Yes, it has come to this: the American “Establishment” is so blind, benighted, and beggared that it takes the installation of a complete mountebank1 in the White House to save that Establishment, and the United States as well, from that Establishment’s ever-compounding follies. I refer, of course, to Donald Trump’s precipitous withdrawal of a relative handful of American troops from Syria, a country where their presence is completely unauthorized and constitutes in fact a vague and shapeless invasion.
From the shrieks and howls emerging from virtually all points on the political compass—all the “respectable” points, at least—one would think the president had addressed the UN in the nude—said shrieks and howls, of course, being doubled and redoubled with the news that the president is also contemplating significant withdrawals from America’s longest and most fruitless war, in Afghanistan.
The one great, seemingly irreducible advantage of a government based on free elections is that each election allows the opportunity of a new government to pursue new policies unattached to the failures of the past. If you didn’t break it, you don’t have to pay for it. But the elites of both parties were almost equally compromised by the disastrous policy of military intervention in the Middle East first introduced by the supposedly judicious George Bush I, never disavowed by President Clinton, grossly and grandiosely amplified, to the point of disaster and well beyond, by George Bush II, and again never disavowed by his Democratic successor, Barack Obama.
Over and over again, the Establishment sought that elusive “middle ground” that would allow it to eat its cake and have it too—accomplish extravagant goals with minimal effort. The fact that this goal was inherently self-contradictory never seemed to dawn on anyone. Even the great set piece—Bush II’s full-scale invasion of Iraq—was a ludicrous compromise and fraud. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld—and to make him tell the truth as well—we invaded, not with the army we needed, but with the army that it was politically feasible to deploy. Rumsfeld refused to plan for the reconstruction of Iraq, knowing that to examine the task before us would only reveal the impossibility of achieving a successful resolution. Ignorance is bliss, or at least politically necessary!
And so we jumped blindly into the abyss, and, having done so, lacked the courage to admit our own folly, to admit that we are more incompetent than indispensable. It is “amusing” to read “moderate” hawks like Slate’s Fred Kaplan as they reveal the incoherence and inherent infeasibility of our policies even as they seek to defend them:
One complicating factor is that the United States government has never figured out what its interests in Syria are. The Obama administration pursued a few interests, some of them contradictory: Defeat ISIS, contain Iran, bolster Iraq, maintain the alliance with Turkey, protect the Kurds, and help negotiate a political settlement that involves the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Accomplishing one of two of those goals was extremely difficult; tackling them all, probably impossible.
Well, yes, that’s probably true, particularly since actual American involvement fell short of even the “very limited, very targeted, short-term effort” originally described—rather vaguely, to be sure—by then Secretary of State John Kerry. “That is exactly what we are talking about doing, unbelievably small, limited kind of effort,” the secretary explained, the incoherence of his speech reproducing with remarkable accuracy the incoherence of his thought, and, later, the incoherence of our policy.
For more than two full administrations the United States has been in a state of crisis because no one would say that the emperor has no clothes. And it has taken Donald Trump, Mr. Nudity himself, to do it.
Afterwords
At the same time, of course, the “real” Donald Trump is shutting down, and half wrecking, the federal government because he can’t admit that he was lying when he said he was going to build a big, beautiful wall, the one that will solve all our problems. And so the beat goes on.
Fairly long, fairly coherent diatribe on the lack of a meaningful foreign policy debate by me here, and more here. Over at the American Conservative, Jon Basil Utley reminisces about "How the Gulf War Gave Us the Antiwar Right", linking to a number of articles exposing the lies George I told to get us into Iraq the first time around, particularly this one.
1. “Mountebank” being a polite term meaning “complete and unrelenting asshole”.
