“We’re looking for opportunities to do more.”
The quote is from an interview that Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter, America’s Robert McNamara and Don Rumsfeld rolled into one, gave last month at the gathering in Davos, Switzerland, of the world’s especially rich and privileged leaders.
I guess we should be pleased that Mr. Carter was at least honest about what we are doing, even if our military-centric foreign policy is not only lame-brained but also at sharp variance with what the American people want at this point in time. That is to say, less war.
Nonetheless, we are told that the Pentagon is proposing — and that President Barack Obama is reportedly not opposing — deeper American military involvement in both Iraq and Syria. It is said that the targets they have in mind are the Islamic State “capital” of Raqqa in Syria and the second city of Mosul in Iraq that the Islamic Statists took and continue to hold. Mr. Obama apparently has agreed to increase the U.S. troop level in Iraq from 3,700 to 4,500 and substantially raise the troop level in Syria from some hundreds now.
Mr. Carter’s bellicose words are, of course, echoed by most of the candidates for president, including former Sen. Hillary R. Clinton, who voted for the Iraq War, and all of the Republicans, with the exception of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
The Pentagon’s desire to heighten U.S. military involvement in Syria and Iraq, and Mr. Obama’s reported acquiescence, comes alongside some critical facts that would seem to cut in the opposite direction.
Perhaps the most important of these is that Congress so far has been unwilling to vote on what now have become Mr. Obama’s wars, relying instead on the general congressional authorization to make war on bad guys that was passed in the aftermath of 9/11, back in the George W. Bush administration. It is difficult to imagine, but members of Congress ought to be at least vaguely aware that most Americans are sick and tired of spending taxpayer money and losing U.S. lives in basically meaningless and unsuccessful struggles in far-off Middle Eastern nations.
It is clear that the only American elements that benefit from such enterprises are the arms manufacturers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumann, General Dynamics, Raytheon and others — which make big bucks and employ U.S. military officers and civilians such as Mr. Carter when they retire from government.
Even the financial aspect of the picture raises an interesting question when one considers U.S. debt to China, running about $2 trillion, along with the Pentagon’s zest for pulling China’s tail in the South China Sea over the reefs it claims and is building up there. What happens if China decides to stop lending us money to spend provoking it in the Pacific?
Another awkward question as one contemplates increasing, rather than decreasing, American military activity in the Middle East, is that the American armed forces are finding it increasingly difficult to meet their recruitment quotas. A cynic could ask whether the decision to admit women to combat roles might relate to that problem. There is something incongruous about needing to provide combat forces maternity leave, although I do understand the economics and the justice of the change.
Another problem is the reluctance of America’s erstwhile allies to involve themselves in these scraps. It seems they would prefer to use their money and manpower to other ends. Their argument is understandable, looking at America’s own manifold needs in education, health care, infrastructure, housing and other high-priority concerns. But the politicians are not going to tell you that if we spend it on war, we do not have it to spend at home.
One of the arguments for increasing our stake in Iraq and Syria is that no one takes the United States seriously in military terms anymore because we have, in fact, lost the wars we have waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Taliban are re-gobbling up big chunks of Afghanistan and a combination of the Islamic State and al-Qaida are doing very well indeed in the face of the hapless forces of Haider al-Abadi in Iraq. Apart from the coalition victory in the first Gulf War, the last U.S. wartime victory was against Grenada in 1983.
It is probably tunnel vision on my part, but I don’t understand why our lunatic policy toward the war in Afghanistan, which started in 2001, and the war in Iraq, which began in 2003, are not major issues in the current political campaign. I have the awful feeling that this is partly because most of the candidates don’t even know where Raqqa or Mosul are or have even thought about what a rational U.S. policy toward these problems would look like. Instead, they bleat menacingly about how exceptional we are, implying that we can get away with any idiot policy that we wish to pursue in the Middle East or anywhere else.
The idea that U.S. foreign and defense policy is not yet a major issue in the presidential campaign because neither the candidates nor the media know enough to discuss them intelligently is almost as terrifying a thought as thinking about the subjects the candidates choose to go round and round on. It would be delightful to see these people transfixed by piercing questions on foreign and defense policy that they could not dodge. Ironically, these are the questions of life and death and money that will torment whichever one of them is elected president.
Dan Simpson, a former U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette. com, 412-263-1976).
First Published: February 3, 2016, 5:00 a.m.
