It's Memorial Day Weekend. We can honor our troops by bringing them home
Marc Lynch wrote an excellent
article on Yemen awhile back that I wholeheartedly agree with. We've got to stop fighting other people's battles for them, especially when they don't want our help.
No Easy Answers
There are no easy answers to the problems infesting our globe's many intractable hot spots. Yemen looks like another situation where an oppressive, decrepit regime will invite us in to do its dirty work, while we think we're fighting for freedom. They paint their enemies as "terrorists" and unleash the awesome American firepower against them.
Lynch warns against both military intervention and development assistance. The former would be a quagmire. The latter would be sucked up by greedy, corrupt officials, as it is in Afghanistan by Karzai and his gang of bandits, including the Taliban, who are profiting richly from our largesse.
Lynch posits that no realistic option offers even an outside chance of success, so we should simply manage the situation as it suits our national interests. He's talking specifically about Yemen, but it could apply equally to any hot spot.
Marc Lynch's Conclusion:
It's never as satisfying as a morally pure call to battle, but the administration shouldn't over-react or under-react.
Be patient, build intelligence and CT assets, strike against clearly AQ targets when available but only where the civilian costs will be minimal and the rewards high, search out local partners... the usual.
But the administration shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking it must "do something" to fend off political harping from the right and end up over-committing... or taking steps which ultimately make the situation worse.
Amen! And ditto for Iran
I pray we are covertly funneling millions to the Iranian opposition, but we should not send one American soldier or bomb. Our immediate objective should be to get out of Afghanistan and assiduously avoid future "big footprint" operations as the money-wasting plagues that they are.
Middle East: The World's Nuthouse
These people have been bombing, shooting and stabbing and stoning one another since time immemorial, what makes us think that we can change them? If we merely stay out of the way, they will set upon one another, fighting centuries-old feuds instead of going after us. Remember the charnel house that was the 10-year Iran-Iraq War?
Europe, Saudi Arabia and the rest of you who no longer share our values, you're on your own!
And while we're at it, we need to fold up the Western European security umbrella as well. Time for our cousins across the pond to man up and learn to live without the bossy hyperpower on their backs all the time.
Sounds isolationist, but I'm not. We just need to pick our battles wisely and partner only with those who share our values and who are willing to shoulder their share of the burden. Too often we've been suckered into petty parochial struggles where the craftiest side was able to demonize the other, wrongly rousing Uncle Sam's sense of righteousness, always with unintended consequences.
No Happy Endings
Everything can't be tied up neatly with a nice bow on top. Poverty and violence abound in most of the world (what Thomas P.M. Barnett calls
The Gap). Some societies do not cohere well because of the nature of the people, the terrain, lack of resources, whatever. These fractious conditions spawn congenitally weak governments where, as Thomas Hobbes says
"... every man is Enemy to every man... And the life of man [is], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Washington's Admonition Against Foreign Entanglements
A sadly-forgotten component of traditional conservatism is wariness towards
foreign entanglements. That doesn't mean withdraw from the world; it means don't get suckered into the internal affairs of other countries, and don't get sucked into fights between warring factions.
And this isn't a
"be nice so the bad people will start liking us" argument. Bad people will always hate us because we stand for good. We should reserve the right to unapologetically smack them at the time and place of our choosing based on our national interests.
We honor those who have fallen by not squandering what they have handed on to us, and we can honor those who now serve by deploying their talents wisely.
