The 'Muddled East'

Joe Honick

A few years ago, I asked, “If war comes in the Middle East, how do we know whom to defend?”  It was a valid question then.  Sadly, it is even more valid today…sadly, yes, but more dangerously so than ever.

When I raised the question then, we only had two worlds with whom to contend: the Middle East nations and the politicians of the United States who did not know where to plant their opinions.

At this point, the only bipartisanship we can assess rests on the reality that seven straight Democratic and Republican presidents have managed to turn the Middle East into the Muddled East. 

The only difference today is the foolishness of President Trump not to have considered the Russian reality that had not existed before.   Consider at least the possibility had the American Chief Executive used the relationship he had developed with Russia’s Putin to force Syria’s Assad’s hand… finally.

That option is gone!  Whatever your feelings about Russia, the people are tough and proud and just as smart as we are.

What brought us to such a point that the word “delicate” defies definition?

Although Jimmy Carter was able to negotiate some kind of lowering of Israeli-Palestinian stuff for a time, he was soon caught up with a hostage crisis in Iran as rebels took over the American Embassy and took 90 hostages.  Important to note was and remains that the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran and supported the student takeover.  Remember that name.

The series of events that made eventual freeing of the hostages was politically costly to Carter though they were all free by the time his successor, Ronald Reagan officially took office. During the election campaign, however, Carter took a beating from the Reagan operation for not being more aggressive.

But then Reagan came on the scene and took to the Iraqi boss Saddam Hussein because the former California governor and screen actor simply detested the Iranians.

First, Ronald Reagan poured billions of dollars and arms into the pockets and arsenals of Saddam Hussein because we (the president that is or was) did not like Iran.  He also sent lots of Marines into the Beirut scene.  It was to be a sign of American power.  Sadly, on October 24, 1983, the unguarded Marine barracks at Beirut Airport was hit by a terrorist truck loaded with TNT killing 161 Marines and sailors and wounding about 75 more.

But the handsome, smooth speaking Reagan was hardly the consummate militarist conservative later Republicans tried to make him out, although he did make lots of headlines lecturing the Russian president Gorbachev to “Tear down that wall!” referring of course to the wall the Communists had built to separate East and West Germany.  The only real battle authorized by him was against the 600-man army of Grenada, a conflict that took about a day and a half.

But any real peace in that part of the world was hardly much.  Clinton authorized Operation Desert Strike and he warned Saddam Hussein about developing nukes.  He also moved the Israelis and Palestinians a little closer with something called the Oslo accords, one more effort that eventually blew up as well.

The world knows of course how the two Bushes, father and son, managed to find time to launch wars in the Middle East desert.  Papa Bush wanted to be sure he protected the oil fields of the Saudis.  George thought he dreamed of Weapons of Mass Destruction and decided on an invasion to find them in 2003.

In fact, the Iraqi invasion he launched (and still seems to continue) was one of the most welcome by America’s defense contractor industry and who, together with the massive recruitment of anyone and everyone who wanted to fight (there was no draft anymore, courtesy of Richard Nixon), ran up a bill rumored to about a trillion dollars.  At one time, after things had moved to Afghanistan, there were more contractor personnel in the place than American troops.  Of course, the contractor folks lived a lot better!

So, as Barack Obama came along, promising to end the war in Iraq and bring the American boys and girls home, one might have thought peace would finally have come to at least that theater of war.  It was of course not to be as something called ISIS or ISIL suddenly arose as a powerful force doing business as savagely as the dictator of Syria. 

If things aren’t bad enough, we and others have had to do battle with groups called Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, groups that seem never to run short of arms and the shells they fire as each operation manages to screw up territory wherever they appear, including the Israeli-Palestine conflict. 

Still worse, ISIS conducts its recruitment activities by telephone, Internet and other informal means that seem to draw ne’er do-wells in America and elsewhere to blow up people and places including themselves while boasting a fully operational economy and mini-government no one seems able to destroy.

Among those who have not only threatened to knock off the ISIS bunch has been that ever-so-modest fellow Donald Trump.  He not only promised to quickly rid the planet of ISIS if elected but knew more about their activities than the generals who run the day to day operations of our armed forces! 

Well, he hasn’t done it any better than anyone else.  And, lacking any perceivable strategy, even with what he might call the lesser talents of those generals, and even after witnessing the kinds of beheadings, exploding mosques and other actions conducted by ISIS, it took one day of Syrian gassing for this president suddenly to launch millions of dollars of missiles dumped on a Syrian airfield to, as some of his Trumkins claim, “send a message to the Syrian dictator!”

So, what’s the problem?  The problem, as any schoolkid even knows, is that Syria’s boss Bashar Assad, who long ago knocked off more than a half million of his own people and exiled a million more, now has a powerful ally named Vladimir Putin and his own people on hand.

Despite the ugliness of the alleged gassing of civilians, including children and babies to try to quell the long-standing rebellion against his government, it was really one more day in the Syrian boss’s authoritarian strategy that had not met much in the way of American substantial combat.

But now new lines are drawn.

When I was younger, much wiser people taught me that if you took the chance to talk loudly, carried a big stick and threatened surprises yet to come, you’d better have a “therefore” available to prove you had a real plan to follow.

The reality is there are some among us who simply thrill when we do things like launch missiles to look tough with little realization others can do the same.  The additional question is what on earth took Trump so long to realize what has been going on in the Syrian mess that has seen so much bloodshed for so very long?  It should not have taken the gassing of innocents to know that hundreds of thousands had died before all this and about a million were exiled.

In the end, whenever it comes, we are now on a far more slippery path than ever in the Muddled Middle East, and every one of those seven American presidents have played a role in its present and dangerous confusion.  It is the kind of bipartisanship we really did not need in order to prove American influence in the world. 

President Donald Trump is heavily obligated to prove damned fast that he indeed has a “therefore” readily available.

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Joseph J. Honick is president of GMA International in Bainbridge Island, Wash.