phill4paul
06-26-2016, 10:21 AM
Beginning with the Carter Doctrine, the US has aggressively injected itself into the Muslim world but with little to show for it besides a record of misunderstanding, hubris, and failure.
In America’s War for the Greater Middle East, Andrew J. Bacevich, one of our most eloquent and incisive students of American foreign policy, military history, and the often-vexed nexus between the two, makes a startling claim: For the last 36 years, the United States has been engaged in an ill-advised, counterproductive struggle to shape the destiny of the Muslim world—not only in the Middle East proper, but in Southwest Asia, North and East Africa, and the Balkans as well.
Like Vietnam, this has been an undeclared war that started off small, and escalated in fits and starts into a major conflict. Like Vietnam, it has been poorly understood by policymakers, senior military officers, and the American public.
And like Vietnam, it is a doomed undertaking, with tragic implications.
Since the early ’80s, in “almost imperceptible increments,” the American military’s center of gravity has shifted from the plains of Europe, where it was deployed to fend off a Soviet attack against Western Europe, to the Middle East. After the 9/11 attacks, the conflict expanded exponentially, driven by invidious delusions about the efficacy of American military power, and a hubristic belief that the world’s only “indispensable nation” has both the right and the obligation to remake the region over in our own image.
Trouble is, millions of people in the Islamic world have rejected out of hand Western multiculturalism and the values of democracy and rule of law we see as universal, and seek to impose on them. They have come to see the United States not as an ally seeking to help them liberate themselves from repressive strongmen, economic dysfunction, and chronic instability, but as an imperialist purveyor of wantonness and materialism, bent on world hegemony.
Despite having been heavily engaged in the region’s geopolitics for 35 years, we remain deplorably ignorant of the region’s peoples and cultures, and continue to pursue political policies and military strategies in the region that exacerbate rather than diminish the region’s myriad difficulties. And we squander precious American lives and resources that should be devoted to far more urgent concerns here at home.
Bacevich’s book, in addition to providing a thought-provoking and penetrating account of the evolution of an ultimately futile conflict, is also a passionate plea to a self-absorbed American public to awake from their slumber, reflect seriously on what their leaders are doing in their name in the Islamic world, and force them to bring an end to the project.
Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/26/the-us-has-screwed-up-in-the-muslim-world-for-36-years.html
In America’s War for the Greater Middle East, Andrew J. Bacevich, one of our most eloquent and incisive students of American foreign policy, military history, and the often-vexed nexus between the two, makes a startling claim: For the last 36 years, the United States has been engaged in an ill-advised, counterproductive struggle to shape the destiny of the Muslim world—not only in the Middle East proper, but in Southwest Asia, North and East Africa, and the Balkans as well.
Like Vietnam, this has been an undeclared war that started off small, and escalated in fits and starts into a major conflict. Like Vietnam, it has been poorly understood by policymakers, senior military officers, and the American public.
And like Vietnam, it is a doomed undertaking, with tragic implications.
Since the early ’80s, in “almost imperceptible increments,” the American military’s center of gravity has shifted from the plains of Europe, where it was deployed to fend off a Soviet attack against Western Europe, to the Middle East. After the 9/11 attacks, the conflict expanded exponentially, driven by invidious delusions about the efficacy of American military power, and a hubristic belief that the world’s only “indispensable nation” has both the right and the obligation to remake the region over in our own image.
Trouble is, millions of people in the Islamic world have rejected out of hand Western multiculturalism and the values of democracy and rule of law we see as universal, and seek to impose on them. They have come to see the United States not as an ally seeking to help them liberate themselves from repressive strongmen, economic dysfunction, and chronic instability, but as an imperialist purveyor of wantonness and materialism, bent on world hegemony.
Despite having been heavily engaged in the region’s geopolitics for 35 years, we remain deplorably ignorant of the region’s peoples and cultures, and continue to pursue political policies and military strategies in the region that exacerbate rather than diminish the region’s myriad difficulties. And we squander precious American lives and resources that should be devoted to far more urgent concerns here at home.
Bacevich’s book, in addition to providing a thought-provoking and penetrating account of the evolution of an ultimately futile conflict, is also a passionate plea to a self-absorbed American public to awake from their slumber, reflect seriously on what their leaders are doing in their name in the Islamic world, and force them to bring an end to the project.
Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/26/the-us-has-screwed-up-in-the-muslim-world-for-36-years.html