In the George
Orwell classic 1984, there is a state
of perpetual war between the nations of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. The
enemy in the conflict is ambiguous, it could be Eurasia one day, and Eastasia
the next. The war has no borders and seems to be taking place everywhere and
nowhere at the same time. It is also endless. There are daily news reports of
battles and skirmishes but never reports of decisive victories. Meanwhile back
at home the citizens are reminded that they are being protected by Big Brother
who is constantly tracking their every movement and monitoring their mail and
telephone communications. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is part of this
system of governmental control; he works for the Ministry of Truth where his
job is to rewrite past newspaper articles so that the historical record matches
the current party line. He consigns inconvenient truths that do not fit the
approved narrative to the “memory hole.”
Sound
familiar? It could be a description of the new normal in 2014 where America and
its NATO allies are engaged in an endless military struggle against Islamic terrorists
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria and
elsewhere. Where the government records every telephone conversation, every
fax, every email message, and can track our movements by means of personal
digital devices called “smart phones.”
Satellites in space silently survey every corner of the globe and send
signals back to secret control centers hidden deep underground beneath
nondescript suburban buildings where CIA soldiers direct pilotless drones to
rain death down on enemy targets by means of laser-guided missiles.
This state of
perpetual war used is to justify psychological and physical control over their
populations by keeping them fearful and hateful towards the enemy, while at the
same time ensuring that the military-industrial complex and the national
surveillance state can continue to siphon billions of dollars from the treasury
every year in the name of national defense. In the meanwhile millions of
citizens are unemployed, children lack adequate schools, roads and bridges are
collapsing, and the provision of essential social services such as ensuring
that families have enough to eat or are able to access basic health care are
assigned to charities. The legislature is in a perpetual state of conflict
between entrenched opposing ideologies with “liberals” insisting that the
government grow bigger and “conservatives” insisting that it get smaller. Polls show that the people are extremely
unhappy with the government, but at every election the vote mostly the same
politicians back into office. Many people soon become cynical about “politics”
and retreat into private pleasures, consoling themselves with alcohol, drugs,
gambling, and professional football. Those lucky few who manage to find decent
jobs can also entertain themselves by going to strip malls and buying cheap
consumer goods made in China.
George
Orwell’s dystopian novel was first published in 1949, the same year I was born,
only four years after the end of WWII, a war in which an estimated 50 million
people died. This war lasted for six years, but it was really a continuation of
the WWI which began in 1914 (a century ago), so one can say that the Great World
War lasted for 41 years. The year I was born, 1949, also marked the beginning
of the Cold War which lasted for another 40 years until 1989. During the Cold
War, America and its allies fought an enemy called “communism,” which was not
really an enemy so much as it was an ideology that was perceived as a threat to
our capitalist economic system. Since
2001 America has been fighting a “War on Terrorism,” which is not really an
enemy so much as it is a set of tactics employed by angry, humiliated men who reject
liberal values and lack access to sophisticated weapons.
So, even if
one regards the twelve year period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
and the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001 as a time of “peace” I have lived most
all of my 65 years during “wartime.” My own parents, who were born in the
1910’s spent most of their lives during wartime. And it seems likely that my
children and other members of the millennial generation, those of you born in
the 1980’s and 1990s, will also spend most of your lives during “wartime.”
The historian
Margaret McMillian whose work has focused on the causes and effects of WWI, has
predicted that instead of WWIII, the 21st century “will be a series of low
grade, very nasty wars that will go on and on without clear outcomes, doing
dreadful things to civilians in their path.” (New York Times, September 7, 2014, SR 11). Political scientists
such as Hedley Bull have been forecasting since the late 1970s that the international system is
evolving into a neo-Medieval pattern in which sovereign territorial nation
states no longer possess a monopoly on violence, and political authority is
exercised by a variety of violent non-state actors such as gangs, militias,
warlords, and terrorist organizations.
In 2014 these
predictions are reality. In Nigeria last April Boko Haram kidnapped 250
schoolgirls because they object to secular education. Social media around the
world quickly reacted with hashtags of horror, but six months later nobody has
rescued them. In Guatemala and Honduras gangs extort and threaten honest
citizens who are so afraid they send their children unaccompanied across the US
border in hopes of saving them. In Libya rival militias fight over control of
Tripoli’s international airport, and Egypt and the U.A.E. send in planes to
bomb the ones they don’t like. Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine rebel
against a new government in Kiev that leans west, and shoots down an
international commercial jetliner with a Russian missile system killing
everyone aboard. Russia annexes Crimea and sends its troops across the border
to aid the Russian separatists. In Afghanistan thirteen years of NATO military
involvement have not eliminated the Taliban. The election that was supposed to
set the stage for NATO withdrawal ended up as a fiasco with the charges of
rampant voter fraud and election rigging, In Syria, a four year civil war has
so far killed 200,000 people, and created 3 million refugees and 6 million
IDPs. Israel decides it is time to punish and degrade Hamas in Gaza, so it
launches a fifty day assault killing an estimated 2,000 people most of whom are
civilians. And finally, for now, over the summer ISIS surged into Northern Iraq
and has declared a Islamic Caliphate complete with beheading of infidels whose
remains are mounted on crucifixes as a warning to those who would prefer not to
convert to their brand of radical Islam.
President
Obama was elected in part because he campaigned on a pledge to end the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. He followed through on his promise to pull US combat
forces out of Iraq, but, sobered by the rapid advance and brutality of ISIS, is
now is contemplating returning US forces to the region to combat ISIS. His mind
focused by the grisly executions of two American journalists, the winner of the
Nobel Peace Prize is making the case for more war.
In a speech
to the nation on September 10th 2014, on the eve of the 13th
anniversary of the September 11th attacks, he offered three reasons,
or causus belli, for this renewed war
in the Middle East. First, he claimed that “ISIL poses a threat to the people
of Iraq and Syria, and the broader Middle East - including American citizens,
personnel and facilities.” Second, he said that “these terrorists could pose a
growing threat beyond that region - including to the United States.” The third justification was to protect civilians who are being threatened with ethnic cleansing and genocide.
His strategy to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIS involves
four points: (1) stepping up airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq and if necessary
Syria; (2) increasing intelligence sharing, coordination and support with the
Iraqi army and the Kurdish pesh merga mobilizing to counter ISIS in northern
and western Iraq and eastern Syria; (3) the US “will redouble our efforts to
cut off its funding; improve our intelligence; strengthen our defenses; counter
its warped ideology; and stem the flow of foreign fighters into - and out of -
the Middle East”. (4) the US will “continue
providing humanitarian assistance to innocent civilians who have been displaced
by this terrorist organization,” including Sunni and Shia Muslims who are at
grave risk, as well as tens of thousands of Christians and other religious
minorities who have been targets of ethnic cleansing and genocide carried out
by ISIL.
Of these objectives, the only one that I wholeheartedly
support is the last, continuing the military intervention for humanitarian
protection purposes. The United Nations Human Rights Council has condemned the
abuses committed by ISIL against civilians in northern Iraq in the strongest
terms, and has called the brutal persecution of Christian, Yezidi, Turkmen,
Shabak, Kaka’e, Sabaeans, and Shia on the basis of their ethnic and religious
identities as crimes against humanity. Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch have produced reports that label these crimes as “ethnic cleansing.” And
a group of genocide scholars, including myself, have written a letter to the UN
Security Council calling these crimes “genocide.” Whichever category of mass
atrocity crimes one employs, the acts are clear violations of international criminal
law. In my view, people who are threatened with genocide, ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity have a right to be rescued by the international community.
However, concerning the president’s
broader strategy to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIL, I have some serious
doubts and misgivings. While ISIL is certainly a threat to the people of Iraq
and Syria, the extent to which it threatens other countries in the region, such
as Jordan, Turkey, and Israel has been over-stated. Moreover, there is no
evidence that it intends to nor has the capability to carry out terrorist
attacks against the USA or Europe. In fact, it seems more likely that mounting
US airstrikes against ISIL will make it more rather than less likely that they
will contemplate retaliation of this kind. There is no credible evidence that
ISIL is planning an attack on the American homeland. Even if it does decide to
send some of its fighters who are American or EU citizens to carry out
terrorists attacks it is possible to stop them and prevent them from succeeding
without going to war against ISIL. Why have we spent billions of dollars on
Homeland Security (in additional to national defense, the NSA surveillance
programs, the CIA, and other intelligence services) if not to detect and
neutralize just such threats? In fact, given the ideology and past behavior of
this group, it seems that directing more American airstrikes against them in
Iraq and Syria will tend to increase rather than decrease the likelihood that
they will decide to try to retaliate against American civilians by dispatching
jihadis to travel to Western Europe and North America to carry out terrorist
attacks.
The task of pushing ISIL back out of the parts of Iraq it
has captured will be formidable, particularly given the fact that it has the
support of many of the Sunni tribes in those cities and towns who are more
fearful of the Shia militias and the Iraqi Army than they are of ISIL. At least
in the case of Iraq, the US has the consent of the government to intervene
militarily, and at least one solid ally in the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, so it
might be possible to recapture the parts of Iraq that ISIL is now occupying. But
the prospects for defeating ISIL in their strongholds in Syria are much dimmer.
I have grave doubts about how feasible it is to train and equip the Free Syrian
Army to stand up to ISIL in Syria. For the past several years the Obama
administration has thought it was a “fantasy” that this fractured and
undisciplined force could topple the Assad regime. Why is it now credible to
believe that it can fight effectively against both Assad and ISIL?
Many commentators have argued that only way to end the sectarian
civil wars in the region is through political negotiations that recognize the
legitimate grievances of the Sunni populations of Syria and Iraq. It is not
possible to eliminate the threat of Islamic extremism by killing extremists.
Unless one addresses the underlying grievances that lead people to support and
join extremist groups, we are just playing “whack-a-mole,” or worse,
“whack-a-hornet’s-nest.” One cannot resolve grievances born of humiliation and
dispossession by killing those who claim to be fighting for those harbor these
feelings. Unless we learn this lesson I fear that we will continue to live
during wartime.
Morton Winston
