A year ago the Islamic State (ISIS) seemed ludicrous. The President called them "the Junior Varsity team" of terror. Perhaps so, but through the skillful use of weaponry and propaganda, this apocalyptic death cult has placed itself center-stage for world attention. If our own homes are not at risk (yet), our Enlightenment values certainly are.
https://davidkeithlaw.wordpress.com/...
Americans are rightly wary of any march to war. The U.S. intelligence apparatus was hijacked over a decade ago and committed America to a disastrous folly. That disaster not only inflicted harm on the United States (the dead, the maimed, the insane cost) but left behind a snakepit of unresolved ethnic and religious factionalism. Angry and armed with excuses and weaponry, those factions have taken to war.
Today, the U.S. and other western countries are now looking down the barrel of a true threat: not to our neighbourhoods (today) but to civilization itself, in the form of a brutal and bloody reign of terror being visited upon vulnerable target groups of Muslims and others in the Mid-East.
Unfortunately, the goal of one group at least - the Islamic State - appears to be a reign of terror, on land and on the Internet. The U.S. and other western countries appear to have no strategy but to react to increasingly horrific provocations from ISIS. We would be fools to be provoked, but we would be greater fools to ignore it.
Does America and the West have a duty to defend those values where they are under attack? Is there a self interest in doing so? As that war penetrates our islands of calm (9/11, London, Ottawa, Sydney, Charlie Hebdo, Copenhagen) what strategy do we adopt?
There is a legitimate argument that the United States has no moral standing to presume or to impose what it considers to be "right" in the Middle East. On the other hand, the United States took an imperfectly stable region, blew it apart and drove away.
Even if one were to blame the West for the current state of affairs (which would be ridiculously limited and bigoted - the Syrians, Saudis, Iranians, Iraqis et al are in my view, far more responsible) isn't that an argument FOR intervention? "You broke it, you bought it?"
It is difficult to find a moral or a practical case for passivity. And it is difficult to square passivity with the progressive tradition: what would President (Bill) Clinton have done in the face of this? Or President Al Gore? We know what JFK would have done, although hopefully with better results than his successor.
Even as people remain angry about the huge lie and the huge cost of the Iraq War, the time has passed where "being angry" is enough. There has to be a responsible, coherent and effective strategy to address the evil mess left behind in that war. We have no reason to trust the Right to come up with it. What can progressives do, aside from complain about reality? THAT is the question.
Eleven past diaries on this topic:
https://davidkeithlaw.wordpress.com/...