Yazidi refugees
Once again, Barack Obama, our peace president, has authorized acts of war.
It would seem that no one who occupies the office of president is able to resist the call to war.
We just can’t leave this open sore we call Iraq alone.
The President has explained that his current foreign policy stance is based on the theory of “No victor, no vanquished.”
Some might fairly ask, is that what the US is really doing in Iraq?
President Obama ordered drones into the skies, and jet planes to commence fire, to drop quarter ton bombs in Northern Iraq, because the Yazidi, an ethnic and religious minority, were stuck on a mountaintop named Sinjar, starving and under attack from the Islamic State that insisted the Yazidi renounce their religion and convert, or die.
President Obama ordered military intervention to thwart the Islamic State.
When we favor one side over another in a military exercise, we have to admit we really are choosing a preferred “victor.”
We are also up to a lot more than just saving the Yazidi off a mountain top.
The President announced, “This is going to be a long-term project.”
Then he said a few days later, that we would stand with Iraq if Baghdad could form a unified and inclusive government to counter the Sunni militants.
This is mission leap — not mission creep.
Every military intervention poses as defensive or humanitarian to win the public’s support.
Worse, there are plenty of data points to prove that we’ve had no earthly idea what we were doing in the Middle East.
The last Administration didn’t know either. When it was the last Administration’s war, Senator Obama called it a “dumb war.”
We left Iraq, or we thought we left Iraq in December 2011, because we never should have been there.
We went there to find weapons that never existed.
We invaded like a bull in a China Shop, intervening among a people burdened by ancient, complex and irreconcilable religious differences we plainly did not and do not understand. Indeed, the leading news organizations can’t keep straight who’s who in the current conflict.
We only recently sent several hundred troops to Iraq. We couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together in Iraq when we had hundreds of thousands of troops there.
Now we have the President saying he wants to stay in Iraq with a military presence to give space to Baghdad to fight back against the militants.
In the wings we have the original war-mongering Senate duo, Messrs. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, demanding military action to drive the militants out of Iraq and Syria.
We citizens can only affect the course of this nation’s military strategy if we learn that we may not trust what our leaders say and that we must instead carefully study what they do.
It appears we are mimicking the British Empire’s ambition in World War I to redraw the maps of Mesopotamia with France, and perhaps we seek to seize from the fog of civil war how we may draw a new map favoring our hegemony in the region.
John Jay in the Federalist papers, No. 4, warned against the monarchical impulse “to make war when [the nation is] … to get nothing by it…”
Jay concluded that such impulses may cause a nation “to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of [its] people.”
That’s the wrong-headed war we are undertaking right now and it’s high time we stopped this military misadventure.