{"id":87315,"date":"2017-02-27T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=87315"},"modified":"2017-02-21T15:51:08","modified_gmt":"2017-02-21T15:51:08","slug":"how-we-got-here-the-misuse-of-american-military-power-and-the-middle-east-in-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/02\/how-we-got-here-the-misuse-of-american-military-power-and-the-middle-east-in-chaos\/","title":{"rendered":"How We Got Here: The Misuse of American Military Power and the Middle East in Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"

21 Feb 2017 – <\/em>The United States has already lost — its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn\u2019t be clearer to me. Unfortunately, it\u2019s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush\u2019s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama\u2019s quiet shift<\/a> to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn\u2019t turn the tide either. For all President Trump\u2019s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest assured that, at best, he\u2019ll barely move the needle and, at worst\u2026 but why even go there?<\/p>\n

At this point, it\u2019s at least reasonable to look back and ask yet again: Why the failure? Explanations abound, of course. Perhaps Americans were simply never tough enough and still need to take off the kid gloves. Maybe there just weren\u2019t ever enough troops. (Bring back the draft!) Maybe all those hundreds of thousands<\/a> of bombs and missiles just came up short. (So how about lots more of them, maybe even a nuke<\/a>?)<\/p>\n

Lead from the front. Lead from behind.\u00a0Surge<\/a> yet again\u2026 The list goes on — and on and on.<\/p>\n

And by now all of it, including Donald Trump\u2019s recent tough talk, represents such a familiar set of tunes. But what if the problem is far deeper and more fundamental than any of that?<\/p>\n

Here our nation stands, 15-plus years after 9\/11, engaged militarily in half a dozen<\/a> countries across the Greater Middle East, with no end in sight. Perhaps a more critical, factual reading of our recent past would illuminate the futility of America\u2019s tragic, ongoing project to somehow \u201cdestroy\u201d terrorism in the Muslim world.<\/p>\n

The standard triumphalist version of the last 100 or so years of our history might go something like this: in the twentieth century, the United States repeatedly intervened, just in the nick of time, to save the feeble Old World from militarism, fascism, and then, in the Cold War, communism.\u00a0 It did indeed save the day in three global wars and might have lived happily ever after as the world\u2019s \u201csole superpower<\/a>\u201d if not for the sudden emergence of a new menace.\u00a0 Seemingly out of nowhere, \u201cIslamo-fascists<\/a>\u201d shattered American complacence with a sneak attack reminiscent of Pearl Harbor.\u00a0 Collectively the people asked: Why do they hate us?\u00a0 Of course, there was no time to really reflect, so the government simply got to work, taking the fight to our new \u201cmedieval<\/a>\u201d enemies on their own turf.\u00a0 It\u2019s admittedly been a long, hard slog, but what choice did our leaders have?\u00a0 Better, after all, to fight them in Baghdad than Brooklyn.<\/p>\n

What if, however, this foundational narrative is not just flawed but little short of delusional? Alternative accounts lead to wholly divergent conclusions and are more likely to inform prudent policy in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s reconsider just two key years for the United States in that region: 1979 and 2003.\u00a0 America\u2019s leadership learned all the wrong \u201clessons\u201d from those pivotal moments and has intervened there ever since on the basis of some perverse version of them with results that have been little short of disastrous.\u00a0 A more honest narrative of those moments would lead to a far more modest, minimalist approach to a messy and tragic region.\u00a0 The problem is that there seems to be something inherently un-American about entertaining such thoughts.<\/p>\n

1979 Revisited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Through the first half of the Cold War, the Middle East remained a sideshow.\u00a0 In 1979, however, all that changed radically.\u00a0 First, rising protests against the brutal police state of the American-backed Shah of Iran led to regime collapse, the return of dissident ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the declaration of an Islamic Republic. Then Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for more than 400 days.\u00a0 Of course, by then few Americans remembered the CIA-instigated coup<\/a> of 1953 that had toppled a democratically elected Iranian prime minister, preserved Western oil interests<\/a> in that country, and started both lands on this path (though Iranians clearly hadn\u2019t forgotten).\u00a0 The shock and duration of the hostage crisis undoubtedly ensured that Jimmy Carter would be a one-term president<\/a> and — to make matters worse — Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan to shore up a communist government there. It was quite a year.<\/p>\n

The alarmist conventional narrative of these events went like this: the radical mullahs running Iran were irrational zealots with an inexplicable loathing for the American way of life.\u00a0 As if in a preview of 9\/11, hearing those chants against \u201cthe Great Satan,\u201d Americans promptly began asking with true puzzlement: Why do they hate us? \u00a0The hostage crisis challenged world peace.\u00a0 Carter had to do something. Worse yet, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan represented blatant conquest and spotlighted the possibility of Red Army hordes pushing through to Iran en route to the Persian Gulf\u2019s vast oil reserves.\u00a0 It might prove the opening act of the long awaited Soviet scheme for world domination or a possible path to World War III.<\/p>\n

Misinformed by such a tale that they repeatedly told themselves, Washington officials then made terrible choices in the Middle East.\u00a0 Let\u2019s start with Iran.\u00a0 They mistook a nationalist revolution and subsequent civil war within Islam for a singular attack on the U.S.A.\u00a0 With little consideration of genuine Iranian gripes about the brutal<\/a> U.S.-backed dynasty of the Shah or the slightest appreciation for the complexity of that country\u2019s internal dynamics, they created a simple-minded but convenient narrative in which the Iranians posed an existential threat to this country.\u00a0 Little has changed in almost four decades.<\/p>\n

Then, though few Americans could locate Afghanistan on a map, most accepted that it was indeed a country of vital strategic interest.\u00a0 Of course, with the opening of their archives, it\u2019s clear enough now that the Soviets never sought<\/a> the worldwide empire we imagined for them, especially not by 1979. The Soviet leadership was, in fact, divided over the Afghan affair and intervened in Kabul in a spirit more defensive than aggressive. Their desire or even ability to drive towards the Persian Gulf was, at best, a fanciful American notion.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were combined into a tale of horror that would lead to the permanent militarization of U.S. policy in the Middle East.\u00a0 Remembered today as a dove-in-chief, in his 1980 State of the Union address<\/a> President Carter announced a decidedly hawkish new doctrine that would come to bear his name.\u00a0 From then on, he said, the U.S. would consider any threat to Persian Gulf oil supplies a direct threat to this country and American troops would, if necessary, unilaterally intervene to secure the region.<\/p>\n

The results will seem painfully familiar today: almost immediately, Washington policymakers began to seek military solutions to virtually every problem in the Middle East.\u00a0 Within a year, the administration of President Ronald Reagan would, for instance, support Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein\u2019s ruthless invasion of Iran, ignoring his more vicious antics and his proclivity for gassing his own people.<\/p>\n

Soon after, in 1983, the military created the United States Central Command (headquarters: Tampa, Florida) with specific responsibility for the Greater Middle East. Its early war plans<\/a> demonstrated just how wildly out of touch with reality American planners already were by then. Operational blueprints<\/a>, for instance, focused on defeating Soviet armies in Iran before they could reach the Persian Gulf.\u00a0 Planners imagined U.S. Army divisions crossing Iran, itself in the midst of a major war with Iraq, to face off against a Soviet armored juggernaut (just like the one that was always expected to burst through Europe\u2019s Fulda Gap).\u00a0 That such an assault was never coming, or that the fiercely proud Iranians might object to the militaries of either superpower crossing their territories, figured little in such early plans that were monuments to American arrogance and na\u00efvet\u00e9.<\/p>\n

From there, it was but a few short steps to the permanent \u201cdefensive\u201d basing of the Navy\u2019s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain or later the stationing of U.S. troops near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraqi attack.\u00a0 Few asked how such forces in the heart of the Middle East would play on the Arab street or corroborate Islamist narratives<\/a> of \u201ccrusader\u201d imperialism.<\/p>\n

Worse yet, in those same years the CIA armed and financed a grab bag of Afghan insurgent groups, most of them extreme Islamists. Eager to turn Afghanistan into a Soviet \u201cVietnam,\u201d no one in Washington bothered to ask whether such guerrilla outfits conformed to our purported principles or what the rebels would do if they won. Of course, the victorious guerrillas contained foreign fighters and various Arab supporters, including one Osama bin Laden.\u00a0 Eventually, the excesses of the well-armed but morally bankrupt insurgents and warlords in Afghanistan triggered the formation and ascension of the Taliban there, and from one of those guerrilla outfits came a new organization that called itself al-Qaeda. The rest, as they say, is history, and thanks to Chalmers Johnson\u2019s appropriation of a classic CIA term of spy craft, we now know it as blowback<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That was a major turning point for the U.S. military.\u00a0 Before 1979, few of its troops had served in the region.\u00a0 In the ensuing decades, America bombed, invaded, raided, sent its drones to kill in, or attacked Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq again (and again), Somalia (again and again), Libya again, Iraq once more, and now Syria as well.\u00a0 Before 1979, few — if any — American military personnel died in the Greater Middle East.\u00a0 Few have died anywhere else<\/a> since.<\/p>\n

2003 and After: Fantasies and Reality<\/strong><\/p>\n

Who wouldn\u2019t agree that the 2003 invasion of Iraq signified a major turning point both in the history of the Greater Middle East and in our own?\u00a0 Nonetheless, its legacy remains highly contested. The standard narrative goes like this: as the sole remaining superpower on the planet after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, our invincible military organized a swift and convincing defeat of Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraq in the first Gulf War.\u00a0 After 9\/11, that same military launched an inventive, swift, and triumphant campaign in Afghanistan.\u00a0 Osama bin Laden escaped, of course, but his al-Qaeda network was shattered and the Taliban all but destroyed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Naturally, the threat of Islamic terror was never limited to the Hindu Kush, so Washington “had” to take its fight against terror global.\u00a0 Admittedly, the subsequent conquest of Iraq didn\u2019t exactly turn out as planned and perhaps the Arabs weren\u2019t quite ready for American-style democracy anyway.\u00a0 Still, the U.S. was committed, had shed blood, and had to stay the course, rather than cede momentum to the terrorists.\u00a0 Anything less would have dishonored the venerated dead.\u00a0 Luckily, President George W. Bush found an enlightened new commander, General David Petraeus, who, with his famed \u201csurge,\u201d snatched victory<\/a>, or at least stability, from the jaws of defeat in Iraq.\u00a0 He had the insurgency all but whipped.\u00a0 Then, just a few years later, \u201cspineless<\/a>\u201d Barack Obama prematurely<\/a> pulled American forces out of that country, an act of weakness that led directly to the rise of ISIS and the current nightmare in the region.\u00a0 Only a strong, assertive successor to Obama could right such gross errors.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a riveting tale, of course, even if it is misguided in nearly every way imaginable.\u00a0 At each turn, Washington learned the wrong lessons and drew perilous conclusions.\u00a0 At least the first Gulf War — to George H.W. Bush\u2019s credit — involved a large multinational coalition<\/a> and checked actual Iraqi aggression.\u00a0 Instead of cheering Bush the Elder\u2019s limited, prudent strategy, however, surging neoconservatives demanded<\/a> to know why he had stopped short of taking the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.\u00a0 In these years (and for this we can certainly thank Bush, among others), Americans — Republicans and Democrats alike — became enamored<\/a> with military force and came to believe that it could solve just about any problem in that region, if not the world.<\/p>\n

This would prove a grotesque misunderstanding of what had happened.\u00a0 The Gulf War had been an anomaly.\u00a0 Triumphalist conclusions about it rested on the shakiest of foundations.\u00a0 Only if an enemy fought exactly as the U.S. military preferred it to do, as indeed Saddam\u2019s forces did in 1991 — conventionally, in open desert, with outdated Soviet equipment — could the U.S. expect such success.\u00a0 Americans drew another conclusion entirely: that their military was unstoppable<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The same faulty assumptions flowed from Afghanistan in 2001.\u00a0 Information technology, Special Forces, CIA dollars (to Afghan warlords), and smart bombs triggered victory with few conventional foot soldiers needed.\u00a0 It seemed a forever formula and influenced both the hasty decision to invade Iraq, and the irresponsibly undersized<\/a> force structure deployed (not to speak of the complete lack of serious preparation for actually occupying that country).\u00a0 So powerful was the optimism and jingoism of invasion proponents that skeptics were painted as unpatriotic<\/a> \u00a0turncoats.<\/p>\n

Then things turned ugly fast.\u00a0 This time around, Saddam\u2019s army simply melted away, state institutions broke down, looting was rampant, and the three major communities of Iraq — Sunni, Shia, and Kurd — began to battle for power.\u00a0 The invaders never received the jubilant welcome predicted<\/a> for them by Bush administration officials and supportive neocons.\u00a0 What began as a Sunni-based insurgency to regain power morphed into a nationalist rebellion and then into an Islamist struggle against Westerners.<\/p>\n

Nearly a century earlier, Britain had formed Iraq from three separate Ottoman imperial provinces — Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul.\u00a0 The 2003 invasion blew up that synthetic state, held together first by British overlords and then by Saddam\u2019s brutal dictatorship.\u00a0 American policymakers seemed genuinely surprised<\/a> by all this.<\/p>\n

Those in Washington never adequately understood the essential conundrum of forced regime change in Iraq.\u00a0 \u201cDemocracy\u201d there would inevitably result in Shia majority dominance of an artificial state.\u00a0 Empowering the Shia drove the Sunni minority — long accustomed to power — into the embrace of armed, motivated Islamists.\u00a0 When societies fracture as Iraq\u2019s did, often enough the worst among us rise to the occasion.\u00a0 As the poet William Butler Yeats so famously put it, \u201cThings fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed\u2026 The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the invasion played<\/a> directly into Osama bin Laden\u2019s hands, fueling his narrative of an American \u201cwar on Islam.\u201d\u00a0 In the process, the U.S. also destabilized Iraq\u2019s neighbors and the region, spreading extremists to Syria and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

That David Petraeus\u2019s surge \u201cworked\u201d is perhaps the greatest myth<\/a> of all.\u00a0 It was true that the steps he took resulted in a decrease in violence after 2007, largely because he paid off the Sunni tribes, not because of the modest U.S. troop increase ordered from Washington.\u00a0 By then, the Shia had already won the sectarian civil war for Baghdad, intensifying<\/a> Sunni-Shia residential segregation there and so temporarily lessening the capacity for carnage.<\/p>\n

That post-surge \u201ccalm\u201d was, however, no more than a tactical pause in an ongoing regional sectarian war.\u00a0 No fundamental problems had been resolved in post-Saddam Iraq, including the nearly impossible task of integrating Sunni and Kurdish minorities into a coherent national whole.\u00a0 Instead, Washington had left a highly sectarian<\/a> Shia strongman, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in control of the government and internal security forces, while al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI (nonexistent prior to the invasion), never would be eradicated.\u00a0 Its leadership, further radicalized<\/a> in U.S. Army prisons, bided its time, waiting for an opportunity to win back Sunni fealty.<\/p>\n

Luckily for AQI, as soon as the U.S. military was pulled out of the country, Maliki promptly cracked down hard on peaceful Sunni protests.\u00a0 He even had his Sunni vice president sentenced to death<\/a> in absentia under the most questionable of circumstances.\u00a0 Maliki\u2019s ineptitude would prove an AQI godsend.<\/p>\n

Islamists, including AQI, also took advantage <\/a>of events in Syria. \u00a0Autocrat Bashar al-Assad\u2019s brutal repression of his own protesting Sunni majority gave them just the opening they needed. \u00a0Of course, the revolt there might never have occurred had not the invasion of Iraq destabilized<\/a> the entire region.\u00a0 In 2014, the former AQI leaders, having absorbed some of Saddam\u2019s cashiered officers into their new forces, triumphantly took<\/a> a series of Iraqi cities, including Mosul, sending the Iraqi army fleeing. They then declared a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Many Iraqi Sunnis naturally turned to the newly established \u201cIslamic State\u201d (ISIS) for protection.<\/p>\n

Mission (Un)Accomplished!<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hardly controversial these days to point out that the 2003 invasion (aka Operation Iraqi Freedom), far from bringing freedom to that country, sowed chaos.\u00a0 Toppling Saddam\u2019s brutal regime tore down the edifice of a regional system that had stood for nearly a century.\u00a0 However inadvertently, the U.S. military lit the fire that burned down the old order.<\/p>\n

As it turned out, no matter the efforts of the globe\u2019s greatest military, no easy foreign solution existed when it came to Iraq.\u00a0 It rarely does.\u00a0 Unfortunately, few in Washington were willing to accept such realities.\u00a0 Think of that as the twenty-first-century American Achilles’ heel: unwarranted optimism about the efficacy of U.S. power.\u00a0 Policy in these years might best be summarized as: \u201cwe\u201d have to do something<\/em>, and military force is the best — perhaps the only — feasible option.<\/p>\n

Has it worked? Is anybody, including Americans, safer?\u00a0 Few in power even bother to ask such questions.\u00a0 But the data is there.\u00a0 The Department of State counted just 348 terrorist attacks worldwide<\/a> in 2001 compared with 11,774 attacks<\/a> in 2015. That\u2019s right: at best, <\/em>America\u2019s 15-year \u201cwar on terror\u201d failed to significantly reduce international terrorism; at worst, its actions helped make matters 30 times worse.<\/p>\n

Recall the Hippocratic oath: \u201cFirst do no harm.\u201d\u00a0 And remember Osama bin Laden\u2019s stated goal<\/a> on 9\/11: to draw conventional American forces into attritional campaigns in the heart of the Middle East. Mission accomplished<\/a>!<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s world of \u201calternative facts<\/a>,\u201d it\u2019s proven remarkably easy to ignore such empirical data and so avoid thorny questions. \u00a0Recent events and contemporary political discourse even suggest that the country\u2019s political elites now inhabit a post-factual <\/a>environment; in terms of the Greater Middle East, this has been true for years.<\/p>\n

It couldn\u2019t be more obvious that Washington\u2019s officialdom regularly and repeatedly drew erroneous lessons from the recent past and ignored a hard truth staring them in the face: U.S. military action in the Middle East has solved nothing.\u00a0 At all.\u00a0 Only the government cannot seem to accept this.\u00a0 Meanwhile, an American fixation on one unsuitable term — \u201cisolationism<\/a>\u201d — masks a more apt description of American dogma in this period: hyper-interventionism.<\/p>\n

As for military leaders, they struggle to admit failure when they — and their troops — have sacrificed so much sweat and blood in the region.\u00a0 Senior officers display the soldier\u2019s tendency to confuse<\/a> performance with effectiveness, staying busy with being successful.\u00a0 Prudent strategy requires differentiating between doing a lot and doing the right things. As Einstein reputedly opined, \u201cInsanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.\u201d<\/p>\n

A realistic look at America\u2019s recent past in the Greater Middle East and a humbler perspective on its global role suggest two unsatisfying but vital conclusions.\u00a0 First, false lessons and misbegotten collective assumptions contributed to and created much of today\u2019s regional mess.\u00a0 As a result, it\u2019s long past time to reassess recent history and challenge long-held suppositions.\u00a0 Second, policymakers badly overestimated the efficacy of American power, especially via the military, to shape foreign peoples and cultures to their desires.\u00a0 In all of this, the agency of locals and the inherent contingency of events were conveniently swept aside.<\/p>\n

So what now? It should be obvious (but probably isn\u2019t in Washington) that it\u2019s well past time for the U.S. to bring its incessant urge to respond militarily to the crisis of the moment under some kind of control.\u00a0 Policymakers should accept realistic limitations on their ability to shape the world to America\u2019s desired image of it.<\/p>\n

Consider the last few decades in Iraq and Syria.\u00a0 In the 1990s, Washington employed economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein and his regime.\u00a0 The result: tragedy to the tune of half a million dead children<\/a>. Then it tried invasion and democracy promotion.\u00a0 The result: tragedy — including 4,500-plus<\/a> dead American soldiers, a few trillion dollars<\/a> down the drain, more than 200,000<\/a> dead Iraqis, and millions more<\/a> displaced in their own country or in flight as refugees.<\/p>\n

In response, in Syria the U.S. tried only limited intervention.\u00a0 Result: tragedy — upwards of 300,000 dead<\/a> and close to seven million<\/a> more turned into refugees.<\/p>\n

So will tough talk<\/a> and escalated military action finally work this time around as the Trump administration faces off against ISIS?\u00a0 Consider what happens even if the U.S achieves a significant rollback of ISIS.\u00a0 Even if, in conjunction with allied Kurdish or Syrian rebel forces, ISIS’s \u201ccapital,\u201d Raqqa, is taken and the so-called caliphate destroyed, the ideology isn\u2019t going away.\u00a0 Many of its fighters are likely to transition back to an insurgency and there will be no end to international terror in ISIS\u2019s name.\u00a0 In the meantime, none of this will have solved the underlying problems of artificial states now at the edge of collapse or beyond, divided ethno-religious groups, and anti-Western nationalist and religious sentiments.\u00a0 All of it begs the question: What if Americans are incapable of helping (at least in a military sense)?<\/p>\n

A real course correction is undoubtedly impossible without at least a willingness to reconsider and reframe our recent historical experiences.\u00a0 If the 2016 election is any indication, however, a Trump administration with the present line-up of national security chiefs (who fought<\/a> in these very wars) won\u2019t meaningfully alter either the outlook or the policies that led us to this moment.\u00a0 Candidate Trump offered a hollow promise — to \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d — conjuring up a mythical era that never was.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton offered only remarkably dated and stale rhetoric about America as the \u201cindispensable nation<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the new Trump era, neither major party seems capable of escaping a shared commitment to the legends rather than the facts of America\u2019s recent past in the Greater Middle East.\u00a0 Both sides remain eerily confident that the answers to contemporary foreign policy woes lie in a mythical version of that past, whether Trump\u2019s imaginary 1950s paradise or Clinton\u2019s fleeting mid-1990s \u201cunipolar moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both ages are long gone, if they ever really existed at all.\u00a0 Needed is some fresh thinking about our militarized version of foreign policy and just maybe an urge, after all these years, to do so much less. Patriotic fables certainly feel good, but they achieve little.\u00a0 My advice: dare to be discomfited.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________<\/p>\n

Major Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, <\/em>Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge<\/a>.\u00a0 He lives with his wife and four sons near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

[Note:<\/strong> The views expressed in this article are those of the author in an unofficial capacity and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Command and General Staff College, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2017 Danny Sjursen<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Feb 2017 – The United States has already lost — its war for the Middle East, that is. Unfortunately, it\u2019s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush\u2019s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama\u2019s quiet shift to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn\u2019t turn the tide either. For all President Trump\u2019s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest assured that, at best, he\u2019ll barely move the needle and, at worst\u2026 but why even go there? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-militarism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}