OPINION:
The endless wars in the Middle East continue. America and the West, despite the most fervent wishes, can’t escape them. Despite President Obama’s insistence that he has pulled America out of the conflicts, an American role continues. It’s the curse of big power.
The American commitment seems to be escalating, if incrementally, with the news that another Navy SEAL has been killed, apparently in the offensive to retake the city of Mosul. The Pentagon is not particularly forthcoming with details. Mosul, population 2.5 million in northern Iraq, has been occupied since June 2014 by the Islamic State, or ISIS. Mosul is the nexus of the unspeakable cruelty and brutality visited on the region in the name of “faith.”
This is the third death announced since last autumn. Americans are, in theory, acting as noncombatants, but in the fog of war such distinction falls away quickly. What is publicly known is that these latest casualties are Special Forces or SEALs dispatched to Iraq to lend spine to the native troops, part of what President Obama ordered “to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIS.”
But Mr. Obama hurts his cause by refusing to acknowledge that the enemy in Iraq is radical Islamic terrorism, which has ties, however vague and obscure, to others of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. Many of these Muslims are neutered by an understandable fear of ISIS. So long as ISIS can claim that it is a new and rising Muslim caliphate, or worldwide regime, it will gather strength in the Islamic world.
Now a new danger emerges. By feeding American soldiers piecemeal into the effort to destroy ISIS, the president risks giving inadvertent assistance to ISIS. With its propaganda and financial manipulation, ISIS establishes ties to Islamic terrorist movements in Libya and North Africa, Indonesia, Syria and Iraq. Through its influence in the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS puts pressure on Turkey and Pakistan, which must deal with their own jihadi threats.
Stumbling into a war in the Middle East, with neither proper planning nor preparation, invites disaster. Incrementalism is no excuse for strategy, as the United States learned in Korea and Vietnam, and it inevitably leads to stalemate at best, or worse. A policeman’s lot is not a happy one, but it is the lot nevertheless of a great power called to lead, not from behind, but straight ahead.
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