How the war party lost the Middle East

Patrick J. Buchanan

The faction in the US administration, which in alliance with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Britain, France and the illegal Zionist regime, had tried to destabilize Syria and Iraq through terrorists of all hue and color, in a bid to convert the entire region from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea into a Takfiristan, has now clearly been defeated.

Patrick J. Buchanan, the author of “The Unnecessary War” and “How Britain Lost Its Empire”, has written an interesting analysis in this regard for the Antiwar website, titled: “How the War Party Lost the Middle East”.

"Assad must go, Obama says."

So read the headline in The Washington Post, dated Aug. 18, 2011. The story quoted US President Barack Obama directly: “The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way.”

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron signed on to the Obama ultimatum, demanding: Assad must go!

Seven years later and 500,000 Syrians dead – majority of them killed by US-Saudi backed terrorists – it is Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron who are gone. President Assad still rules in Damascus, and the 2,000 Americans in Syria are coming home. Soon, says President Donald Trump.

But we cannot "leave now," insists Senator Lindsey Graham, or "the Kurds are going to get slaughtered."

Question: Who plunged the Americans into the Syrian crisis, and so managed our intervention that were we to go home after seven years our enemies will be victorious and our allies will "get slaughtered"?

Seventeen years ago, the US invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban for granting sanctuary to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.

US diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad – an ethnic Pashto Afghan staunchly loyal to Washington – is today negotiating for peace talks with that same Taliban. Yet, according to former CIA director Mike Morell, writing in The Washington Post last Monday, the "remnants of al-Qaeda work closely" with today’s Taliban.

It would appear that 17 years of fighting in Afghanistan has left the US with these alternatives: Stay there, and fight a forever war to keep the Taliban out of Kabul, or withdraw and let the Taliban overrun the place.

Who got the Americans into this debacle?

After Trump stealthily flew without invitation into Iraq over Christmas but was refused a meeting with its president and prime minister, the Iraqi Parliament, calling this a "US disregard for other nations’ sovereignty" and a national insult, began debating whether to expel the 5,000 US troops still in their country.

In 2003 George W. Bush had launched Operation Iraq Freedom to strip Saddam of WMD he did not have and to convert Iraq into a western bastion in the Arab and Islamic world.

Fifteen years later, Iraqis are debating the expulsion of Americans.

Muqtada as-Sadr, the political-religious leader who over a decade ago was wanted dead or alive by the Americans for launching a deadly fight against US soldiers, is leading the charge through the legislature and the legal process to have the American soldiers booted out. He heads the party with the largest number of members in the parliament.

Consider Yemen. For three years, the US has supported with planes, precision-guided munitions, air-to-air refueling and targeting information, a Saudi war on the popular Ansarallah Movement that degenerated into one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century.

Belatedly, Congress is moving to cut off US support for this war. Its architect, Saudi Heir Apparent Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) – the blue-eyed boy of Trump and his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner – has been condemned by Congress for complicity in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. And the US is seeking a truce in the fighting.

Who got the US into this war? And what have years of killing Yemenis, in which we have been collaborators, done to make Americans safer?

Consider Libya. In 2011, the US attacked the forces of Mo’ammar Qadhafi and helped to effect his ouster, which led to his murder.

Told of news reports of Qadhafi’s death, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked, "We came, we saw, he died."

The Libyan conflict has since produced tens of thousands of dead. The output of Libya’s crucial oil industry has collapsed to a fraction of what it was. In 2016, Obama said that not preparing for a post-Qadhafi Libya was probably the "worst mistake" of his presidency.

The price of all these interventions for the United States?

Some 7,000 dead, 40,000 wounded and trillions of dollars.

For the Arab and Muslim world, the cost has been far greater. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, civilian and soldier alike, massacres, and millions uprooted and driven from their homes.

How has all this invading, bombing and killing made the Middle East a better place or Americans more secure? One May 2018 poll of young people in West Asia and North Africa found that more of them felt that Russia was a closer partner than was the United States of America.

What are the fruits of American intervention?

We are told Daesh is not dead but alive in the hearts of several thousand Muslims, that if the US leaves Syria and Afghanistan, our enemies will take over and our friends will be massacred, and that if the US stops helping Saudis and Emiratis kill the Yemenis, Iran will notch a victory.

In his decision to leave Syria and withdraw half of the 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, Trump enraged American foreign policy elites, though millions of Americans cannot get out of there soon enough.

In last Monday’s editorial celebrating major figures of foreign policy in the past half-century, The New York Times wrote, "As these leaders pass from the scene, it will be left to a new generation to find a way forward from the wreckage Mr. Trump inherited."