Tag Archives: foreign policy

It’s Only 5%

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As President Barack Obama said regarding his Obamacare, only 5% of Americans actually are affected by his dissembling about their ability to keep their doctor, their health plan, their medical facility of choice, and these 5% are only a tiny, insignificant minority in the greater scheme of things.

And so it is with the victims of genocide. Obama’s self-described standard for intervention requires a sufficiently large number of humans before they can be a enough of a humanitarian crisis to warrant his attention. In his formula, V(olume) + E(fficacy) + A(uthority) = I(ntervention),  the numbers of Yezidis on the mountaintop no longer meet his standards for a balanced equation; they’re not a Voluminous enough number of victims.

Human beings just don’t matter as individuals; there has to be a minimum aggregation into a suitably sized group. His decision not to help the remaining (potential) genocidal victims because there doesn’t seem to be enough of them left is an illustration of a logical outcome of the Progressive view that individuals matter less than the group.

An Inaccurate Description

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As Nour Malas and Joe Parkinson, writing for The Wall Street Journal, put it in a larger piece,

They [Western officials, including especially US officials] now face the choice of launching a major armament program to Kurdish forces, and risk accelerating Iraq’s dismemberment, or offering smaller supplies but failing to turn the Peshmerga into the definitive proxy force against the Islamic State.

Of course, the choice is not limited to these options, nor are these options accurate reflections of reality. An obvious third choice is arming, and supporting with other means, the Peshmerga so that they can do far more than just be someone else’s proxy, but instead guarantee the Kurds’ survival as a society and a polity against ISIS’ attempts to crush, if not exterminate, them—even to crush ISIS instead.

Nor is “launching a major armament program” a serious risk to Iraqi political unity. That threat comes from an Iraqi government that has no respect—no use for—either of the other two major groupings in Iraq: the Kurds, surely, and the Sunnis as well. Arming the Kurds, far from threatening the Iraqi polity, would facilitate the survival and the effectivity of the Kurds, and give them the wherewithal to force the Iraqi government to take them seriously.

On the other hand, not supporting the Kurds adequately, including arming them with serious weaponry and giving them serious air support, guarantees their fall, which in turn guarantees Iraq’s fall to the terrorists.

Which renders irrelevant any discussion of an alleged threat from the Kurds to Iraqi unity.

Gradual Escalation

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We’ve been taking potshots at ISIS targets, ostensibly to bring relief materials to the Yezidis trapped on mountaintop in northern Iraq. The potshots, though, are having a different effect.

Islamic militant forces in northern Iraq appear to be shifting tactics….

[U]ntil now [ISIS] was behaving like a well-organized army, moving with strategic intent and pursuing military objectives. Now, officials are seeing at least a partial shift to classic insurgency tactics, as militants begin to blend in among the population, making targeting more difficult.

“One of the things that we have seen…is that where [ISIS] have been in the open, they are now starting to dissipate and to hide amongst the people,” LtGen William Mayville Jr, Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said. “The targeting in this is going to become more difficult.”

This, of course, is the result of having ignored the lessons of Viet Nam, specifically the failure of gradual escalation, which leaves the enemy room and time in which to adapt and respond. It also continues to underestimate ISIS: they’re maintaining their strategic intent and military objectives they’ve always had; they’re only changing tactics—just like in Vietnam.

These initial air “attacks” should have been massive and sustained, destroying the terrorists’ formations over a broad swath and while they were still in the open, still concentrated, and still easy targets. Moreover, such a heavy, sustained campaign would have made the Kurds’ Peshmerga’s task easier.

“[M]ilitants can be hard to discern from civilians,” said Michael Rubin, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Are you going to risk having someone come on to a helicopter or into a crowd that’s actually a suicide bomber?”

This is the situation into which Obama’s…tactic…has placed the Peshmerga—and us.

[I]n order for the airstrikes to be effective at this stage, US ground forces would be needed to permanently push the group formerly known as ISIS back—something that has been ruled out by Obama administration officials.

This is not the case, and it’s a surprising misunderstanding by Jennifer Griffin, the author of the above linked article. Ground forces—the Peshmerga—already are in place; US ground forces aren’t needed, and the Kurds aren’t asking for them. All the Peshmerga need are those weapons and ammunition that have been “promised”—an Obama-style commitment—and that still are being withheld.

This business of gradual escalation—or of a too light response—is a lesson writ large from our gradual escalation failure in Vietnam. This is a lesson of which the present administration is fully aware and is studiously is ignoring, since to acknowledge the prior failure would be to acknowledge the failure of the present administration’s disdain for US military power in any place in the world.

There is no military solution? Tell that to tomorrow’s historians studying how the extermination of the Yezidis came about. Tell that to the daughters of the surviving Kurds, living—sort of—as ISIS sex slaves. That will be, after all, the outcome of the current decision to ignore that lesson and to allow, thereby, ISIS to continue its…advance.

Or we don’t escalate at all, we stay with the pin pricks, we don’t try to get ahead of the terrorists’ evolving tactics, and we meekly accept defeat.

Negotiate with Terrorists?

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Democratic Party Presidential contender and current Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) had some thoughts from the Progressive side of the situation unfolding in Iraq. In supporting President Barack Obama’s tepid moves vis-à-vis ISIS, the Yezidis, and the Kurds, Warren said this:

It’s a complicated situation right now in Iraq and the president has taken very targeted actions to provide humanitarian relief that the Iraqi government requested, and to protect American citizens. But like the president, I believe that any solution in Iraq is going to be a negotiated solution, not a military solution. We do not want to be pulled into another war in Iraq.

Warren added this, exposing Progressives’ misunderstanding, generally, of what is required to destroy a terrorist entity:

It’s a very complicated situation in Iraq. The president has now taken two very targeted actions, and those two actions will change the mix of what’s happening in Iraq, and we’ll have to just monitor it[.]

Of course it’s wholly insufficient for us to toss our shoes onto the field and expect the terrorists to cut and run. A cynical man might suggest that the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party is projecting its own world view onto hardened thugs.

And just to seal the muddle, Andy Metzger of MassLive, summarized Warren’s position thusly, taking her at her word that she actually was serious:

While calling for a negotiated solution, Warren said the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is a terrorist organization and the US does not negotiate with terrorists, while leaving open the possibility the US could assist the Iraqi government negotiating with ISIS.

How, indeed, does one negotiate with terrorists? Never mind that this administration has brought this on the Iraqi people, the Kurds, and itself when it abandoned Iraq three years ago under its disingenuous claim that it was “leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.”

We’re entering a very dangerous period in the life of our nation. The Progressives of the Democratic Party simply are unable to see the error of their ways, and they want, post-2014, post-2016, to continue the obviously disastrous policies of the Obama administration.

Lasting Solutions

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President Barack Obama has said, in defense of his inaction against the current and planned atrocities of ISIS, that there can be no lasting solution in Iraq until the Iraqis have resolved their governmental failures and impasse—a true national reconciliation.

He’s right about the need for political resolution—for Iraqis. What Obama carefully elides, though, is the lasting solution that will occur vis-à-vis Yezidis and Kurds if we continue our inaction.

And continue to do nothing we are. Oh, much is made of our having dropped blankets, water, tents, and tens of thousands of meal rations onto a mountain top for the trapped Yezidis. But British estimates range from 50,000-150,000 Yezidis trapped—all of whom must have food for several days. “Tens of thousands” of rats won’t feed all of them for a single day if the British estimates are anywhere near accurate.

And the American air strikes? We’re continuing to shoot up individual artillery guns, the odd APC, an occasional convoy. There is, though, no deliberate, focused, active air campaign of any sort with a view to destroying ISIS’ forces as they continue to press the Yezidis and the Kurds’ Peshmerga—and then the Kurds themselves.

We’ve begun flying arms to the Kurds? We’ve begun “expediting” arms deliveries from third parties; maybe we’ve authorized the CIA to engage in arms trafficking with the Kurds. But these typically are small arms—of little use against the captured American APCs, tanks(!), artillery, etc being used by ISIS.

The lasting solution that will result from Obama’s reluctance to act absent a lasting solution is the extermination of the Yezidis and the enslavement of surviving Kurds. The lasting solution we should be putting in place is the destruction of ISIS.

By the time we elect a new President, though, it may well be too late.