Bombing the Caliphate

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/john-feffer/57616/bombing-the-caliphate

Bombing the Caliphate
Iraq
by John Feffer | August 14, 2014 - 8:02am

~snip~

The Obama administration’s newly restated doctrine—don’t do stupid shit—has just gone up in smoke. I’m not sure why Hillary Clinton has just chosen just this moment to observe that not doing stupid shit doesn’t constitute a foreign policy strategy. After all, what’s her alternative? The Hippocratic oath—first, do not harm—is a more politely stated version of the Obama doctrine. So, Clinton’s anti-Hippocratic approach logically amounts to: first, do some stupid shit. Now, with bombs falling again on Iraq, Clinton and Obama can be on the same page.

Let me be clear. I have zero sympathy for IS. I’d love to read its obituary and that of its cardboard caliphate as well. I also value what remains of the confessional diversity in the Middle East and do not doubt the genocidal urge of IS to wipe out anyone and anything that challenges its totalitarian views. But a campaign of U.S. aerial strikes to save one such pocket of diversity, in this case the Yazidis, is just the kind of outside force that will keep ISIS strong and unified in the absence of an obvious focus of hatred, as Maliki was.

I understand the pressure the Obama administration is under to do something to help the beleaguered Yazidis, not to mention the anemic Kurdish army to the north and all the Shi’ites and Sunnis in Iraq that want to push IS back into the Syrian petri dish that spawned it. The Republican opposition, of course, would like the Pentagon to apply even more force since it believes that IS, as John McCain opined, “is a threat to America.” (Has anyone commented on the irony of McCain making this statement from Vietnam, which for more than a decade was deemed a threat to America only to evolve, after years of senseless U.S. bombing, into a semi-ally in the cordon sanitaire against China?)

IS, like al-Qaeda before it, would love to be considered an actual threat to the United States. Such posturing, backed up by the use of unilateral force, elevates IS’s status to legitimate combatant. It changes the tagline of Uncle Sam’s terrorist recruitment poster into: I Want You to Join IS! It draws the U.S. government even further into a tangle of political and sectarian disputes that it only dimly understands.