President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night outlined his plan for “degrading and ultimately destroying” the Islamic State. The plan involved a vastly expanded military operation and a campaign of precision bombing that will continue for years. A host of American politicians and pundits have joined the president in voicing their desires to see the Islamic State destroyed.
“We will follow them to the gates of hell,” warned Vice President Joe Biden in a speech Wednesday night. Or, as Judge Jeanine of Fox News put it, “Keep bombing them. Bomb them again and again.”
The Islamic State shocked the world over the last two months by conquering wide swaths of Iraq and Syria and establishing an Islamic caliphate. More sensational yet are the numerous videos of mass executions conducted by the group, and its predilection for public crucifixion or decapitation as punishment for crimes ranging from drug possession to being part of the “wrong” religious denomination. The Islamic State is surely vicious and brutal.
In this way, it mirrors its makers.
If the Islamic State is the cancer of the Middle East, the United States is the world’s unscrupulous dumper of carcinogens. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban, it gave the Taliban a raison d’etre. When the U.S. went into Iraq to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s regime, it gave al-Qaeda room to grow.
When the United States and a “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq in 2003 under blatantly false pretenses, it killed over 100,000 Iraqis, destroyed the country’s infrastructure, exacerbated sectarian divisions and left the nation destitute, with a U.S.-armed puppet government in Baghdad.
The memory of sexual and psychological torture at the hands of American soldiers is fresh in the minds of many Iraqis, including members of the Islamic State who staged a prison break from Abu Ghraib last year.
Several months ago, the Islamic State stormed northern Iraqi cities and, in the process of overrunning the Iraqi soldiers stationed there, gained control over an enormous cache of American weapons and supplies. Of course, the group already had many arms, some of which it received from the C.I.A to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Moammar al-Qaddafi in Libya.
Preventing the Islamic State from gaining further traction is a reasonable goal, but any serious venture to combat the sort of militancy and extremism displayed by the Islamic State would require the West to stop trying to colonize and subjugate the Middle East (through war, neo-liberal capitalism and the Israeli colony), and to stop supporting and providing weapons to autocratic leaders in the region.
Saudi Arabia likes to behead people just as much as the Islamic State, so why is one our close ally and the other a mortal enemy?
Bombing people has simply proved ineffective in the U.S.’s tragicomic Global War on Terror. If anything, it has bred anti-American anger and sympathy for groups like al-Qaeda. Any attacks on the White House would simply be a case of the chickens coming home to roost.
“If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,” Obama warned on Wednesday. But if American leaders really wanted to protect Americans, they would put controls on energy companies in order to stop a crisis of massive climate change, would they not? Why do they not spend less money on war and more on education and health? Or at least jail one of the bankers responsible for the current recession?
U.S. involvement in Iraq and Syria is not really about protecting Americans. We hear the same fearful language that was thrown around in the lead up to the Iraq War and the disastrous Global War on Terror, but the threat of the Islamic State is only conceptual here.
The threat of corporate gangsters and a militarized police state, on the other hand, is very real, especially when governments, such as those of the U.S. and the U.K. use the threat of groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to justify surveillance, censoring and a host of other authoritarian measures against their own citizens.
We should have learned, but the same military-industrial businessmen who raped Iraq and wasted nearly a trillion dollars to line their pockets are trying to do it all over again.
Rather than hiding behind the screens from which they direct drones and spread lies, the people who really want this war—the president, his cabinet, those in Congress, and all their cronies in the weapons and oil industries—should stay true to their word, journey to Iraq and Syria, and personally accompany the Islamic State to the gates of hell. Stay there for all I care.