America’s Reckless War Against Evil --Why It’s Self-Defeating and Has No End

[KoKo]

America’s Reckless War Against Evil--Why It’s Self-Defeating and Has No End
By Ira Chernus--Dec. 8 TomGram

Oh, no! Not another American war against evil!

This time, it’s the Islamic State (IS). After the attacks in Paris, Barack Obama, spokesman-in-chief for the United States of America, called that crew “the face of evil.” Shades of George W. Bush. The “evildoers” are back. And from every mountaintop, it seems, America now rings with calls to ramp up its war machine.

By the way, George W., how did that last war against the “evildoers” work out for you? Not quite the way you expected, right? I bet you didn’t imagine that your Global War on Terror would plant the seeds of an Islamic State and turn significant stretches of Iraq (and Syria) into fertile soil in which IS would grow into a brand new, even more frightening enemy.

But that’s the way wars against evil always seem to work.

Pardon me if I vent my exasperation with all the Washington policymakers, past and present, surrounded by their so-called experts and those war-drum-beating pundits in the media. I know I shouldn’t be shocked anymore. I’ve seen it often enough as a historian studying wars against evil in the past -- ever since biblical times, in fact -- and as a citizen watching wars in my own lifetime, ever since the one that tore Vietnam (and, incidentally, America) apart.

Still, it drives me crazy to watch policymakers and experts making the same dumb mistakes time after time, several mistakes, actually, which synergistically add up to one self-defeating blunder after another.

What’s worse, the dominant trend in public opinion is so often on the side of just those mistakes. You’d think someone would learn something. And in that someone I include “we, the people,” the nation as a whole.

Yet now, facing the Islamic State, you guessed it: we’re doing it all over again.

Let me try to lay out our repetitive mistakes, all six of them, one by one, starting with...

Mistake Number One: Treating the enemy as absolute evil, not even human.

Barack Obama called the Paris tragedy “an attack on all of humanity,” which means that, even for the president, IS fighters stand outside that category. They are evidently some other species and merely appear to be human. And this was the mildest of descriptions in this overheated political season of ours. “The face of evil” sounds modest indeed compared to the vivid images offered by the Republicans vying to replace him. For Ben Carson, IS are a bunch of “rabid dogs”; for Ted Cruz, “scorpions.” Donald Trump calls them "insane," "animals."

All point to the same dangerous conclusion: Since we are human and they are not, we are their opposite in every way. If they are absolute evil, we must be the absolute opposite. It’s the old apocalyptic tale: God’s people versus Satan’s. It ensures that we never have to admit to any meaningful connection with the enemy. By this logic, it couldn’t be more obvious that the nation our leaders endlessly call “exceptional” and “indispensable,” the only nation capable of leading the rest of the world in the war against evil, bears no relationship to that evil.

That leads to...

CONTINUED AT:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176078/tomgram%3A_ira_chernus%2C_six_mistakes_on_the_road_to_permanent_war/#more

[FlatBaroque]

1. For most sentient beings around the planet

it is pretty clear that the US/UK/Israel foreign policy is to create the conditions for conflict, death and destruction. Why? Because it is a most profitable strategy for the bankers and the 1%.

[phantom power]

2. Remember: self-defeating and endless are what the MIC wants.

this is the best thing that ever happened to the MIC. An endless war that spawns more war instead of peace. They can get rich selling weaponry until the end of time.

[yurbud]

3. it's not a really a war against evil if we and our allies keep backing the evil before

(and often while) we claim to fight it.

[Blue_Tires]

4. Hollande and other European leaders

all used language at least as sharp as PBO's if not sharper...

But yeah, let Chernus keep pretending Obama is the sole catalyst for this whole thing... It just means he doesn't know his subject matter, and his 'commentary' can be simply dismissed...

I swear to Christ, does *every* emoprog blogger try to frame this conflict as a strict, binary "Obama versus Syria" discussion?