Back in 2003, President George W. Bush and his neocon puppet masters made that ill-advised, WMD-rationalized invasion of Iraq that continues to cost us lives, treasure and reputation. Recall the Bush Administration’s real agenda: a pro-West buffer state to complement Israel and lots of guaranteed oil. WMD scares and erroneous 9/11 associations were the perfect cover.
Fast forward to now: We’d settle for tyrants, dictators and thugs in a nanosecond. Concluding a war seems endless. This assuredly isn’t what President Barack Obama and all non-neocons wanted. But it’s what we have: an existential threat to virtually everybody–whatever the homeland.
“The worst people on the planet” is how dyspeptic, conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer, whom I rarely agree with on anything, accurately defines the marauding, beheading Islamist State. It’s also well-financed, equipped with captured, American-made weaponry, including M1 tanks and howitzers, and privy to Sunni generals who commanded Baathist troops under Saddam Hussein. It also has serious land, a stash of uranium, Western ex-pat jihadists with American and European passports and a safe haven in Syria. And it doesn’t get much more personal than a video decapitation of one of your own.
Recall that the missile crisis of 1962 was averted, in large part, because neither side wanted an apocalyptic endgame. That dynamic no longer applies. This is a zero-sum game with evil–not a forum for a treaty or an armistice. You don’t negotiate with iniquity. You erase it.
Call it a Rubicon that needs crossing.
Sooner, rather than later, the president will have to expand aerial attacks carried out by our F-16 and F-18 jets. Sooner, rather than later, the president will have to acknowledge that military advisers–and this isn’t the Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay crowd that John Kennedy had to rein in–are right in their consensus that a sworn enemy can’t have unfettered access to a Syrian safe haven to regroup, re-plan and resume.
What helps is that we increasingly have European support for such an offensive as well as a lot of anti-Islamic State sentiment among Muslims. In fact, the aerial strikes are done in coordination with ground assaults by Iraqi special forces, Shiite militias and Kurdish peshmerga fighters. Ironically, the Iranian and Syrian governments, regardless of cautious, parsed rhetoric and convoluted history with the U.S., want to see the Islamic State razed. “Convert or die” understandably appalls the neighborhood.
Moreover, we have an indigenous, trustworthy ally in the Kurds. Ever since President George H.W. Bush ordered the no-fly zone over Northern Iraq after the first Gulf War, the Kurds have been grateful–a rare sentiment in the Muddled East–to the U.S. They also have normalized relations with Israel.
The demise of the Islamic State and statehood for Kurdistan: This would be the way to end a war.