We Already Have Too Many Useless Deaths
We should be very careful in deciding what to do about
ISIS. The murder of two Americans in
Syria is appalling, but in responding to it, we should be careful not to cause
the useless deaths of thousands more Americans. I use the word “useless”
deliberately because in my lifetime, too many Americans have died uselessly.
In Vietnam, tens of thousands of Americans died, and their
sacrifice produced no benefit for the United States or for Vietnam. The outcome
of the war was that the Vietnamese communists took over the country, and we
could have obtained that outcome without a single American death in 1945, in
1954 or in 1965.
In Iraq, more than 4000 Americans died, and the main
outcomes of that war were:
·
An increase in the power of the Shi’ites in
Iraq.
·
An increase in the power of Iran as the patron
of the Iraqi Shi’ites.
·
An increase in the power of Sunni Islamic
terrorists in reaction to the actions of the Shi’ite government of Iraq.
All of these outcomes are contrary to the interests of the
United States. So, the American deaths in Iraq actually made the Middle East
more hostile and dangerous for our country. We do not want the same thing to
happen in Syria.
We Will Have American "Boots on the Ground"
President Obama has said that we will hunt down ISIS,
degrade it and ultimately destroy it. He has said that we will use air strikes,
but that the “boots on the ground” will not be American. Allies like Saudi
Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan will do the fighting there, but they have
shown little enthusiasm for that role. In the meantime, a senior US Air Force
commander is quoted in today’s USA Today as
saying that the our pilots will need American spotters on the ground in Iraq
and Syria to verify that the targets of air strikes are real and legitimate. What
will happen when those spotters come under attack, as inevitably they will?
Will we abandon them, or will we send in “boots on the ground” to defend and
support them?
What Will Happen if we Train and Equip the Moderate Opposition?
President Obama has said that we will work to train and
support the moderate opponents of the Assad regime, but the moderate opposition
to Assad is fragmented and not very effective. Moreover, the moderate
opposition groups are allied with radical Islamist groups like the Nusra Front who
oppose ISIS for their own reasons. Will our weapons fall into the hands of those
Islamist groups? What will they do with those weapons? Remember that we armed
Islamists in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet Union, and when that war
ended, the Taliban used those weapons to take over the country. When we invaded Afghanistan to drive out the
Taliban, our troops found themselves fighting against an enemy that we had
armed. We do not yet know what the
outcome of our war in Afghanistan will be, but the situation there does not
appear encouraging. We know that the Karzai government and its supporters are
spectacularly corrupt. We read reports of renewed attacks by the Taliban in key
provinces, and we read that the government’s troops are sometimes being
overwhelmed there. In the end, will the
more than 2000 American deaths have produced any benefit for our country?
The Price Will Be High
If we decide to remake the political map of Syria and Iraq
by eliminating ISIS, we will pay a high price in the lives of the Americans who
do the fighting, and it is not clear that eliminating ISIS will produce any
real benefit for the United States. The regimes in Iraq and Syria will still be
unstable, brutal and corrupt. Other radical Islamist groups will still be there. We cannot change that.
President Bush told us that we would bring democracy to
Iraq, and we know what the outcome of that has been. Some people say that if
President Obama had not withdrawn our troops from Iraq, the situation would be
better there, and perhaps they are right. But how long are they be prepared to
stay there? We were there for a decade. Are they prepared to stay for another
decade or two? If we enter the war in
Syria, all of its problems will become our problems, and we will not be able to
put down that burden once we take it up. So, let us be careful what we do now
because we will have to live with the consequences for decades. Let us at least try not
to cause more useless deaths.
