There are few things more dangerous than when politicians get smitten with nationalistic hubris, replete with lumps in throats and tears on cheeks, whilst they are deciding or voting on military affairs.
In the US House of Representatives a recent vote was taken as to whether the Congress would approve the arming of "moderate" Syrian rebels. Despite all the evidence and experience of disastrous outcomes of decisions to arm such groups in the past, the House duly voted to approve the action. Can politicians really be this dumb? Yes they can.
But not all. Some of those who voted "no" explained their reasons. Their justification for voting against the resolution to arm the "moderate" Syrian rebels shows up their yea-saying colleagues to be dumb, dumber and dumbest. Here are the words of Justin Amash, a so-called Tea-partying congressman:
The desperation to be doing something usually results in the worst unintended outcomes. The bellicose United States goes to war at the drop of a hat. It is "led" by a pacifist-orientated Commander-in-Chief whose liberal world-view sees all wars as unnecessary and preventable because all human beings are really creatures of enlightened good-will. When this has not not worked out, he has lurched from one military misadventure to another with both his eyes firmly fixated on his own polling numbers. He has no strategy, no doctrines, no guiding principles. It's all about him.What have we learned from the last decade of war?
Those years should have taught us that when going to war, our government must:
(1) be careful when defining a military mission,
(2) speak forthrightly with the American people about the sacrifices they will be called to make,
(3) plan more than one satisfactory end to the conflict, and
(4) be humble about what we think we know.
These lessons should be at the front of our minds when Congress votes today on whether to arm groups in Syria.
Today’s amendment ostensibly is aimed at destroying ISIS—yet you’d hardly know it from reading the amendment’s text. The world has witnessed with horror the evil of ISIS: the public beheading of innocents, the killing of Christians, Muslims, and others. The amendment’s focus—arming groups fighting the Assad government in Syria—has little to do with defeating ISIS. The mission that the amendment advances plainly isn’t the defeat of ISIS; it’s the defeat of Assad.
Americans stood overwhelmingly against entangling our Armed Forces in the Syrian civil war a year ago. If Congress chooses to arm groups in Syria, it must explain to the American people not only why that mission is necessary but also the sacrifices that that mission entails.
The Obama administration has tried to rally support for U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war by implying that our help would be at arm’s length. The amendment Congress will vote on broadly authorizes “assistance” to groups in Syria. It does not specify what types of weapons our government will give the groups. It does not prohibit boots on the ground. (The amendment is silent on the president’s power to order our troops to fight in the civil war; it states only that Congress doesn’t provide “specific statutory authorization” for such escalation.) It does not state the financial cost of the war.
As we should have learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must plan for multiple satisfactory ends to military conflicts before we commence them.
If the Syrian groups that are “appropriately vetted” (the amendment’s language) succeed and oust Assad, what would result? Would the groups assemble a coalition government of anti-Assad fighters, and would that coalition include ISIS? What would happen to the Alawites and Christians who stood with Assad? To what extent would the U.S. government be obligated to occupy Syria to rebuild the government? If each of the groups went its own way, would Syria’s territory be broken apart, and if so, would ISIS control one of the resulting countries?
If the Syrian groups that we support begin to lose, would we let them be defeated? If not, is there any limit to American involvement in the war?
Perhaps some in the administration or Congress have answers to these questions. But the amendment we’ll vote on today contains none of them. [Emphasis, ours.]
Above all, when Congress considers serious actions—especially war—we must be humble about what we think we know. We don’t know very much about the groups we propose to support or even how we intend to vet those groups. Reports in the last week suggest that some of the “appropriately vetted” groups have struck deals with ISIS, although the groups dispute the claim. The amendment requires the administration to report on its efforts to prevent our arms and resources from ending up in the wrong hands, but we know little about those precautions or their effectiveness.
Today, I will vote against the amendment to arm groups in Syria. There is a wide misalignment between the rhetoric of defeating ISIS and the amendment’s actual mission of arming certain groups in the Syrian civil war. The amendment provides few limits on the type of assistance that our government may commit, and the exit out of the civil war is undefined. And given what’s happened in our country’s most recent wars, our leaders seem to have unjustified confidence in their own ability to execute a plan with so many unknowns.
Some of my colleagues no doubt will come to different judgments on these questions. But it’s essential that they consider the questions carefully. That the president wants the authority to intervene in the Syrian civil war is not a sufficient reason to give him that power. Under the Constitution, it is Congress’s independent responsibility to commence war.
We are the representatives of the American people. The government is proposing to take their resources and to put their children’s lives at risk. I encourage all my colleagues to give the decision the weight it is due.
Congress is no better. It has not grown up and matured to the point where it understands that when it comes to sending the military to war, overwhelmingly, far more often than not, the best and right decision is to do nothing. The phrase "clear and present danger" has been inflated to where it is a meaningless concept. An ant walking upon a sidewalk in Outer Mongolia would constitute a "clear and present danger" to the United States in the minds of most of the current crop of Congressmen.
Evil exists. People die at the hands of unimaginably evil predators. But need does not constitute a duty--or a right--to intervene so that "good guys" get to kill "bad guys". The world is just not that simple. It is not a narrative of cowboys and Indians.
We make a prediction which doubtless many will consider so extreme and unlikely they will write us off as complete idiots: as a result of arming "moderate" groups in Syria, the civil war will intensify, more people will be killed than otherwise, and US armaments and military weapons will end up in the hands of the most brutal and ruthless of the fighting cliques. Our critics will have conveniently forgotten that it is the US which has indirectly armed ISIS, thereby enabling it to expand rapidly into Iraq and western Syria. Will such things happen again? Inevitably. But the militaristic heart which beats throughout the land in the United States runs on the high octane fuel of patriotism, nationalism, and exceptionalist hubris. This time . . . this time it will be different. We swear.
Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
The star spangled banner of ISIS, that is. Enabled and facilitated by the unintended consequences of foolish US military misadventure.
The world would be a very much safer and saner place, if the US Congress were populated throughout by more Congressmen like Justin Amash.
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