THE AMERICAN PREDICAMENT

Consider the American Predicament today.

Americans elected a President whose behavior during the campaign reveals an exceptionally thin-skinned, vicious counterpuncher who will rise to any bait and batter away at whomever he perceives as wronging him. With properties, all over the world offering soft targets to adversaries wanting to do him (and the U.S.) harm, how long will it be before they start attacking them and what will he do in response, having the full resources of the military establishment under his command? 

The reality of a U.S. President with exposed assets all over the world presents a circumstance unprecedented in American history — something the electorate failed to consider last November. Not only are Trump’s interests vulnerable to terrorist attack, but also to pressure (both negative and positive) by foreign governments able to deny him permits, etc. or eager to curry favor with sweetheart deals offered to his kids. Americans should be mindful and leery of the potential for the U.S. Government to be dragged into conflict and/or compromising situations against its interests, based on action taken by foreigners involving the interests of the U.S. President.

And, worse yet, should jihadists attack the U.S. at home on the scale of another 9/11, Trump’s knee-jerk counterpunch could result in a catastrophic escalation of military violence in the Middle East and official persecutions of Muslims at home — not to mention violence against Muslims by Trump-incited 2nd Amendment vigilantes. 

This danger is not unique to Trump. 9/11 demonstrated that popular fear of and anger toward Muslim extremists has reached the point where any momentous attack against Americans or U.S. interests will provoke wildly disproportionate retaliation met by a corresponding escalation of violence from the other side — e.g. Daesh/ISIS. Where does it end? 

Today’s U.S. global military strategy against Muslim extremists is based on a flawed assumption, namely that there is a level of violence to which the U.S. can escalate sufficient to cause them to desist. The threat of such escalation during the Cold War, per the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) embraced by both sides, resulted in a nuclear standoff. MAD worked because both sides were rational, imbued with instincts for self-preservation staying the hands poised over the nuclear buttons — as we witnessed during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Muslim extremists are not similarly constrained. They are blinded  by their hatred of the U.S. and its allies (based, it must be said, on rational resentments of U.S. aggression in the Middle East) to the point of irrationality in their determination to inflict harm against the West, consequences be damned. Impelled by religious belief and, enticed by the reward of paradise for martyrdom in furtherance of their religion, they lack the restraint imposed by instincts of self-preservation and revulsion against inhuman behavior. Accordingly, there is no level of violence which will cause them to desist, nor is it possible to “wipe them all out,” since escalation of U.S. violence against jihadists only serves to recruit more to their cause. There is only the prospect of irreversible escalation to catastrophic, all-out religious war as long as the U.S. continues to poke the hornet’s nest in the Middle East. 

The neocons of the Bush/Cheney persuasion see all-out war as the inevitable apocalyptic outcome, and therefore, are determined to get on with it, the sooner the better, to take advantage of American air superiority and the apparent lack of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the enemy presently. Bush opened this Pandora’s Box when he invaded the Middle East under the aegis of “preemptive war.” There is a certain logic to this policy — a disturbing, self-fulfilling prophesy as long as the U.S. persists in provoking Muslims with U.S. military aggression on Muslim “holy soil.” There is additional logic to this policy in the profits accruing to the merchants of war of the donor class. Is the U.S. prepared to carry out this policy to its barbaric conclusion? Is it the hawks’ intent to continue escalating violence to elicit another 9/11 to provide the pretext for such an outcome?

Logic suggests the only way to prevent irreversible escalation to all-out religious war is to de-escalate — stop provoking militant Muslims and swelling their ranks with unending Western military intervention in the Middle East. The conflict there is simply the latest manifestation of a fraternal religious civil war ongoing, off and on, since the death of the Prophet 13 centuries ago. As in Vietnam, the U.S. is powerless to arrest irrepressible forces of hostility between contending parties, in the case of the Middle East, the two branches of the Muslim faith. Therefore, the U.S. should not continue to intervene in this historical conflict, leaving it to Islam to work out its differences, as only they ultimately can, must, and have throughout history, fighting each other to exhaustion to eventually arrive at a peace settlement. One can only hope that without the inflammatory presence of Western troops in the region, Muslims realize they have more in common than divides them, and thereby agree to work out a peaceful accommodation, probably involving the redrawing of boundaries to replace those arbitrarily imposed at Versailles after World War I. 

Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated this: any solution the U.S. attempts to impose is temporary, at best, tainted, in the eyes of the other side, by interests of “the infidels,” and, therefore illegitimate and deserving of ongoing resistance by ranks of jihadists swollen by the Western intervention itself. It is illogical and naive to expect U.S. close air support and provision of supplies to Muslim allies will result in the eradication of the jihadist movement such intervention both inflames and energizes. The U.S., in effect, is being hoisted by its own petard. Those who engage in the empty rhetoric of “we could have done more,” and “should not have withdrawn our troops prematurely” fail to recognize the limitations of U.S. power, the lack of American interests at stake in the conflict, the unaffordable cost in blood and treasure on all sides, and, therefore, the counter-productive nature of continued U.S. military involvement in the Middle East.  

The U.S. is caught between a rock and a hard place. Does the U.S. persist in an aggressive intervention in the Middle East advancing irreversibly toward the barbaric outcome of all-out, global religious war? Or does the U.S. acknowledge the counter-productive nature of continued U.S. military involvement in the region, unilaterally withdraw and thereby de-escalate the conflict so as to offer the prospect of peaceful accommodation with Islam? Given the reactive temperament of the incoming U.S. President and cabinet filled with generals and self-interested establishment billionaires, prodded by a political base inclined toward revenge and military solutions, I assume we will continue the present course for the next 4 years. Only an extraordinary realignment of American political priorities achieved by a radically new democratic political process can nurture hope of a rational solution to the American Predicament.   

David L. Smith

Author: The Predicament 

www.the-predicament.com

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