Bombing Our Own Middle Eastern Military Intervention Is, in Fact, the America You Grew Up With

October 18, 2019 

The Interpreter NYT                

There seemed to be no more perfect symbol of President Trump’s subversion of America’s traditional role in the world: the United States military bombing its own base in Syria. Mr. Trump had ordered such a rapid, disorderly retreat from the country that this was the only way to keep the base and its equipment from falling into foreign hands.

“Wow,” Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois wrote on Twitter, summing up the prevailing reaction. “Is this the America you grew up believing in?”

Whatever Mr. Kinzinger and other Americans choose to believe, this is, in fact, the United States that they grew up with.

For decades, American military interventions have gone wrong in ways that led the United States to bomb its own bases, destroy its own equipment, turn on its former allies, have its former allies turn on it and, yes, abandon the people who risked everything for it.

While Mr. Trump has, as with so many things, taken that proclivity to new extremes, he is only building on a long-held American habit: trying to solve long-term problems with short-term military might and having that fail in ways that lead to drastic moments like this.

The United States has found itself compelled to bomb its own military bases and equipment with some regularity, particularly since 2001.

“It was fairly common in Afghanistan for US troops to demolish bases they were leaving,” Wesley Morgan, a military affairs reporter for Politico wrote on Twitter.

This included at least one episode of the United States bombing its own base, Mr. Morgan wrote: Combat Outpost Keating.

This was in late 2009, during President Obama’s so-called surge in Afghanistan. The base was in a mountain region along the Pakistan border; a place so remote and rural that the military was planning to cede it. Before the troops could leave, they were attacked and nearly overrun, forcing an exit so rapid that the base had to be bombed from above.

Five years later, the United States ended up bombing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of its own military equipment in Iraq.

The United States, you see, had supplied nearly the entire Iraqi military with tanks, guns, jeeps, artillery and the like. Having destroyed Iraq with American military equipment in 2003, the United States went about rebuilding it with more American military equipment.

But it turned out that no amount of export contracts with BAE Systems or General Dynamics could create a functioning state. When ragtag irregulars calling themselves the Islamic State invaded from across the border with Syria, the Iraqi Army largely ran or deserted. All that American equipment fell into the extremists’ hands, putting all of Iraq at risk. And so the United States used American weaponry to destroy the American weaponry it had given Iraqis to make Iraqis safer, in order to make Iraqis safer.

Those events are hardly identical to Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from Syria. But they have common elements.

Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan, like the American base in Syria represented what we may well look back on as an overextended mission that emerged out of hubristic faith in American might and confused internal politics — culminating in moments like this week’s self-bombing.

Mr. Obama and his generals had maneuvered one another into an open-ended mission in Afghanistan — much as Mr. Trump and his senior staff did in Syria. That led to an unclear strategy with grand but vague aims and with aggressive deployments like Keating that even the military came to see as unnecessary. In Syria, it led to mission creep, as the aim drifted from defeating the Islamic State to forcing Syrian elections and Iranian withdrawal.

And, in Iraq, the United States had, again and again, for what has now been 20 years, used short-term military might to solve long-term political problems. And, every time, that made the political problems worse.

First, it was President Clinton bombing Iraq in 1998 to punish it for refusing weapons inspectors. Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s leader, had refused the inspectors, internal documents later revealed, out of misapprehension that Mr. Clinton had been sincere in his threats to remove that leadership by force. The bombings did not exactly dissuade Hussein from his paranoia.

Then, in 2003, President Bush invaded Iraq, supposedly to remove an imminent threat to the United States, in the process creating a generation of much bigger threats.

By the time Mr. Obama bombed platoons’ worth of his own military’s equipment in Iraq, the country had been “saved” by American military action so many times that it was no longer able to provide for its own basic security. The result was a situation in which American intervention to roll back the Islamic State’s advance really had become the only way to fill the security vacuum there.

Instances of the United States bombing its own equipment are not just tragicomic aberrations. They encapsulate the familiar cycle of American interventions, particularly in the Middle East.

A problem emerges, creating a crisis of insecurity. Say, Libya’s implosion into the uprising and civil war. Or Saudi Arabia’s destabilizing, region-wide rivalry with Iran. Or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Or the emergence of extremist insurgents in Pakistan.

The American solution to this insecurity is often to fill the vacuum with military force. That might be reasonable in the short-term. But, for the United States, the use of force abroad often becomes its own end, in ways that worsen the long-term, underlying insecurity that compelled a response in the first place.

Countries are bombed to prove a point. Insurgents are crushed, whatever the cost to the surrounding community, because negotiating would be too politically costly back home, or simply unthinkable. Any action that humiliates or hurts the bad guys can be only a good thing. The use of force is a moral act in its own right.

There is frequently political capital, even pressure, for the short-term use of force, such as Mr. Obama’s intervention in Libya or Mr. Bush’s in Iraq. There is often less interest in solving the problems created by that use of force.

That has certainly applied to uphold American commitments to the people who fight on the United States’ behalf. Long before Mr. Trump withdrew from Syria, the United States withheld visas from thousands of Iraqis and Afghans who had put their lives at risk by aiding the American missions in their countries.

It happened on the watch of many of the same American lawmakers who backed the initial invasions and who now decry Mr. Trump’s abandonment of Kurdish groups that fought the Islamic State on American promises of support.

One of the people to denounce Mr. Trump’s withdrawal this week, if indirectly, was Mr. Bush, whose invasion of Iraq is considered a major precursor of the conflict in Syria. The former president said the United States were “becoming isolationist,” a change he called “destabilizing around the world.”

But the blame for the Middle East’s cycles of violence did not, in Mr. Bush’s telling, ultimately rests with the United States, but with one of the countries whose government Mr. Trump has threatened to depose by force.

As if to articulate a mirror image of how many Middle Easterners view the United States’ role in their region, Mr. Bush said, “I don’t think the Iranians believe a peaceful Middle East is in their national interest.”