Thursday 12 February 2015

US policy informed by expert dunces

[What follows is an excerpt from an article by Bruce Fein published yesterday on the website of The Washington Times:]

US foreign policy is informed by expert dunces, who chronically give birth to calamities. (...)

Exemplary is the advice of Kenneth M Pollack, a senior fellow at the prestigious Brookings Institution, to bring stability and legitimacy to the government of Iraq through a Shiite-Sunni power sharing dispensation. Writing in The New York Times (“ISIS is Losing Iraq. But What Happens Next?” Feb 4, 2015), Mr Pollack insinuates that US national security would be profoundly impaired if Iraq falls into a Shiite-Sunni civil war.

That conclusion is far from self-evident, and Mr Pollack fails to articulate a single reason for believing that it is true. Numerous countries are plagued with civil strife irrelevant to the security of the United States. Think of Somalia, Libya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Mali, the Central African Republic, Sudan, South Sudan, Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

The United States does not revel in the misery of other peoples. But our national security would be no more implicated in a Shiite-Sunni civil war than it was by the Rwandan genocide of Tutus by Hutsi in 1994. (...)

In 1991, the United States encouraged Iraq’s Marsh Arabs to revolt against Saddam Hussein, and then abandoned them to Saddam’s mercy. The United State supported Saddam in his 1980-88 war with Iran, and then switched to overthrow and kill him in 2003. The United States normalized relations with Libya’s Col Muammar Gaddafi for destroying weapons of mass destruction, renouncing terrorism, and paying compensation for the Lockerbie bombing. Then we flipped and commenced war against Gaddafi in 2011, which led to his ouster and murder by our allies.

No Shiite or Sunni in Iraq with minimal intelligence would trust the United States not to double-cross them, for instance, abandoning Iraq’s Sunnis to cut a nuclear deal with Shiite Iran, or betraying Iraq’s Shiites to solidify relations with Saudi Arabia, including undiminished production of oil to keep international prices low and Russia, Venezuela, and Iran economically destitute.

Expert dunces need to be driven out of the nation’s foreign policy arena as Jesus drove out money changers from the Temple.

[Another relevant article by Bruce Fein can be accessed here.]

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