Category: War

RINGING IN THE NEW YEAR WITH WORLD WAR THREE

If you squint your eyes just right, and try very hard to look beyond and beneath the wreckage of our national politics, it’s possible to find signs of hope, of a new dawn ready to rise out of the ashes of our Trumpian despair. Really. Well, sort of. Anyway, I wanted my first blog post of 2020 to focus on the hopeful, on a vision of transcendence and progressive change. I had 16 pages of notes and was all set to make the case for optimism.  Then our president ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general, and the deafening rat-a-tat-tat of the war drums quickly drowned out all aspirations of hope and change.   

Happy New Year, same as the old year. Only worse. And we thought 2019 got off to a bad start when Trump shut most of the government down.  We should be so lucky to have a shutdown right now. It might have prevented Friday’s drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s top security and intelligence commander.  

Instead, we woke up on the third day of this new year to a cascade of depressing news. Yes, Suleimani orchestrated the deaths of hundreds or thousands (the Prevaricator in Chief says millions) of American and Iraqi troops and citizens. He was also revered as almost a cult figure by Iran’s leaders and allies.  The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised “forceful revenge”.  

As a result, our country went into to full-scale war prep.  The State Department warned all U.S. citizens to leave Iraq immediately.  Thousands of American troops are on their way to the Middle East. U.S. businesses and government agencies were told to prepare for Iranian cyber attacks. “World War III” trended on Twitter.  The Selective Service’s website crashed after being inundated by young men worrying about getting drafted into battle.

Trump, meanwhile, took a hero’s bow at a Miami campaign rally, boasting about Suleimani’s execution-by-drone. “He was planning a very major attack,” said the president, “and we got him!” The crowd roared, and Trump took it to the next level with a single declarative sentence: “God is on our side.”  

If all this had gone down at any other time in our history, the prudent and rational course for us would have been to take a deep breath and engage in watchful waiting as events unfolded.  As unseemly as an assassination of another country’s leader might appear, we would also be mindful of how much we don’t know about the underlying facts of the kill order. The president, after all, is surrounded by military and intelligence experts who carefully weigh all available facts before advising the commander in chief.  If they all thought killing one high ranking Iranian leader would save many American lives, that would warrant a green light in many moral paradigms.  

Sadly, this is not any other time in history. This is now.  This is Donald J. Trump.  His narrative about killing the bad guy in order to save American lives can only be viewed through the lens of a pathological liar, one who, according to the Washington Post’s fact checker, made 15,413 false or misleading statements during his first 1,055 days in office.  He has also demonstrated a propensity to ignore the advice of the experts who surround him, bragging about how, due to the power of his instinct, he knows more than any general.  

Then comes Trump’s single most important behavioral characteristic, at least in terms of predicting the choice he will make in any given situation. He will, without fail, follow the impulse to do whatever he thinks at the time will make him look the strongest and the winningest to his adoring MAGA base.  As a piece of leverage, last year’s government shutdown was a dismal failure for the administration. Trump’s base, however, showered him with adoration for messing up a government they disdain in order to build a wall to keep brown people from “invading” America.  The same please-the-base decision making was responsible for putting children in cages, the transgender military ban and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Treaty, to name but a few. 

The dynamic also explains why Trump rejected the advice of military experts last fall and announced a sudden withdrawal of troops from Syria, leaving our Kurdish allies to fend for themselves.  The president hit the campaign rally circuit in October with boasts of “No more endless wars. I’m bringing them all home.” He basked in the dopamine of cheering crowd approval. 

Not even three months later, the Trump administration is sending thousands of troops into the middle east, gearing up for an Iranian retaliatory strike in response to Suleimani’s killing. Most authorities on the middle east say we are closer to a full-blown war in that region than at any time in the past several decades.  Some say we are already at war, that the drone strike on Suleimani was an act of war.  

How is it that the same president who took bows before a cheering crowd for ending wars is now getting the same reaction for starting one?  Chalk it up to the magic of a freeze frame presidency.  This guy doesn’t do strategy, only tactics in the moment. And whatever that moment portends is all that counts.  Shortly after Suleimani was killed, Trump triumphantly announced that he had “ended a war”, even while thousands of American troops were on their way to the middle east in preparation for Iran’s retaliatory strike. In Trump Time, that neither counted nor mattered.

What makes this horrendous situation even worse is the current political atmosphere in which congressional Republicans have abandoned all moral calculus in order to march in lockstep with a president they know is, at best, unhinged, out of fear that Trump will disparage them on Twitter. These GOP leaders have spent the past few months insisting that there is nothing wrong with a president asking foreign countries to interfere in our elections, a revolting abandonment of long-held norms and values. Add to that now, the party’s acquiescence with the assassination of another country’s leader. 

This rapid and deep abdication of the moral underpinnings of our democracy will one day be laid bare in our history books.  The days we are now struggling through will be correctly portrayed as a major stain on what has been known as the “American Experiment”.  The only control we have over the content of those pages will be the length of that stain, and how we go about removing it and taking our country back.

ONE TOKE OVER THE RED LINE, SWEET SYRIA

If the first casualty of war is truth, surely the second must be moral clarity. In the case of Syria’s civil war, both Presidents Obama and Trump, men with wildly disparate world views, drew the same “red line” of morality. Here’s their shared ethical standard: Killing and maiming thousands of noncombatant men, women and children with guns, bombs and explosives is acceptable, but if chemical weapons are used to accomplish the same results, there will be hell to pay.

Three times now in recent years, we’ve gone through the to-bomb-or-not-to-bomb drama of responding to Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad’s decision to leap over that red line. The first was in 2013 when Obama pushed for a missile attack to punish Assad for using chemical weapons. Congress, however, declined to authorize the bombing. There were similar gas attacks in 2017 and earlier this month. On both occasions, Trump sent the bombs dropping on Syrian military facilities as a way of denouncing the regime’s “evil and despicable” use of chemical warfare. Both actions won him more bipartisan praise than anything he has done in office.

Most of the news coverage these past few days has focused on the narrow issue of whether Trump’s punitive air attacks were effective. The general consensus of military leaders is that Saturday’s bombing might have put a dent in Assad’s chemical arsenal, but is unlikely to hold the regime back from making and using new ones. Scant attention has been given to the broader matter of whether we are drawing the red line in the right place. In other words, do we really want a moral imperative that limits evil to one category of weapons? Is it a greater wrong to kill civilians with gas than it is to shoot or bomb them to death?

What started as anti-government protests seven years ago, quickly evolved into full scale civil war in Syria. There is no end in sight. More than a half million people have died, and the vast majority of them were civilians, including tens of thousands of young children. Yet, it’s only the chemical attacks that show up on Trump’s outrage meter or Twitter feed. In the most recent incident, 70 civilians died from Assad’s use of what is believed to have been sarin, a chemical nerve agent that can cause agonizing death in minutes.

Here’s what Trump said in justifying the retaliatory bombing: “The evil and the despicable attack left mothers and fathers, infants and children thrashing in pain and gasping for air. These are not the actions of a man. They are the crimes of a monster instead.” In calling Assad a monster, Trump was uncharacteristically without hyperbolae. Yet, the president’s moral offense was aimed at the specific method of the dictator’s mass murder, not the broader act of having spent seven years killing his own people.

There is, of course, a case to be made that chemical weapons are more evil than their conventional counterparts. As Obama noted in 2013, the weaponization of poisonous gases conjures up dark moments of thousands of American GIs dying from mustard gas in World War I and, of course, the Nazis’ use of gas in the Holocaust during World War II. The civilized countries of the world have agreed not to use chemical weapons. In arguing for a punitive strike after Assad’s 2013 chemical attack, Obama said such action would reinforce the taboo of chemical warfare.

Yet, in the context of this ongoing Syrian massacre, limiting our moral outrage to the relatively small number of deaths caused by chemical weapons is a de facto acceptance of the other 500,000 murders at the hands of weapons just as lethal and painful as gas. NPR reported that the regime has used crude but deadly barrel bombs almost exclusively on civilians. An international team of scientists found that 97 percent of the deaths from these devices have been noncombatants, mostly women and children. Another report found that at least 14,000 children have been killed in Syria by snipers, machine guns, missiles, grenades, roadside bombs and aerial bombs. Another 1,000 children have been executed and more than 100 have been tortured and then executed. None of those atrocities, however, are included in our government’s outrage and punitive air strike over Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

Leaving the battlefield for a moment, let’s apply the same moral relativism to a pair of terrorist attacks. In 1995, a religious cult used sarin to kill 12 people on the Tokyo subway. In 2005, terrorists set off bombs in the London subway, killing 52 and injuring more than 700. Are we really prepared to view the latter as more morally acceptable than the former? Steve Johnson, an academic expert on chemical weapons, says he “can understand why (chemical warfare) feels emotive to us – it is insidious, there is no shelter, it is particularly effective on the young, elderly, and frail, and can be a violent and excruciating death. When one breaks it down ethically, though, it seems impossible to say that it is more acceptable to kill 100 people with explosives than with nerve agent.”

This is much more than a mere intellectual exercise in moral philosophy. It’s about adopting a coherent and meaningful standard with respect to regimes that murder their own people. Trump’s Tweetstorm about the evil of killing children with chemical weapons, followed by tough talk and a quick act of cruise missile theater, does absolutely nothing to address the daily atrocities faced by the Syrian people. As George Washington University professor Stephen Briddle put it, “That’s not a Syria strategy. It’s a psychodrama.”

Although Trump boasted that his response to Assad’s chemical weaponry reflected his “concern for humanity,” that concern is no larger than a pin prick. By the end of Obama’s presidency, the U.S. welcomed 15,479 refugees from Syria into the country. These were men, women and children, literally fleeing for their lives. Under Trump’s travel ban, however, the door slammed shut for Syrian refugees. So much for humanity. A moral code that rejects chemical weapons but gives a dictator a pass at killing by any other means – and offers no safe shelter to his victims – is anything but moral.