By Chris Hedges/Truthdig/April 7, 2017
Victims of this week’s chemical weapons attack in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria. (Alaa Alyousef / AP)
War opens a Pandora’s box of evils that once unleashed are beyond anyone’s control. The invasion of Afghanistanset out to defeat al-Qaida, and nearly 16 years later, we are embroiled in a losing fight with the Taliban. We believed we could invade Iraq and create a Western-style democracy and weaken Iran’s power in the region. The fragmentation of Iraq among warring factions has left Iran the dominant Muslim nation in the Middle East and Iraq destroyed as a unified nation. We set out to topple President Bashar Assad in Syria but then began to bomb the Islamic insurgents trying to overthrow him. We spread the “war on terror” to Yemen, Libya and Syria in a desperate effort to crush regional resistance. Instead, we created new failed states and lawless enclaves where vacuums were filled by the jihadist forces we sought to defeat. We have wasted a staggering $4.79 trillion on death, destruction and folly as our nation is increasingly impoverished and climate change threatens us with extinction. The arms manufacturers, who have a vested interest in perpetuating these debacles, will work to make a few trillion more before this act of collective imperial suicide comes to a humiliating end.
In war, when you attack one force you implicitly aid another. And the forces we assist by striking the Assad regime are the forces we ironically are determined to eradicate—Nusra Front, al-Qaida and other Islamic radical groups. These are the same Islamic forces we, along with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Kuwait, largely created, armed and funded at the inception of the civil war in Syria. They are the forces that have responded to the chaos caused by our misguided military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. They are the forces that execute Western captives, slaughter religious minorities, carry out terrorism in Europe and the United States and collect billions of dollars from smuggling refugees into Europe. They are our sometime enemies and our sometime allies.
READ: Trump Intervenes in the Civil War in Syria
The jihadists’ savagery mirrors our own. The jihadists respond to our airstrikes and aerial drone attacks by using suicide vests and improvised explosive devices. They respond to our black sites and prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo with basement cells that torture kidnapped captives. They respond to the ideology of Western secularism with an Islamic state. They respond to violence with violence.
The Islamic militants in Syria, after Russia intervened against them in September 2015, were losing territory, financial revenue and support in the six-year war. And they were the ones who rejoiced this week when the United States fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syria’s Shayrat airfield, reportedly the launching site for a chemical weapons attack that killed 86 people, including at least 30 children, on Tuesday in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun. The Syrian government says six people died in the U.S. missile attack.
The selective moral outrage of the United States, among both Democrats and Republicans, over the alleged chemical attack—I know from two decades of covering war that the truth is very murky and easily manipulated in wartime—ignores America’s primary responsibility for the wholesale carnage that has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions as refugees, including 4 million from Iraq and 5 million from Syria. It ignores the 12,197 bombs we dropped on Syria last year. It ignores our role in creating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and our role in arming and funding these jihadists in Syria. We have made sure that the Syrians—400,000 of whom have died and half of whom have been forced from their homes during the war—have many options when it comes to dying.
Syria had, and may still have, chemical weapons. It appeared to use them in 2013 in the Damascus suburb Ghouta, leaving anywhere from 281 to 1,729 dead. But the Syrians, in an international accord brokered by then-Secretary of State John Kerry with the Russian government, agreed to turn over their chemical stockpiles to the Russians following the attack. And one has to ask why Syria, which is finally winning the war, would use chemical agents now and risk U.S. retaliation. Syria says the deadly nerve agent sarin and possibly chlorine gas were released when a rebel depot holding the chemicals was hit in an airstrike.
WATCH Does U.S. Attack Against Syria Violate International Law?
Why the moral outrage now among Americans? Why have we stood by as Syrians died daily from barrel bombs, bullets, famine, disease and drowning off the shores of Greece? Why have we been mute as schools, apartment blocks, mosques and hospitals have been bombed into rubble? Where is the outrage about the deaths of the thousands of other children, including those we killed recently in Mosul when a March 17 coalition airstrike took the lives of as many as 200 civilians? Why are we not enraged by the Trump administration’s flagrant violation of domestic law by carrying out an act of war without approval from Congress or the United Nations? Why do we lament these deaths yet bar Syrian war refugees from entering the United States? Is American foreign policy to be dictated by the fickle emotions of Donald Trump, whose perception of reality appears to be obtained exclusively from a television screen?
The radical Islamists can always count on the West to intervene and resurrect them. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian radical, founded al-Tawhid al-Jihad in Iraq with about 100 former fighters from al-Qaidi in Afghanistan. His goal was a sectarian conflict with the Shiites. A unified Shiite and Sunni state in Iraq was an anathema to the Sunni jihadists. Zarqawi’s group became al-Qaida in Iraq in 2004. It declared its loyalty to Osama bin Laden, who had initially opposed Zarqawi’s call for a war with Shiites. Zarqawi was killed in 2006.
By 2010 al-Qaida in Iraq was a spent force. Then came the civil war in Syria. The United States, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey pumped weapons, money and resources to various rebel factions in Syria to overthrow the Syrian regime. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who took over the leadership of Zarqawi’s organization, changed the name of the group to the Islamic State of Iraq. He soon decamped to Syria. His group, like all jihadist organizations in Syria, was showered with weapons and resources. Baghdadi devoted his energy to attacking other jihadist and rebel groups. He gradually took control of an area the size of Texas in Syria and Iraq. Al-Nusra, the al-Qaida-affiliated group in Syria, merged with the Islamic State of Iraq. The new group became the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. It attracted an estimated 20,000 foreign fighters—some 4,000 of whom held European passports. The group was estimated by The Wall Street Journal to earn $2 million a day in oil exports alone. As a trafficker of humans, it has made billions from the desperate refugees attempting to flee to Europe. It has executed religious minority members or forced them out of its territory. The newly formed self-described caliphate has also terrorized the Sunnis in the name of religious purity, as Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton point out in the AlterNet article “Is Trump Rescuing Al-Qaeda’s ‘Heartland’ in Syria?”
The rise of Islamic State has instilled pride and self-empowerment for many Sunnis, humiliated by the U.S. occupation. It has exposed the weak and corrupt ruling elites who have sold themselves to Washington. It is proof that the Western military forces are not invincible. These groups will suffer reverses, but they will not go away.
There is no clean or easy way to exit from the morass we created in the region. None of the insurgents in the region will willingly lay down their weapons until the U.S. occupation of the Middle East ends. The wars we started are complicated. There is a myriad of proxy wars being fought beneath the surface, including our war with Russia, Turkey’s war with the Kurds, and Saudi Arabia’s war with Iran. The civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen are the human fodder. This slaughter has already lasted nearly 16 years. It will not cease until the United States is exhausted and withdraws its forces from the region. And before that happens, many, many more innocents will die. So save your tears. We are morally no different from the jihadists or the Syrians we fight. They reflect back to us our own repugnant visage. If we wanted this to stop, we could make it happen.
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Arlen Grossman, as I said, both of the 2 main Parties are war parties. They just change their tunes regardless of which Party is in power. Even if all of the wars following World War 2 were not legitimate, we should have indicted all members from that time to the present. The argument that a war is illegal because one objects to it, not because the Congress authorized it, is a bad argument. Some wars are unjustified as I said, the Civil War being one of them. Despite this detail, if it was legally declared, the argument against its legality would have been moot by its very nature. We could say that the war on drugs is illegal, however, as long as it is being funded by Congress, that argument would not be valid.
I’m not sure of the Civil War being unjustified, Jeffrey. If we didn’t go to war, slavery would have continued in the South.
Arlen Grossman, with the invention of the cotton gin, as well as some other things, that would have made slavery obsolete. Yes, the war and slavery should never have happened. However, it was a gross abuse of power for Abraham Lincoln to claim that no state would be permitted to secede from the United States. Since the states created the federal government, not the other way around, it is absurd that one man acted as if he had sole authority to dictate whether or not states could secede from the union and be their own nation.
Jeffrey, you ignored the fact that slavery would have continued were it not for the war. The part about the cotton gin is speculative. What would you have said to the slaves? Hang in there for a few more years (or decades) until the plantation owners changed their mind?
Arlen Grossman, you misunderstand me. I would have fought against slavery. However, Abraham Lincoln did it at the expense of the U.S. Constitution. He also violated the rights of the individual states.
My understanding is that Saddam kept a lid on a lot of extremist groups, so maybe ISIS wouldn’t exist but for our overthrow of the government.
Arlen Grossman, unless Saddam Hussein had a bona fide death wish (which we would have granted if he attacked us directly,) I seriously doubt that he would have attacked us directly. My thinking is that the war in Iraq was unwarranted.
So do I.
Arlen Grossman, I am opposed to war in general. However, if we reach a point where it is inevitable, I prefer to be the victor as long as there is minimal loss of life on both sides.
I believe in war only as self-defense, not pre-emption. “The world knows that America will never start a war. This generation of Americans has had enough of war and hate… we want to build a world of peace where the weak are secure and the strong are just.” John F. Kennedy
Arlen Grossman, when avoidable, war is unnecessary. If it becomes non-optional, the best thing to do is win it as long as minimal loss of life occurs.
That’s because Obama is a politician and therefore calculating. When the wind blew the other direction he changed his mind. I never could understand how letting gays marry is a bad thing?
Can you enlighten me?
Arlen Grossman, letting gays and lesbians marry is not a bad thing. These people who claim that marriage is for God to define are hardcore religious fundamentalist types who want to mandate their beliefs by force of law, particularly on people who do not share their same beliefs. At the very least, same-sex marriage should have some degree of support from groups that are pro-life.
Again, we are on the same page on this issue.
Arlen Grossman, I know that congress has the power to declare war. Having said that, what if Congress gave authorization to go to a certain war and members of the general public claim that the war is illegal? Are the people who claim that it is illegal being ignorant about Congress’ authority to declare war or are they just spouting off because they object to it?
The Constitution clearly states only Congress can declare war. And yet the last time that happened was WWII. Congress is shirking its duty and giving too much power to the executive branch.Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are examples of undeclared wars that have failed. And I’ve lost track of the number of countries that our troops are fighting in.
Arlen Grossman, Iraq was a fruitless endavor from my way of thinking. In your opinion, would ISIS and ISIL have come into being if Saddam Hussein was still in power in Iraq or not likely?
Arlen Grossman, as I said in another post, we should have just let the Middle East implode. What happens over there should stay over there. The only real reason for us to have been over there is because of the attack that was orchestrated by Al Qaeda.
No disagreement from me, Jeffrey.
Arlen Grossman, political bias aside, when George W. Bush was president, what did he come close to getting right on the issues in your personal opinion? On matters of national defense (excluding involvement in Iraq, which was a fruitless endavor in my opinion,) what do you think George W. Bush got right and what did he get wrong? You don’t obviously have to like the guy, however, to focus on the positive, what good, if any, did he do as President in your opinion? From a national security standpoint, I would say good in some ways, not so good in other ways.
Well, he wasn’t Donald Trump. That’s a positive. I did like the way he calmed the country down after 9/11 and promoted tolerance toward Muslims. Also, Medicare Part D. Turnabout is fair play. Can you find anything positive about Barack Obama?
Arlen Grossman, one issue that Barack Obama got right was his support of same-sex marriage. A+ there. We should not have a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage. The Dictionary already took care of that.
What we’ve done up to now have only made bad situations worse. I don’t see the benefit of the U.S. involved in every Mideast conflict. We don’t seem to be helping make peace. Perhaps we should let them work out their own problems. But of course, too many people are making to much profit for us to leave, so we’re stuck with perpetual bloodshed. What a shame.
Arlen Grossman, you and I are on the same page. We have both expressed differing opinions on things, however, I am inclined to agree with you in this regard.
I’m glad to hear that. You sound like a libertarian, Jeffrey. Am I correct?
Arlen Grossman, I am inclined to agree with the Libertarian Party on the issues. Some things they are for I am personally opposed to. Prostitution and drug use are examples. However, I believe that people should be free to do drugs or pursue sex work if they so choose. Would it be seen as a double standard in your personal opinion if someone says they oppose something personally, however, they are disinclined to advocate laws to legislate said behavior?
Sounds reasonable and sounds libertarian to me. I wish everybody else had the same attitude.
Arlen Grossman, I hope that I am not coming across as a hypocrite when I speak of things that I am opposed to personally and yet don’t have any issue with being legal for the public at large. On the grounds of personal freedom, people should be free to do whatever they want as long as they are not affecting anybody else.
I support the idea of the US pulling out of Middle East, but should that happen, I have zero hopes that it will bring peace to the ME. After all, many conflicts in or around ME don’t involve the US: Shiites vs Sunni, Turkey vs Kurds, Assad vs rebels, (and rebels against other rebels, Saudi Arabia vs Iran, al-Sisi vs Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS vs everyone, Erdogan vs democracy in Turkey, Houthis vs Yemen government, and if all else fails, Arabs vs Israel. If we move out, all of these conflicts remain unsolved and will cause decades and decades of war and bloodshed.