Bruce Thornton: Still Not Learning From History Bad ideas and practices that we have witnessed over and over again.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/still-not-learning-from-history/
From its beginning 2400 years ago in ancient Greece, the purpose of history has been to counsel the present by documenting the mistakes of the past. Thucydides explicitly made this goal the purpose of his History of the Peloponnesian War: to memorialize “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” At the violent end of the Roman Republic, the historian Livy similarly explains his intent: to shows us “what to imitate,” and “mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result.”
Yet here we are, two millennia later, despite our wealth, technological advances, and much vaster knowledge, still repeating the mistakes and follies not just of the distant past, but of the last half-century. The four years of the Biden administration’s failing foreign policy are the consequence of bad ideas and practices that we have already witnessed over and over.
Until we pay attention to the blunders of the past, and acknowledge the tragic nature of human affairs, we will continue to let misplaced idealism, electoral politics, ideological mantras, and sheer laziness endanger our national security and interests.
The conflict ignited by Hamas’ war crimes on October 7 features another lesson our foreign policy and national security mavens have failed to learn. U.S. forces in the region have been attacked 170 times by Iranian proxies, with scores of U.S. troops wounded, some critically, and three killed. Yet during that time, the Biden administration has responded with telegraphed and limited missile attacks on proxy assets in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the Red Sea. Yet the aggression against our forces and international shipping has persisted.
Obviously, a political party going into a presidential election with a failed candidate suffering from dementia and underwater in the polls, is loath to add the uncertainty of serious military action against Iran. So the financier and provider of materiel for its proxies has not had its mind concentrated by a serious degradation of its military infrastructure and armaments. Moreover, it’s clear that Iran is also providing targeting information to the Houthis’ attacks on commercial and military shipping in the Red Sea. Yet Iran continues to get a pass.
And we know why. The Biden foreign policy establishment is still slaves to “new world order” talismans like “diplomatic engagement” and “negotiated settlements.” The former is chin-wagging with photo ops, the latter mere “parchment barriers.” They create the illusion of action, while avoiding the uncertainty and unforeseen contingencies that attend the use of force on the scale needed to concentrate the mullahs’ minds and reinvigorate our weakened deterrence power.
Then there’s the bogeyman of “escalation,” which doesn’t trouble Iran and its proxies, but does paralyze the greatest military power in world history. This administration is also mired in an either-or fallacy: either we avoid Iranian targets, as the Biden team is doing, and run the exorbitant risk of empowering the enemy and emboldening it to further aggression; or we ignite World War III.
But as Alan Dershowitz points out,
“There are, of course, alternatives less than all-out war, and more than attacks on proxies. They involve the bombing of military targets inside Iran. These include sites used for Iran’s nuclear program, its naval bases and ships, its military drone production, its oil and gas facilities and its command centers. All of these could be accomplished from the air and sea without a ground invasion, and without the loss of American lives an invasion would risk.”
And how about restoring the punitive sanctions and “maximum pressure” that Donald Trump put on Iran’s economy? Or taking out the commander of the expeditionary Quds Force Esmail Qaani, whose predecessor, Qassem Soleimani, President Trump obliterated? The foreign policy big brains squealed that Trump was being reckless and sparking a regional conflict. But Iran merely responded like the West, putting on a cruise-missile fireworks show that accomplished nothing. In fact, the whole region was pretty calm during Trump’s four years.
The history we’ve failed to learn from does not have to go back to the Twenties and Thirties of the 20th century for monitory examples, when the serial appeasement of Germany began before the ink was dry on the Versailles Treaty, and ended in the most destructive war in history. The Nineties and the rise of al Qaeda provide enough foreign policy decisions “shameful in the conception and shameful in the result.”
The first portent was the 1993 bombing of the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center, the first of several other bombings planned for the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the United Nations building. Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy publicized during the trial and in his book Willful Blindness, the traditional Islamic doctrines that motivated Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheik,” and his followers who carried out the attack. Though the explosion did not cause the destruction and the mass casualties the terrorists had hoped for, the audacity of the attack against the world’s greatest infidel power heartened and inspired jihadists across the globe, especially Osama bin Laden and the jihadist group al Qaeda he founded in 1988.
The Clinton administration, however, and many Americans did not understand or take seriously enough the nature of this enemy and its jihadist motives based on 14 centuries of Islamic precepts and doctrine. Bin Laden’s many rationales for attacking the infidel Americans were dismissed as the ravings on an “extremist,” a “heretic,” a “beard from the fringe,” or a kooky cultist like Jim Jones or David Koresh. Yet bin Laden’s sermons on American degeneracy and weakness were based on orthodox Islamic “creed,” as he said, and reprised the arguments of the neo-jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, the premier influence on modern Islamic jihadism.
As the Nineties progressed, this rhetoric became a gruesome reality:
- In November 1995, a car bombing killed five Americans in a U.S.-Saudi training facility in Riyadh.
- In June 1996, another car bomb killed 19 Americans and wounded 372 in a residential complex housing Air Force personnel near Dhahran. Bin Laden credited those murders with the U.S. reductions of its number of troops in Saudi Arabia.
- In August 1998, al Qaeda launched simultaneous attacks on two U.S. embassies in east Africa. In the Nairobi bombing, 12 Americans died.
- In October 2000, a fishing boat full of explosives blew a 40-by 40-foot hole in the destroyer U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding 39.
None of these lethal attacks on our military personnel were met with serious reprisals. The usual post-Vietnam fear and political costs of “escalation,” along with photogenic dead troops and foreign civilians, inhibited President Clinton’s response. Also, just as today, the doctrines of the globalist “rules-based international order” downgraded military force, and in dealing with the jihadists privileged instead “diplomatic outreach” and “dialogue,” and economic incentives to change their behavior.
More dangerous, the Clinton foreign policy team, which included holdovers from Jimmy Carter’s administration, were internationalists reluctant to use force, and didn’t grasp the deeply religious motivations of Islamic jihadists. To Clinton’s team, as Daniel Pipes wrote, “most Islamists were seen as decent people, serious individuals” who, according to the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, were espousing “‘a renewed emphasis on traditional values.”’ Unfortunately, those traditions included the Koran injunction to “kill the infidel wherever you find him.”
As a result, Clinton’s response to those attacks were tentative and limited. The murders in Riyadh were treated as a criminal matter instead of an attack on the whole nation and its way of life. Then as now, the attackers were aided by Iran, and kinetic retaliation was discussed but, as one White House official wrote, “The anger was never fortified by any coherent depth of thought or planning. Every tactic brought up soon ran out of support or was forgotten. It was all momentary.”
Also then, as now, strategically useless, showy barrages of cruise missiles substituted for action. For example, in August 1998, a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan misidentified as a chemical weapons manufacturer was destroyed, killing a night watchman and putting 300 people out of work. In another useless display, 66 cruise missiles were fired at two al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan that bin Laden supposedly was visiting. Six militants were killed, but bin Laden had just left for Kabul. At a cost of $70 million dollars, as CIA officer Michael Scheuer put it, the attack had done “the work of day laborers armed with thirty-dollar sledge hammers.”
Finally, then as now, missish rules of engagement squandered several opportunities to take bin Laden out. One good chance to kidnap bin Laden while he was attending evening prayers in a mosque was lost when the plan was vetoed out of fear that the Muslim world would be offended, and jihadists who hadn’t participated in the embassy bombings would be killed. Just like today, international public relations trumped punishing those who murdered our citizens, at the cost of our powers of deterrence. And bin Laden enjoyed a huge boost to his prestige for once again eluding the American infidels and exposing their weakness.
The wages of those failures were the smoking ruins in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania, and 2996 dead.
So here we go again, our soldiers taking casualties from Iran’s proxies, and our leaders losing their nerve and not punishing the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism that for 45 years has been at war with the U.S. and killing our citizens with impunity. Such are the wages of historical amnesia, political calculations, and feckless foreign policy idealism.
Comments are closed.
