Pax on both houses

Alan: Since the Vietnam War, two lessons scream at us.

"You don't get involved in somebody else's Civil War."

"And you don't start them."

"Bush's Toxic Legacy In Iraq"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/06/bushs-toxic-legacy-in-iraq.html

Excerpt: Instead of interrupting a budding relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda, the Iraq War precipitated the arrival of al Qaeda into Iraq. Although the Bush administration tended to gloss over the fact, al Qaeda only formally established itself in Iraq a year and a half after the U.S. invasion. On October 17, 2004, its brutal leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issued an online statement pledging allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Zarqawi's pledge was fulsome: "By God, O sheikh of the Mujahideen, if you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you. If you ordered it so, we would obey." Zarqawi's special demonic genius was to launch Iraq down the road to civil war. In early 2004, the U.S. military intercepted a letter from Zarqawi to bin Laden in which he proposed provoking a civil war between Sunnis and Shia. Zarqawi's strategy was to hit the Shia so they would in turn strike the Sunnis, so precipitating a vicious circle of violence in which al Qaeda would be cast as the protector of the Sunnis against the wrath of the Shia. It was a strategy that worked all too well, provoking first sectarian conflict in Iraq and later civil war. Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, regularly attacked Shia religious processions, shrines and clerics. The tipping point in the slide toward full-blown civil war was al Qaeda's February 2006 attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which is arguably the most important Shia shrine in the world. Three years into the Iraq War, AQI seemed all but unstoppable. A classified Marine intelligence assessment dated August 17, 2006, found that AQI had become the de facto government of the western Iraqi province of Anbar, which is strategically important because it borders Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia and makes up about a third of the landmass of Iraq. In addition, AQI controlled a good chunk of the exurban belts around Baghdad, the "Triangle of Death" to the south of the capital and many of the towns north of it, up the Tigris River to the Syrian border. Thus AQI controlled territory larger than New England and maintained an iron grip on much of the Sunni population. In other words, the Bush administration had presided over the rise of precisely what it had said was one of the key goals of the Iraq War to destroy: a safe haven for al Qaeda in the heart of the Arab world."

***

Iraq and Syria: What if bombing makes things worse?

The situation in Iraq and Syria is deeply complicated with no easy or good solutions. Over the past few weeks, we have heard from many of you who are torn between the reality that the extremist militants known as ISIS are committing very real atrocities and your desire to avoid yet another American war in the Middle East.

While we share the outrage at the violence and brutality of ISIS, we believe that the unilateral use of American military force will only exacerbate the crisis and cause more suffering for the people of Iraq and Syria. We believe that, to truly solve what is now a regional conflict, we need a fundamentally new solution that does not rely on American bombs to bring peace to people who have now suffered through years of war.

The following article was written by our Advocacy Director, Stephen Miles, and is also available on Huffington Post. We invite you to learn more about the potential impact of U.S. military action. Then, if you agree that U.S. bombs are not the answer, please write to President Obama and encourage your friends and family to take action.

Thank you for working for peace,

Angela, Stephen, Tom, and the Win Without War team

Iraq and Syria: What if bombing makes things worse?

With more than 1,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq, surveillance flights over Syria , and over 100 airstrikes launched in Iraq, it is time to start asking the hard questions about the latest U.S. military intervention in the Middle East. As David Petraeus so famously asked a decade ago, ‘Tell me how this ends.’

However one felt about the humanitarian intervention to save the Yazidis stranded on Mt. Sinjar (and we can all be happy so many were safely evacuated), the U.S. military intervention in Iraq - and potentially soon in Syria - has become something completely different. As has so often been the case in conflict, the mission has crept its way from a noble humanitarian goal towards something far more complicated.

We are becoming deeply involved in a sectarian conflict that spans from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf, with multiple fronts, multiple actors, shifting alliances, and horrific violence on all sides. In short, we're in the middle of a giant mess.

We should take a minute and acknowledge something. ISIS (or ISIL or Islamic State depending on who you ask) is a collection of some of the most despicable beings to walk the earth. They have reportedly executed religious minorities (and an American journalist), forced women into slavery , and are committing atrocities faster than anyone can monitor them. Being opposed to a broadening U.S. military intervention does not mean you have to think that ISIS is somehow not evil. They are. The question is what you do about that and how you can avoid making them stronger.

Cooperating with Assad to unilaterally strike ISIS in Syria makes zero sense and would likely exacerbate the regional crisis. It is true that the border between Syria and Iraq has, in some ways, become irrelevant. However, the fact that we could soon be bombing a country that, one year ago, the American public overwhelmingly rejected bombing, should be a stark reminder of how much has changed. Even more absurd is that, exactly one year after Assad gassed his own people, our potential military action would be to target his chief rivals in a now three-year-old civil war that has claimed 191,000 lives . The icing on this illogical cake is that the ISIS spokesman who threatened to ‘raise the flag of Allah in the White House' is reportedly dead at the hands of Assad's forces. As a reminder, it remains official U.S. policy that Assad must leave power and we will spend $500 million in FY2015 arming Syrian opposition forces.

The truth is that ISIS feeds off of war. They need it to survive. It's at the core of their identity and they are very good at provoking a fight. They are purposefully inciting sectarian fights in Iraq in the hopes of rallying Sunnis around them. They want nothing more than for the U.S. to get involved so that it's not just apostates and infidels they are fighting, but the Great Satan itself. Bringing the fight to them and taking sides in Iraq's sectarian conflict and Syria's civil war is exactly what ISIS wants.

Some argue that, because we cannot negotiate with ISIS, the only way to defeat them is through unilateral military action. Here's where we have to learn from history. Our efforts in Yemen and the tribal regions of Pakistan offer a useful preview of how this will go, and the future does not look bright. Years of airstrikes, with local forces fighting proxy ground battles for us, has led to increasing extremism and a growth in the Taliban (both Pakistani and Afghan ) and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula . Nowhere where we have gone down this path has it ended with peace or fewer extremists. Even worse, unilateral airstrikes have ended disastrously for the inhabitants of those places. Life in Iraq and Syria right now is truly awful, and we should do everything we can to ease the humanitarian crisis. But history has shown us that a stepped-up counter-terrorism in isolation effort will have the opposite effect: empowering terrorist organizations and causing collateral damage. We've seen this movie before and we know how it ends.

This is not about whether or not we trust President Obama or his intentions. Once a President starts down the road of military intervention, mission creep is almost always inevitable. We now have roughly 1,000 U.S. troops in Iraq with requests for more to deploy. The Iraqis have asked us to ramp up our fighting and it is unclear what promises we have made as carrots for their ousting of former Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. What started as a humanitarian mission to save Yazidis on a mountain has grown to over 100 airstrikes, the majority of which have been in support of an Iraqi and Kurdish military mission to recapture the Mosul Dam. Following the execution of an American journalist, the promise of a second execution, and the personalization of this fight to the President, it is becoming next to impossible for Obama to 'back down.' The Pentagon has reportedly been so pleased by their airstrikes that they've asked for the ability to ramp them up. Add to this the very real likelihood that American bombs will soon fall into the middle of the Syrian civil war, and it becomes clear that this train has left the station.

But it is not too late to change direction. Countless experts and religious organizations have watched America’s misadventures in the Middle East over the past several decades and learned the painful lesson so few in Washington can seem to grasp: American bombs do not solve the problem. While the impulse to ‘do something’ remains compelling, we must continue to seek out solutions that will actually solve the challenges we face and not simply plunge America and the Middle East further into war.

By Juan Cole

In a new Pew/ USA Today poll, the American public shows itself alarmed by the rise of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in northern Iraq and Syria as a threat to US security, finding it more threatening even than Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has risen on the villain scale quite a lot. Iran is seen as less menacing, as is North Korea. The Israel-Palestinian struggle is seen as a threat to the US by a little over half. More Americans still think the US is doing too much as the world’s policeman, but those who think it is doing too little have greatly increased in number, especially among Republicans.

But almost no Republicans think Global Warming is a threat, and only slightly more than a majority of Democrats do. In short, the US public is again being misled by its media and politicians as to the true shape of the world, and is likely to suffer pretty badly for this ignorance.

Americans’ concern about the rise of the so-called “Islamic State” is justified. It is an extremely nasty and vicious organization, and it has made significant advances this summer in northern Iraq. The public largely supports giving US close air support to Kurdish and Iraqi military forces against it.

But it seems likely that the public is not being given a sense of proportion about the region. Conservative pro-American monarchies in the Middle East include Morocco, Jordan, and the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Secular republics that are non-NATO allies or at least relatively friendly toward the US include Algeria, Egypt and Yemen (though Yemen has local militant movements not under government control). Governments of the mild religious right have risen in Tunisia and Turkey but they are pro-American (Turkey is a NATO ally). Lebanon is hard to categorize– its government is pro-American but it includes Hizbullah which is not. It is not clear how much of the militia faction-fighting in Libya is a security threat to the US, and apparently people have been relatively unconcerned by the Syrian civil war until recently.

Of the some 400 million people in the Middle East, only a fraction live under IS — half of what’s left of Aleppo, the small city of Raqqa, Mosul and some other Iraqi cities. Given refugee flows (at least a fourth of Mosul fled), I shouldn’t imagine it is more than five or six million. It would be alarming if a militant group took over Tennessee or Wisconsin, but it is not as if those states bulk very large in a US of some 314 million. Given how vicious IS is, I don’t think it should be allowed to keep its conquests, and I think the international community can and should coordinate with local actors to push it back. In a way, IS is made for concerted United Nations action, since it alarms all the members of the Security Council.

But while the Ukraine conflict is concerning, it is a struggle between Russia and the European Union for a sphere of influence and therefore is largely a regional matter. It is hard to see how it poses a threat to the US or requires an intervention beyond tools such as sanctions (which have clearly had some effect in restraining Russia, though they haven’t been completely successful).

Iran is not a threat to the US. It is a country of some 75 million with a small conventional army that hasn’t invaded a neighbor for a century and a half and has a military budget between that of Norway and Singapore. It was never more than a bogeyman wielded by right wing US politicians to scare the people. The government of President Hassan Rouhani is clearly trying to reach a new modus vivendi with the US. The public is right to demote it further as a menace given the current negotiations.

North Korea is also not a threat to the US. Interestingly, China is seen by fewer Americans as a menace, presumably because Secretary of State John Kerry has good relations with Beijing and has played down the “pivot to Asia” rhetoric, some of which was aimed at preparing the way to an effort to contain China.

None of these threats is very serious for the actual lives lived by most Americans.

But Global Warming (what experts call Climate Change) is a dire threat to the health and well-being of millions of Americans. In the coming decades it will do trillions of dollars of damage to the American economy. Imagine what the city of Miami is worth; but much of it is doomed . We have locked in a four foot sea level rise over the next 80 years or so. But that is an average. In some places it will be higher (the ocean is not smooth). There will be episodes of rapid rise and storm surges leading to substantial coastal flooding for some towns and cities.

You are much more likely to die falling in the bathtub or being struck by lighting than to be killed by terrorists or by Vladimir Putin, much less by Hassan Rouhani of Iran. But Americans’ health and well-being is directly and powerfully threatened by global warming.

What to do about IS is not completely clear (President Obama has gotten into trouble for saying that he doesn’t yet have a policy for dealing with it in Syria, which actually was his way of walking back the assumption in the US press that he intends to bomb Syria unilaterally). Over time an approach will be crafted.

What to do about global warming is obvious. Stop spewing 34 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that prevents the sun’s heat from radiating back out into space from the earth’s surface. The more you have in the atmosphere, the hotter it is guaranteed to become over time. We’ve gone from 270 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the 18th century before the industrial revolution to over 400 parts per million today. We crossed that 400 ppm line just this year. There should have been urgent summits and hand wringing on Capitol Hill and massive urban demonstrations.

Our press and our politicians are screwing us over. We still take our cues from our two parties and from corporate mass media. Both are in effect lying to us on the whole, by not being shrill over the real problems we face. American political leaders and American television anchors are encouraging us to hold a dance party on the deck of the Titanic.

The last time carbon dioxide levels spiked the way we are making them spike today, in the Eocene epoch 50 million years ago, it wasn’t a pretty picture. Carbon dioxide goes into the oceans, making them acidic and killing off much sea life. Lots of humans live on fish; there won’t be any for many of them. It was tropical everywhere, with no surface ice. There was a third less land mass above the waters. There is some evidence of massive storms, some lasting thousands of years over the same area. Past eras like the Eocene reinforce the conclusions reached by climate modelers. Modeling can err, if the inputs are mistaken. But History does not lie. C02 levels matter for the health of the earth. We have a young species, only about 150,000 years old, and it is adapted to a relatively cool world. Can it survive another Paleocene-Eocene Climate Maximum?

We are locked in to going up by 4 degrees F. (scientists in the US should stop using Centigrade, which seems to downplay the problem to an American audience). There is no escaping it. But whether we go on up to a 9 degrees F. average rise in surface temperatures is up to us. To this generation. We could go to solar and wind as energy sources in a crash Manhattan Project-style effort over the next 20 years. We’d actually save money in the long run if we do it, not to mention averting some of the worst effects of global warming (loss of coasts, droughts, wild fires, species lost, extreme weather). We’d also free ourselves and our allies of dependence on foreign oil and gas. If you own a house and will be in it at least ten years, you’re crazy if you don’t put up solar panels and get an electric car or plug-in hybrid. At current prices you’d pay off both in 6 or 7 years and ever after you get free fuel. I did this and figure my household has avoided 3 metric tons of C02 so far this year. More extensive measures are needed that only governments (municipal, county, state and federal) can implement. But American homeowners can make an impact all by themselves. You get a $7500 tax break on the panels and another one on the auto. Every American produces on average 16 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, more per capita than any other major industrialized country in the world. We have met the terrorists, and they are us.

———-

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