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    How Foreign Policy People Think, Part III

    By Michael Maiello on Thu, 06/19/2014 - 9:34pm | Politics

    Here is a New America Foundation blog that gathers various perspectives on how the U.S. should deal with ISIS.  There are outright calls for the use of force and absolutely no one explicitly takes the position that the U.S. could make matters worse by intervening militarily in either Iraq or Syria.  But, aside from the uniformity of voice in a supposedly diverse round-up, only one participant considers the idea that U.S. military involvement could end involve U.S. sacrifices.

    Tom Sanderson, Co-Director of the Transnational Threats Project says:

    “Remaining on the sidelines as Syria and Iraq descend into civil war may have prevented flag-draped coffins from arriving on America’s shores, but it leaves the United States with few options for a now an unavoidable task: halting and reversing the destructive actions and impact of ISIS, which if left unchecked could launch a much wider regional battle.”

    That's kind of a callous take on the benefits of American soldiers not dying, isn't it?

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    Comments

    There are not enough US flags, coffins or bodies to fill them to bring peace to the Middle East.


    by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 06/20/2014 - 3:09am

    At this point I am leaning in favor of what M.S. at The Economist's Democracy in America blog proposes:

    I don't think there is anything wrong with the Obama administration's strategy of demanding an inclusive government in exchange for American military intervention. If Iraq does not form a non-sectarian, inclusive government, there is no particular reason why America should aid it. There is no reason for America to deploy deadly force to defend an ethnically repressive Iranian ally from security threats it has itself created. Either Iraqi Shiites will try to reconcile with the Sunni minority, in which case it may make sense to offer them help against ISIS's fanatics, or they won't, in which case America can stay out of a mess it helped create but has little hope of influencing for the better.
     
    Meanwhile, it's time for us to lie on the couch and think about this pattern we keep getting ourselves into. Over and over in the wars America conducts we attempt to create political entities that meet our ideological criteria, but have no natural constituency in the countries themselves. Maliki, Karzai, Diem: we become infuriated at the leaders we install when they fail to carry out our vision of progress. We are the world's biggest Hegelians, analysing every conflict as a clash between two opposing principles that need to be resolved, and then trying to create that synthesis. We have the same longing in domestic politics, for that matter. If only some great moderate could bridge the gap between the two parties, and bring us all together towards the reasonable consensus! We cannot seem to understand that if there were a constituency for that middle position, someone would be occupying that space; if there is no one in that space, it is because the middle position has no constituency. We keep trying to create a third force that does not exist. We need to stop it. The forces on the ground are the forces on the ground. If we support one side, we should back that side, and if not, not. If the two sides want peace, we can help them reach peace. If they want to fight, they will.
    Before that he had an interesting recap of how we got involved in Vietnam.
     

    by EmmaZahn on Fri, 06/20/2014 - 10:53am

    Well, to paraphrase D.H. Rumsfeld: "You don't go into a conflict with the forces on the ground you want, you go into the conflict with the forces on the ground that are there." Now if he had only listened to his own words of wisdom.


    by Elusive Trope on Fri, 06/20/2014 - 11:22am