama at War,” the title itself being an oxymoron of sorts because the portrait they painted of President Obama was basically that of a wimp who doesn’t want to get the U.S. involved in any more wars over the Middle East, particularly having troops on the ground in places like Syria that don’t have that much discernible importance to the U.S.’s national interest. The title was a calculated bit of irony, obviously evoking the name of Bob Woodward’s first book about the George W. Bush administration, Bush at War, and the extent to which “national security” issues and particularly the hysterical response to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks came to define the second Bush presidency (and incidentally almost certainly saved him from the one-term fate that befell his father). Obama, as is well known, won the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008 to a large degree because he was, and apparently always had been, against Bush II’s ridiculous and counterproductive invasion of Iraq in 2003, whereas his principal rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton, had been a sitting Senator when the war was being debated and had voted for the resolution authorizing Bush to make the attack. Though the collapse of the U.S. economy probably had more to do with Obama’s ultimate victory in the 2008 general election than his stand on foreign policy in general and Iraq in particular (John McCain was actually catching up to him until the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 reversed the trends in the polls almost overnight and gave Obama his victory margin), Obama still took office with the self-image of someone who gets his country out of wars, not into them — and even when he has escalated he’s tried to do so “on the cheap,” getting other countries to contribute. Indeed, under Obama the U.S.’s principal tactic against real or alleged terrorists has become the air strike with drones, which has the obvious political advantage of not putting any U.S. servicemembers directly at risk — though given how much more sloppily the drones have been targeted than the hype surrounding them suggests (including wiping out an entire wedding party in Pakistan) it seems highly likely there will be “collateral damage” from them as terror organizations find new recruits among the surviving relatives of civilians killed by drone strikes and engage them to mount terrorist attacks against Americans, either her or (more likely) abroad.
What was most amazing about “Obama at War” is that, despite all the
hype from the Right that regards PBS as just another part of the “liberal media
Establishment” they regularly denounce, the attitude the show takes towards the
Obama administration almost exactly lines up with the Republican propaganda
line denouncing Obama as a dangerous wimp whose actions, or rather non-actions
— failing to keep a U.S. military presence on the ground in Iraq and failing to
intervene on behalf of the so-called “moderate rebels” in Syria (whose
existence was actually a collective fantasy on the part of the U.S.
military-industrial establishment — there are basically two sides in the Syrian
civil war, the Bashir al-Assad government and the fundamentalist Islamic
terrorists, including but not limited to ISIS, and to the extent that there are
fighters who aren’t aligned with either of those camps, there are so few of
them they are basically irrelevant; indeed, the show itself notes that the
so-called “moderate rebels” are abandoning the struggle altogether, I suspect
because they know that they are likely to be executed either by the al-Assad
government if it survives or by ISIS if it takes over, and they figure quitting
altogether is the best hope they have to live through the outcome, whichever of
those it is) — basically created ISIS and allowed it to survive, thrive and
take over cities like Mosul and Ramadi the U.S. already laid down a lot of
blood and treasure to capture in the first place in the 2003-2011 war. One of
the most interesting exchanges in the program was this one, regarding the
pull-back from Obama’s “red-line” position that he’d launch air strikes against
the Assad government if it used chemical weapons against its citizens to the
position that he’d accept a proposal from the government of Russia (i.e.,
president Vladimir Putin and his foreign minister) to broker a peace deal in
which the Syrian government would turn over its chemical weapons stockpile in
exchange for not being attacked by the Americans:
DEREK
CHOLLET, Asst. Sec. of Defense, 2012-15: It was the right decision. Had we conducted the
military campaign that had been planned, we would not have taken out a high
percentage of his chemical weapons. The credible threat of force brought about
an opening for diplomacy to come in, which then led to something that no one
thought was possible.
AMR
AL-AZM, Syrian Opposition: No. I think it was a terrible, terrible error on the part
of this administration. I mean, it’s not just a red line. This is the president
of the United States, this is the White House, and a tinpot dictator challenges
that and gets away with it? Who’s going to believe you next time?
Yet at the same time, the show acknowledged towards its end
that there aren’t really any good options on how to deal with ISIS. The irony
is that ISIS has gripped the world of Sunni Islam like the proverbial prairie
fire, catching the imagination of hundreds of thousands of potential recruits.
I’ve noted the irony of President Obama saying recently that as part of his
strategy against ISIS he wants to recruit and help train a new Iraqi army,
which will fight … the last Iraqi army
the U.S. trained, whose Sunni members have deserted en masse and joined ISIS, giving the guerrilla group (and
ISIS is really much more a guerrilla group than an al-Qaeda style terror
organization — indeed, it was precisely over the issue of whether the way to
bring about the revival of the Islamic caliphate was to stage spectacular
9/11-style attacks in foreign countries or to take and hold territory in
Muslim-majority states that ISIS broke from al-Qaeda in the first place) the
backbone of its fighting power just as its success in holding oil-producing
regions of Iraq has given it its financial clout. There doesn’t seem to be any good way for the U.S. to counter ISIS; trying to
create puppet states in the region to limit its influence (as the U.S. did with
Iran from 1953 to 1979 and with Iraq from 2003 to 2011) hasn’t worked; drone
strikes have created havoc but haven’t harmed ISIS long-term because their
“bench” is strong enough they can easily replace anyone we kill; and while I
suspect the fooforaw about ISIS allegedly using social media to recruit
terrorists worldwide is largely propaganda bunk, it’s true they’ve been able to
turn up people in surprising locations even though most of the people who are
claiming allegiance to ISIS and citing it as a motivation for terrorist
idiocies like the attempted attack on an anti-Muslim rally in Garland, Texas
probably have no more to do with ISIS than I do. ISIS is going to be a headache
for the U.S. for years, and is probably going to get a lot stronger before it gets weaker (and the example of
Iran, where a Fundamentalist Islamic government has kept a stranglehold on
power for 36 years and shows no signs of letting up despite an increasingly
restive population, many of whom — particularly their younger people — want to
break free of Islamic restrictions and be part of the same world as the
relatively cosmopolitan West, doesn’t encourage the thought that ISIS’s
excesses, especially where it actually rules, will provoke a successful
revolution against it) — and neither claiming that Obama hasn’t been “tough”
enough (I’m convinced the next President, whether it’s Hillary Clinton or a
Republican, will put U.S. troops
in the ground in yet another ill-starred campaign in the Middle East, this one
with the avowed purpose of defeating ISIS) nor continually blaming the Bush
administration for the mess (yes, they made the mess, but it’s still the
responsibility of America’s future leaders to clean it up) is going to be much
help.
