Really Strange Bedfellows, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #368 | @MDWorld
June 16, 2014 Mike Gold 10 Comments
If politics makes strange bedfellows, war makes even weirder shotgun marriages.
For example, take this third Iraq War. Yes, indeed, war in Iraq is revived more frequently than Batman, and we’re dusting off our drones and building the big ships and boats, some are building monuments, others jotting down notes. Feet will beat along the street to… war!
Get this – we’ve got an ally! And I’m not talking about troops that helped us out in the first Iraq War (Bangladesh, the Netherlands, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone…). I’m talking about the mother of the axis of evil, those beardos Americans love to hate, the ones who put Ted Koppel on the map.
Let me introduce you to our newest ally in the Middle East… Iran!
This might confuse Americans. After all, yesterday Iran was the soon-to-go-nuclear axis of evil. They’re Muslims, and all of those people are out to destroy our Christian way of life. Iran really sucks, right?
Well… the fact is, there are several different types of Muslims, and the Sunni and the Shi’a have been at it since forever. Our new enemy is the ISIL, a.k.a. ISIS, a.k.a. that exceptionally well-financed off-shoot of Al Qaeda that seems to actually scare the bejeezus out of the generally-short-lived leaders of Al Qaeda.
O.K. I get it. 89% of Iranians are Shi’a. ISIL is fighting their holy war for the Sunni. The enemy of our enemy is our friend. Secretary of State John Kerry said “We’re open to discussions if there is something constructive that can be contributed by Iran… I would not rule out anything that would be constructive in providing real stability, a respect for the constitution, a respect for the election process and a respect for the ability of the Iraqi people to form a government that represents all the interests of Iraq… We are open to any constructive process here that would minimize the violence.”
Yep. Now Iran is going to respect the Iraqi constitution, the election process, and the Iraqi people’s right to self-determination. To quote Sarah Palin, something I don’t often do, “you betcha.”
Of course I’m impressed by Kerry’s belief that war is a constructive process that would minimize violence. And Heinz Ketchup will cure cancer and make you skinny.
It’s as if we’ve all moved into Alice’s condo in Wonderland.
That bit about ships and boats was Bob Dylan’s The Mighty Quinn; the feet beating the street bit was from The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. I only quote from the classics…
Yes, this piece is going up late, and this time it’s Gold’s fault. As it turns out, last night the Master of the Universe showed up in Connecticut for dinner. And he is the Master of the Universe!
Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.comabove for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.
Rene
June 17, 2014 - 4:38 am
War (and international politics) is just an amoral socio-political chess game. The Bush administration tried to champion the fiction that war is about good vs. evil, no doubt trying to replace “communist” with “muslim” in all the Cold War textbooks of the Good Conservative.
Clean-cut moral wars, like WWII, are the exception.
Rick Oliver
June 17, 2014 - 7:56 am
Iraq is headed for footnote status in the history books. It will not survive intact. The dark truth about the mideast that no one wants to acknowledge is that for the past 60 years, the only form of “stability” in that region came in the form of dictators. As repulsive as he was, Saddam was probably the last thing resembling a secular government that Iraq will ever have.
On a related note, I heard on NPR this morning that ISIS was raising has been raising cash by selling oil to the Assad regime — you know, the guy they are fighting against in Syria.
Rene
June 17, 2014 - 8:18 am
Yeah, I’ve read an article just this morning with the same conclusion as Rick’s. That Muslim countries with vicious internal divisions aren’t ready for democracy just yet, and that as horrible as dictators are, they at least “freeze” the in-fighting.
The post-dictatorship chaos results in a much larger death toll.
Mike Gold
June 17, 2014 - 10:01 am
According to reports, ISIL is getting the reception for the Iraqis that Cheney et al said we’d get when we last invaded the country. Yeah. Just wait until their womenfolk are swaddled in black and they start shooting teenagers for wet dreams.
Iraq is three separate nations camouflaged as an oil field.
R. Maheras
June 17, 2014 - 10:58 am
Iran doesn’t give a rat’s behind about our interests, and will dump us as soon as it’s convenient to do so. They just want free stuff and personnel to help put the Sunnis in check, since Sunnis outnumber Shiites about 10 to one. The reason the Sunnis hate the Shiites is because they don’t even consider them to be real Muslims. The Sunnis also don’t consider the relatively small Omani Islamic sect of the Ibadis to be Muslim either — which is ironic, I guess, since it PRE-DATES the Sunni sect! I’ll bet the real reason the Sunnis hate the Ibadis is because they are tolerant of “non-believers,” while the most radical Sunnis simply want to kill ’em all.
Douglass Abramson
June 17, 2014 - 8:07 pm
Russ,
Good or bad, getting people who don’t like us to work with us on matters of mutual interest pretty much is US foreign policy post WWII. ISIS, at the moment, is a bigger threat than Iran is. There’s also the minuscule chance that a successful corroboration on this could boost the political power of the moderate and the pro-West political blocks. Not likely, but the last time there was a thaw in the relations between our two countries, somebody called them a member in the “axis of evil”. The Ayatollah’s then forced out the slightly moderate government that had been making overtures to the US and replaced the president with the nut case with the bad hair cut. They may just want some shiny new toys that go boom; and it wouldn’t be the first time Washington has given them big boy toys in exchange for their cooperation on a security matter.
Mindy Newell
June 18, 2014 - 5:05 am
Mike, all I keep thinking about is how George-Peorgie W. Bush and cronies–or make that Dick Cheny and his “Project for A New American Century” cronies–destroyed the balance of power in the Middle East and thus the world.
Saddam Hussein may have been a despostic, tyrannical bastard, but, to my mind, (and to others more studied in Middle Eastern politics and history), he was the “strongman” needed to control that part of the world.
Mindy Newell
June 18, 2014 - 5:07 am
@ Rick: Yeah, I heard that same report.
And I agree with you.
Oh, and btw, if I really want to get historical, this whole business started at the end of WW I when Churchill and the rest of the winning side broke up the Ottoman Empire.
Basil Reid
June 18, 2014 - 5:57 am
So, let me get this straight. ISIS is in bed with Assad. Iran is Assad’s ally. ISIS has overrun Iraq. Iran is sending Al Quds Special Forces Units to help Iraq defeat ISIS and we are going to get in bed with Iran to help al Maliki, who rejected our Status of Forces Agreement so as to appease Iran. Hmm, how the hell could any of this go wrong?
R. Maheras
June 18, 2014 - 6:34 am
Douglass — Iran is dangerous under its current leadership, and we don’t have to make a deal with the devil to handle the problem. We could easily mute the ISIS threat if we had a firm, coherent foreign policy stance for the region. But we obviously don’t — which is why ISIS became a threat in the first place.
This administration is clueless about Southwest Asia, and they are afraid to do anything that will “upset” the various factions in the region. They are vacillating and slow-leaking their response, just as they’ve done with every other crisis in the region.
They look weak, and no one in the region has any respect for them — including Iran. So becoming pals with a dangerous bully won’t solve anything.
Douglass Abramson
June 18, 2014 - 9:29 am
Who the hell said anything about “pals”? The American public will not accept sending ground troops back into Iraq. Its questionable whether they’ll accept the use of our air power, manned and unmanned, to attack ISIS forces. (Personally, I’m in favor of carpet bombing the bastards.) The problem isn’t Washington’s foreign policy. The problem is an incompetent and corrupt central government in Baghdad. A government that neither the Bush or Obama administrations picked. We need somebody in the region to help. Our Saudi “allies” are less trustworthy than Iran, the UAE and Jordan’s armed forces are too small, Turkey won’t get involved because that might complicate their Kurdish problem, anyone in Europe or Asia with the capability to help don’t care about what happens in Iraq as long as their oil supply doesn’t dry up and Lord help us if Israel decides to “help”. The current crisis is the end game to almost one hundred years of Western meddling in the region; first England and France after World War I and then the US after WWII.Right up to the Status of Forces agreement that we agreed to in 2008. If we don’t work with Iran, while keeping an eye out for any metaphorical shivs they might try to stab us with, what do we do? Allow a group that scares the crap out of Al Qaeda to take over? Attempting to find common ground here with Iran seems like the least bad choice.
Rick Oliver
June 18, 2014 - 11:22 am
We have very limited effective options. We could certainly do something futile so that we don’t “look weak”, but it would be largely window dressing, unless we want to invade and occupy large parts of the mideast for the next century. The whole clusterfuck did, indeed, start with the western powers drawing artificial borders at the end of WWWI. Further western meddling at the end of WWII didn’t help, and then there was that pesky oil thing that suddenly made it all relevant to us. So we set up and/or supported a bunch of dictators to ride herd on the whole mess and keep all the disparate factions in line. That all started to fall apart with the fall of the Shah in Iran. The ouster of Saddam accelerated the process. We can’t run a double-blind study, but I strongly suspect that the “Arab spring” would still be somewhere off in the future if not for our brilliant success in Iraq.
Getting in bed with Iran is probably no more dangerous than getting in bed with the Soviet Union during WWII and getting in bed with the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the soviet occupation. There are certainly some lessons to be learned from those experiences. The former gave us the rise of the Soviet Union to world power status; the latter gave us the Taliban and Al Queda. But the alternatives probably sucked more.
R. Maheras
June 18, 2014 - 12:09 pm
This whole thing is a Sunni verses Shiite thing that’s been going on for 1,000 years, and the Sunnis outnumber the Shiites about 10 to one. As a result, there are only four countries in Southwest Asia and Africa that have Shiite majorities: Iran, Iraq, Bahrain and Azerbaijan.
The rest of the Muslim world is predominantly or overwhelmingly Sunni. So we’re going to throw our weight behind an alliance with a Shiite Iran to allegedly fix this mess of our own making — alienating the rest of the Muslim world, including many of our long-time allies?
Oh, yeah. That’s a great plan.
Pretty soon EVERY country in the region will be inviting in the Sunni al Qaeda and/or ISIS groups.
God, we are so dumb when it comes to foreign policy.
Mindy Newell
June 18, 2014 - 5:35 pm
And btw, Dick Cheney had the FUCKING NERVE to blame Obama for this!!!!!
We need to make up a new word to describe the unbelievable CHUTZPAH of the man!
Umm…
Chentzpah?
Mindy
R. Maheras
June 19, 2014 - 5:52 am
Yeah, Cheney should be the last guy pointing fingers, since the Bush administration’s handling of the whole Iraq war — especially early on, was fraught with screw-ups.
That said, this current disaster is almost entirely the fault of the Obama administration’s policies (or lack thereof). It never should have happened.
Rick Oliver
June 19, 2014 - 9:37 am
“That said, this current disaster is almost entirely the fault of the Obama administration’s policies (or lack thereof). It never should have happened.”
Well, that’s where we disagree, Russ. Without a substantial and long term military presence in the country we destroyed, I think the current disaster was inevitable, and Bush signed the agreement to withdraw all U.S. forces by the end of 2011, which was what the Iraqis demanded.
R. Maheras
June 19, 2014 - 1:00 pm
Rick — I don’t care what Bush did. Agreeing to withdraw all US forces before the country had a proven stable government and viable army was stupid — just like it was stupid to disband the army in the first place. Obama was supposed to be so much smarter than Bush, remember?
If we had left South Korea circa 1960, it would have collapsed like a house of cards. And we STILL have 40,000 troops there 64 years later — even though they’ve been stable for the past 20 years or so. Why? Because there’s a militaristic neighbor right next door.
Iraq has Iran next door, and it was obviously not at all stable.
The fact is, we should have asserted ourselves about keeping a significant presence — especially after investing so much blood and capital. Shame on us for listening to politicians, not true leaders.
Rick Oliver
June 19, 2014 - 2:08 pm
Russ:
So…your position is that Obama should have disregarded the official agreement that the former president made with the new government of Iraq, and he should have forced Iraq to accept the continued presence of U.S. troops for the indefinite future regardless of the explicit objections of both the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people?
What could possibly go wrong?
I’m sure that would have worked out well — and after all, we have a plenty of precedents for going back on our word in our dealings with our own native population.
R. Maheras
June 20, 2014 - 10:48 am
Rick — Yes. For the simple reason that bailing out of Iraq too early was not in our best national security interests for a number of damn good reasons — several which are manifesting themselves as we speak.
Rick Oliver
June 20, 2014 - 12:04 pm
We can’t run a double-blind study and try it both ways, but I suspect that the negative repercussions of staying in Iraq after we promised to leave and against the wishes of the government that we established there would have been far greater than the current morass, and we would have had to keep a significant presence there for a very long time and also extend our occupation to larger areas of the region “in our best national security interests.”
R. Maheras
June 23, 2014 - 7:43 am
There are rarely ever easy choices when it comes to national security, and worrying about hurt feelings or pissing other people off is not a good reason to put your own interests, and country, at great risk. This administration has erred yet again on the side of “please like me and be my friend.”
Rene
June 24, 2014 - 8:25 am
Russ – That is the stereotype of the liberal politician, but it sort of falls apart when Obama sends killer drones and spies on everybody (and gets caught spying).
I don’t know if a Republican President would have done any differently in Iraq. There would be a lot more posturing and John Wayne speeches with Mitt Romney, probably, but I think even the GOP knows that the age of large-scale overseas American intervention is over. I think that is why they look at Putin with such melancholic admiration.
Iraq was never like Post-War Europe or South Korea. It was Vietnam all over again.