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The Domestic Consequences of
America’s Many Wars in the Middle East
Remarks to a Salon of the Committee for the Republic
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, the Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs, Brown University
12 October 2016, Washington, D.C.
In just four
weeks, as the press never tires of pointing out, Americans will elect “a new
commander-in-chief.” But no one claims
that we will elect a president able
to govern, even if she or he commands
our uniquely powerful military establishment.
There is almost no reason to believe that whoever is elected will be
regarded as legitimate by other candidates or their followers. So unless you believe in magic or the triumph
of the will, there’s no basis for anticipating the end of dysfunctional
government in the United States. Without
radical reorganization of our politics, there won’t be.
One major party
candidate promises to “make America great again,” without providing any
evidence that he knows what America’s greatness has been or how to restore
it. The other promises to double down on
the very militarist and fiscally irresponsible policies that have brought
America’s greatness into question. The
bipartisan political establishment does everything it can to prevent new or
unconventional ideas from being heard.
Most Americans – almost three-fourths of us by recent polls – think the
country is on the wrong track, with no cure in sight.
This brings me
to the subject of my latest book, America’s
Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East.. I am not going to recapitulate the foreign
policy blunders the book catalogs tonight.
If you are interested in a list of the major ones, have a look at my
remarks to the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. You can find it at MailFilterGateway has detected a possible fraud attempt from "chasfreeman.net," claiming to be http://chasfreeman.net/
under “Speeches” or in the forthcoming Cairo Review. Or you can join me tomorrow afternoon when I
speak on the topic at a Middle East Policy Council conference in the Russell
Senate Office Building. Better yet, read
both the new book and its predecessor, America’s
Misadventures in the Middle East.
Both track our deteriorating position in the region over the past two
decades. They do so in real time so you can
see what other Americans and I got right and what we got wrong and draw your
own conclusions.
This is the
Committee for the Republic, which was formed out of concern that adventurist
militarism would damage the traditions and civil liberties of our republic. And, sure enough, our interventions in the
Middle East are the source of much of the corruption of constitutional order in
our republic as well as our current economic malaise. These interventions have produced ruinous
levels of debt, enriched a few but impoverished many of us, and made us ever
less secure. They have pushed us toward the creation of a garrison state,
militarized our foreign relations, consolidated an imperial presidency, and
provided excuses for Congress self-indulgently to evade its constitutional and
legislative responsibilities. In
response to our perceptions of the Middle East and its challenges, we have done
away with major aspects of the separation of powers and accepted the progressive
impairment of our civil liberties. Debt,
legislative default, and constitutionally illegitimate presidential efforts to
work around these politico-economic impediments account for our chronic
national indecision on priorities and means to deal with them. Who said foreign policy has little impact on
the lives of ordinary citizens?
If the United
States is today divided and lacking in agreed or feasible foreign policy goals,
this too has a great deal to do with the cumulative burden of failed American
policies in West Asia and North Africa.
There is a long list of these, beginning with the total collapse of the
five-decade-long American effort to broker security and acceptance for a Jewish
settler state in Palestine. There is no
longer a basis for such diplomacy, so there will no resumption of an
American-led “peace process.” The United
States remains at odds with Iran. It is
now estranged from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states as well as Israel,
Egypt and Turkey, none of which remain willing to follow an American lead. Saudi Arabia, like Israel, has broken ranks
with us and – for some of the same reasons – is doing its own thing.
Israel now
shares few, if any interests with the United States, and is more often opposed
to U.S. policies than supportive of them.
Its values were once congruent with those of Americans, including the
values of American Jews. They have now
diverged to the point of incompatibility.
The fact that the now wealthy, militarily powerful Jewish state remains
on the U.S. dole is testimony not to
shared interests or values but to the power of campaign contributions in an
American political system that is openly venal.
The $3.8
billion annual gift we have agreed to make to Israel for the next ten years
will enable it to do all sorts of self-destructive things while buying Muslim
hostility on the installment plan and guaranteeing continued terrorist blowback
against us. The deteriorating prospects
for the long-term survival of a Jewish state in the Middle East are the result
of Israeli decisions and policies enabled by unconditional political, economic,
and military support from the United States.
It's no consolation that the United States will be there at Israel’s
side, still cutting checks to it, holding its hand, and doing nothing to stop
it from destroying itself as it does itself in.
Once upon a
time, anger at U.S. backing of Israeli injustices to Palestinians was the main
driver of violent anti-Americanism in the Arab world. Region-wide enmity to Israel is still a
factor in terrorist attacks on Americans, but now it’s overshadowed by blowback
from direct U.S. interventions in a widening swath of the Islamic world:
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, and Syria. These interventions have thrust much of the region
into anarchy and directly or indirectly killed at least 1.3 million and perhaps
as many as 2 million Muslims so far this century.[1] U.S. support for Israel’s wars in Lebanon and
Gaza and Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen has indirectly enabled the death of many
more. There is no plan to end to any of
these wars. By contrast, there are lots
of proposals for expanding them and for heating up America’s
thirty-five-year-old cold war with Iran.
The
Constitution reserves the power to authorize wars to the Congress. But all of the wars in which we are currently
engaged are presidentially ordained. As
such, they are extra-constitutional – even the war to pacify Afghanistan, as
opposed to the effort fifteen years ago to root out al-Qaeda in response to
9/11. And, with the exception of
Afghanistan – where the government the United States installed wants Americans
to do as much as possible of its fighting for it while we pay for its military–
all are also illegal invasions of foreign sovereignty and breaches of the peace
under the UN Charter and international law.
Invasions,
drone warfare, assassinations, extraordinary rendition, torture and the arming
of insurgents against established governments and populations are widely
regarded abroad as constituting state terrorism. Up to now, this hasn’t mattered much. But, if other countries react to the
Saudi-targeted “Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act” (JASTA) as expected by
enacting legislation that mirrors it, legions of aggrieved foreigners will
eagerly sue the United States and its officials in their homelands’ courts.
There is already a bill before the Iraqi legislature that would direct the
government to sue the United States for the terrible suffering and immense
losses our invasion brought to the country.
JASTA
privatizes U.S. foreign relations on the basis of unfounded conspiracy
theories. Lawyers who bring or defend
suits under JASTA or its foreign Doppelgängers will make out like bandits. But, in the end, their clients will gain
neither satisfaction nor financial compensation for their losses. Meanwhile, the United States, Israel, the UK,
and other governments will spend a lot of time and money defending themselves
and their military and civilian officers against lawsuits by foreign victims of
their invasions, occupations, and drone strikes of other nations. And governments being sued by U.S. claimants
are very likely to suspend important cooperation with the United States,
including cooperation against terrorism.
In terms of its probable impact on U.S. and allied interests as well as
international law, JASTA is the mother of all “own goals.”
Meanwhile, as a
society, we continue to misperceive the nature and sources of terrorism against
Africans, Americans, Arabs, Chinese, Europeans, Israelis, and Russians. We analyze these as theological issues,
rather than the politicized manifestations of social psychology that they
are. Our counter-terrorist policies are
misdirected. We are not being assaulted
by religious fanatics so much as by young men (and the occasional woman) who
fit the profile of American misfits like Dylann Roof, Timothy McVeigh, or Ted
Kaczynski. Our attackers see themselves
as humiliated, persecuted, bullied, or otherwise victimized. Like the perpetrators of gun massacres from
non-Muslim backgrounds, they are boastful.
They crave vindication, and they seek attention through spectacular
violence.
Contemporary
Islamism provides the powerless, disaffected youth of today with an opportunity
very similar to the one young Europeans seized in joining the Crusades or young
Iranians grasped in assaulting foreign embassies in Tehran during the Islamic
revolution. Conversion to Salafi
Jihadism magically transforms the sociopathic behavior of alienated youth into
apparent support for a cause larger than themselves. Joining the Jihadi community enables the
socially marginalized to redefine themselves as heroes in a cohesive
subculture, cure their purposelessness and powerlessness, lord it over others,
show off their machismo, and affirm a religious identity – all without having
to endure the tedium of actually studying the theology they profess. “Islamist terrorists” are losers and
gangbangers, not theologians. Like
pirates, gun massacre perpetrators, and other criminals, they are primarily a
law enforcement problem to be addressed in cooperation with other governments,
not through unilateral military interventions..
Degrading the
prestige of the so-called “Islamic
State” by defeating it militarily on its own ground will help suppress
recruitment to its cause. That’s worth
doing. But bombing and strafing Iraq,
Libya, and Syria will not cure the affronts to Muslim dignity in Israel, Europe,
Russia, India, China, and the United States that generate Islamist
terrorists. The more Islamophobia, the
more Muslim alienation; the more alienation, the more attention-seeking acts of
terrorism. The "Caliphate"
will likely lose its territory in Iraq and Syria. But the dark forces it represents will
continue to metastasize under the impetus of drone warfare and an ever-more
credible narrative of a Christian crusade against Islam, now joined by Israel
and the Jewish diaspora that Israel speciously claims to represent.
The “global war
on terrorism” has ironically become the greatest stimulus to the spread
and growth of anti-American
terrorism. The U.S. Government needs to
stop poking hornets’ nests abroad and spend more time and money at home, fixing
all the things it has disinvested in to pay for its counterproductive wars. A more equal, tolerant, and healthier
American society would enjoy greater prestige as well as enhanced domestic
tranquility. It would produce fewer
misfits and mass murderers. A country
that went not abroad in search of monsters to destroy would attract fewer of
them to its soil.
Where once our
partners in the Middle East and elsewhere were poor and weak, they are almost
all now rich and strong. We are not on
the same wavelength anymore. Where once
their problems fit into the framework of a coherent U.S. global strategy, this
is no longer the case. Many of our
foreign security partners’ problems are new, self-made, and peculiar to
themselves. Confusion of foreign causes
with our own in the post-Cold War period has led American commitments to exceed
American capabilities by a growing margin.
We gain nothing and lose much by subsidizing and supporting interests we
do not share and courses of action we consider counterproductive. Americans need to clarify our interests to
ourselves, discuss them candidly with our partners overseas, work out new
divisions of labor with them, and manage transitions to these refashioned and
rebalanced arrangements.
Instead of
acting in ways that multiply our enemies, we should be trying to manage down
hostility to us abroad. Instead of
picking fights with other great powers, we should be trying to solve the
problems that are the sources of tension between us and bring our power to bear
on issues of common concern. We may be
strong enough to ignore the rules we helped establish in the U.N. Charter and
through the 20th century evolution of international law. But by doing so, we encourage others who are
growing in strength to do likewise. The
law protects the weak against the strong.
In the future, others may be stronger than we in some arenas. It is unwise to bet that we will always have
the upper hand.
We should seek
to preserve, not erode, the rule of law, which is the greatest legacy of
Atlantic civilization. For this we need
restored harmony with Europe. We need an
agreed role for Russia in the councils and governance of Europe. We need an independent, prosperous, and
nonaligned Ukraine. We need a mutually
respectful and balanced relationship with China that recognizes the legitimacy
of its interest in secure borders, including in the contested seas off its
shores. To deal with shifting balances
of power in Europe and Asia, we need greater contributions by allies to their
own defense, not payments to us to provide continuing defense services for
them. And we need to get out of the
regime-change business. It produces
anarchy and terrorist movements, not greater security or stability for us or
anyone else.
These changes
in our foreign policy make sense in their own terms. They are also prerequisites for winding down
the predatory warfare state we have built over the course of the Cold War and
the subsequent pursuit of American global military dominance. But the vested interests of our
military-industrial complex keep us from extracting ourselves from Afghanistan,
Iraq, Somalia, Syria, or Yemen or seeking acceptable terms for ending the
fighting in any of these places. We have
no vision for a Russian role in stabilizing the European order or a Chinese
role in doing the same in the Indo-Pacific.
Instead, we try to bottle up both Russia and China and to convince ourselves,
when they do not launch a war in response, that deterrence is working and
everything is under control.
Maybe so. But without a peaceful international
environment and harmonious relations with other countries and civilizations, we
cannot hope for a rebirth of freedom, effective constitutional democracy, or
the rule of law at home. These things
are what America is all about. 229 years
ago, these values found expression in the Constitution of 1787. The men who drew up that charter proved to be
the greatest political engineers in human history. For more than two centuries, the system they
designed and built promoted an ever-more perfect union, established justice,
insured domestic tranquility, provided
for the common defense, promoted the general welfare, and secured the blessings
of liberty to Americans. If we cannot
return to their design, we must update it in ways that remain true to their
vision.
In my view, we
should restore the legislative branch to the primacy and public accountability
originally envisioned for it by Article I of the Constitution. This means accepting that the separation of
powers has been fatally eroded. What is
left produces political impasse and incurable governmental dysfunction. Congress enjoys the respect of around 10
percent of the American people. The
military clock in at about 80 percent.
What does that say about the state of our democracy?
With great
reluctance, I have concluded that the time has come to adopt a parliamentary
system. Candidates to lead the
government should be members of our legislative branch, chosen by their peers –
people who really know them from having worked with them, not men or women of
no experience chosen by people who know them only through spin-doctored
appearances on television. A government
that loses the confidence of the people’s representatives deserves to be
dissolved. It should be replaced through
national elections that provide a mandate for a new government. In a world in which the United States has less
margin for error, the qualifications of department heads need an upgrade. In a parliamentary democracy, the heads of
government bureaucracies consist for the most part of people who have prepared
themselves for the responsibilities of office by serving in shadow positions or
previous governments. This is a model we
should emulate.
The greatest
blessings from embracing such change would be mercifully short political
campaigns and the end of so-called debates convened by the media to entertain
the public and generate advertizing revenue as the candidates pose before the
cameras. Instead, the incumbent leader
and his or her challenger would regularly debate the issues that divide them and
their followers in question hour.
Think about
it! Difficult as such constitutional
reform would be, short of it will we be able to call off our endless wars,
refocus the government on priorities other than those set by the
military-industrial complex, retain our liberties, and remain a functioning
democracy?
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