Sunday, June 15, 2014

America's love affair with foreign policy failure.

A crucial aspect of our love affair with foreign policy failure is our fanatical determination to fight limited wars – i.e., carrying the fight to the enemy just to the point of causing him excruciating agony and then backing off far enough until the children's airlift can begin.

If our enemy has outside supporters, we bend over backwards to pretend they don't exist or we define them in such a way that the truth of their hostility to us is hidden. (E.g., "Religion of Peace.") Heck, we even contort ourselves to disguise our mortal enemies themselves. (E.g., "Uncle Joe," "Che," "Just some guy in the neighborhood.")

Here's one thoughtful take on how our fatal weakness has played out in the Middle East and environs:

We were never willing to engage the two drivers of global Islamic terror, Iran and Saudi Arabia (although Pakistan is moving up fast these days), and instead settled for a strategy in which we soothed ourselves with the notion that if we could just establish “democracy” in Iraq, this would inevitably lead to the fall of Islamofascism in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Only Americans could be both gutless and gullible enough to fall for a load of hokum like that. As a strategy it as always been an easily predictable failure – particularly since we left its two strongest enemies, Saudi Arabia and Iran – in place to oppose it and do everything possible to destroy it. And now the whole thing is falling apart, to the great surprise of absolutely nobody who actually paid attention to what was going on.

We are not sending troops back into Iraq. George W. Bush poisoned that well for a generation. We will be gone from Afghanistan shortly, and then the laughable “democracy” there will fall to the Taliban.

We lost, because we never fought to win. All those American deaths were a despicable sham, because those men were sacrificed in a “conflict” American never intended to fight with Islamic terror in general.

"Painful Question, More Painful Answer." By Bill Quick, Daily Pundit, 6/13/14.

H/t: Cold Fury.

1 comment:

KG said...

The key line: "We lost, because we never fought to win."
That's true of all Western countries nowadays.