I’m not a foreign policy expert. My knowledge of Middle Eastern history and politics peaked in eighth grade, when I debated Israel’s occupation of Gaza with my classmate Josh, who donned a PLO head scarf over his yarlmulke in honor of the occasion.
Thirty-five years later, it’s virtually impossible for laypeople to follow the complex geopolitics of the Middle East; nonetheless, common sense allows me to see one thing very clearly, something I think most ordinary Americans get, but that expert foreign policymakers apparently do not: What we’re doing isn’t working.
It’s been almost 25 years since we first sent troops to Iraq. To riff off Ronald Reagan’s famous 1980 campaign quip, “Is the Middle East better off now than it was 25 years ago?”
You don’t have to be an expert to know that the answer is a resounding no. On the contrary, every time we send ground troops, missiles and drones into the Middle East, we spawn new and more atrocious terrorist sects.
ISIS is, by all accounts, the worst of the lot. ISIS is what you get--what we got--when we bombed civilians, obliterated infrastructure, and tortured detainees. Let’s face it: We haven’t exactly endeared ourselves to the non-Israeli people of the Middle East, and ISIS is the unsurprising demon child of our marriage to endless war.
ISIS was incubated in a part of the world devastated and destabilized by the “War on Terror”, a war that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stieglitz estimates has cost American taxpayers three trillion dollars. A war that Physicians for Social Responsibility says has killed 1.3 million Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis, most of them innocent civilians.
Pause for just a moment to let the number 1.3 million sink in. It’s a big number. If American soldiers were dying at anything close to that rate, we would have long since abandoned the War on Terror.
I understand we have to do something to help fix what we broke in Iraq. But what I don’t understand is why anyone thinks that more of the same will produce a different outcome.
Military solutions have failed for twenty-five years and will fail for another twenty-five if we don’t change course. In the eyes of most of the world, the United States is an arrogant imperial power on a fast track to moral and financial bankruptcy.
The United States has done away with Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s top six leaders. Isn’t that what we went there to do? When can we say we’re done? The longer we stick around, the more drones we deploy to terrorize already traumatized war zones, the more children are killed, maimed and orphaned, the stronger ISIS and its ilk become. Even if we manage to weaken ISIS, some other group will rise up, just as ISIS filled the void created when al Qaeda began to fall apart.
The devastation we’ve wrought on Iraqis has engendered a burning desire for revenge. We didn’t intend to kill children and destroy homes and hospitals and schools, but we did. In the eyes of Iraqis and Pakistanis, our War on Terror is a War of Terror. The sooner we stop it, the sooner the region can begin the long process of healing and repairing itself, perhaps with some form of constructive (i.e. non-military) support from us. It won’t be easy to turn things around, but at least we can stop killing and getting killed.
Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” After 25 long years, let’s come to our senses.