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Elbow Grease in the Middle East
By John
Crittenden on Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon:
This is the thing about dirty jobs that need to be done. They can only be ignored or left half-done for so long.Saddam Hussein, and the ethnic bloodbath his policies engendered there. Iran, ruled by a regime that denies its reform-minded people a free vote, actively supports terrorists and seeks to undermine other nations in the region. Syria, another terrorist-supporting, interfering nation, ruled by a second-generation despot.
Sooner or later, all of them must be dealt with. Removing the stain of Saddam's rule from Iraq remains a work in progress, where the mistake was made of going in light. The United States, now a neighbor of Iran and Syria as an occupying power in Iraq, with major strategic interests regardless of that, cannot hope for a desireable outcome there unless it wields and expresses a credible threat of force.
I agree with JC, and that interests me. The introspection stems from the realization that five years ago, I would have never seen myself casually considering a proper cleansing process for the Middle East. Before 9/11, it was taboo. Today it's coffee-table talk.
Americans are still isolationists at heart, and that makes tough-talk...well, tough. But even taking into consideration the strains and stresses of Iraq, Crittenden's core point remains. Decades of thumb-twiddling and do-nothing sunshine policies in the Middle East got us a steady stream of escalating body counts and multiplying enemies. Laying down the big stick because Iraq got sticky is precisely the opposite of what we should be doing.
I am not saying that we should avoid engaging these regimes in dialogue, quite the opposite. I am, however, concurring with Crittenden's assessment that our choice of language should be the universal dialect of strength.
Not arrogance, mind you. Strength. There is a difference.
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Comments
As our superiors in the Air Force, and other branches I imagine, they continue to tell us that America has a short attention span. Which translate into the the “Decades of thumb-twiddling and do-nothing sunshine policies”. Just look at the recent Lebanon conflict. Sh*t has been going on for years, a war breaks out, it’s nonstop coverage, everybody is frantic about why the US is doing anything fast enough, war winds down, and now we’re back to the normal route of what Paris Hilton did yesterday or OJ’s tell all.
On the military side; given our military might it should have been predictable, like planning chess moves ahead that Syria and Iran would rely on terror organizations to do their dirty work.
It’s ashame, in spite of Vietnam, we’ve never come up with an effective counter-insurgency strategy. Granted I know there are brutal ways of doing it...
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Concur. However, Iran and Syria should have taken precedence over Iraq. They poised the greater threat and their evidence of involvement with terror organizations is much more compelling than Iraq's ever was.
Right now we simply lack the capability to deal with Iran or Syria with any sort of serious military power. It's all taken up with Iraq and Afghanistan.