Andrew Sullivan found himself as irate as The Hot Screen at the general reaction to Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria and Afghanistan. He, too, identifies this widespread opposition as the manifestation of an establishment consensus supporting endless American intervention in the Middle East, despite equally endless evidence demonstrating the insanity of such policy. Of U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war, he writes, “We should not be asking why Trump has decided to nip this in the bud, following his clear and popular mandate to get us out of the region. We should be asking how on earth did the Establishment find a way to occupy yet another Middle Eastern country without any democratic buy-in at all.”
Sullivan hits several important points that I didn’t touch on in my own piece. First, he suggests that just as those on the right have been motivated by neo-conservative dreams of U.S. dominance of the Middle East, some on the left side of the spectrum have supported a “liberal internationalism” that supports interventions on humanitarian grounds. Sullivan argues that this justification was used and discredited in the Obama administration’s forays into both Syria and Libya. To me, it also suggests the ways in which American military force seems to possess magnetic appeal to those who hold power, a manifestation of that tried-and-true adage that for a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. This bipartisan American belief in the moral use of violence is one of the single greatest character flaws of our nation, abetted by the growth of the Pentagon’s bureaucratic and budgetary power in a way that distorts our politics immensely.
Sullivan also notes the treacherousness of involving ourselves in Middle Eastern conflicts we have no national interest in, like the Sunni-Shiite split that was so great a factor in the Iraq invasion turning into such a catastrophe. I worry that even at this late date, not enough Americans are aware that the Muslim world is hardly monolithic, and that our siding with one sect over another entwines us in dynamics that are the very definition of none of our business.
Sullivan also elaborates on the connection between our ongoing occupations in the Middle East and the rise of Trump, pointing out that both Obama and Trump ran, and won (though, with Trump, with all the usual asterisks about his victory), on platforms that called for extricating the U.S. from Iraq and Afghanistan. He suggests that Trump supporters are opposed to a government that defies the will of the people, and that the wars in the Middle East, in the face of the public’s growing lack of support, helped fuel a backlash in favor of someone who seemed not so beholden to establishment opinion.
But Sullivan’s willingness to credit Trump for his withdrawal decisions, premised on the president carrying out a campaign promise in the face of adverse pressures, fails to persuade me, and seems more borne of Sullivan’s effort to demonstrate how insane establishment opinion is: it’s so crazy that a crazy man was needed to turn things around! Rather, we have plenty of evidence that Trump is acting due to pressures that Saudis and perhaps Putin have brought on him to make decisions conducive to their interests; in other words, that he is hardly acting out of a hard-headed assessment of the national interest, but in the interests of the only thing that counts — his own.
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Sullivan cites U.S. involvement in the Saudi-United Arab Emirates war against Yemen as another example of our country’s endless and pointless Middle Eastern interventions. Indeed, the more you learn about what the Saudi coalition has been doing, and the ways the U.S. has backed it, the more horrified any decent American will surely become. The Shiite Houthis overthrew Yemen’s president in 2014, and in 2015 a Saudi-led coalition began to make war on the Houthis, who are backed by Saudi Arabia’s enemy, Iran. The Obama administration made a decision to support the Saudi war, including intelligence and logistics assistance. Much of the Saudi effort was through an air war, which the U.S. aided via in-air refueling by U.S. Air Force aerial tankers, the provision of mechanics and technicians for the Saudi’s American-built planes, and sales of bombs and other munitions.
As this New York Times story details, such assistance has implicated the U.S. in a variety of atrocities and possible war crimes against the Yemeni people. These horrors have come about in two ways. First, more than 4,600 civilians have been killed directly by Saudi air strikes in the war. This is apparently due in part to the Saudis’ wish to minimize pilot casualties by staying higher in altitude when launching attacks, which diminishes the accuracy of the attacks. It’s also tied to faulty intelligence. Overall, though, these mass civilian casualties appear to be linked to the Saudis simply not giving a fuck about the deaths of innocents.
This mass slaughter from the air should be enough to give any decent person pause, and to provoke questions as to the war’s morality and the U.S.’s culpability in such misdirected violence. The U.S. not only has sold to the Saudis the weapons of war that make these horrors possible, but primes them before each sortie to make sure they can deliver their violence again, and again. Our fellow citizens are being ordered to participate in this carnage.
What emerges from the tale is a staggering portrait of American decision-makers who have lost their ability to gauge how to defend and promote American interests in the world. It turns out that the generals who backed selling some of the most advanced warcraft in the world to the Saudis thought they’d never actually use them, viewing the F-15’s as “expensive paperweights.” The U.S. attempted to guide the Saudis in minimizing civilian casualties, efforts that the Saudi ignored; yet military leaders continued to provide support despite the Saudis’ refusal to abide by their recommendations, then dissembled to Congress about U.S. awareness of some of the mass casualty attacks.
But the overall effects of the war on the Yemeni people are more terrible by orders of magnitude than the individual air attacks. The war has led to a breakdown of the country’s economy, and Saudi strikes on its cities and infrastructure have led to malnutrition and the prospect of mass starvation that could kill literally millions of people. Indeed, between its involvement in errant bombings and this humanitarian catastrophe, Pentagon officials have begun to worry that the U.S. may now be implicated in war crimes.
The full reality and horror of the immoral U.S. perpetuation of this war seem to finally, sort of, be breaking through to a wider public and political consciousness. Earlier this month, the Senate voted to end U.S. military assistance in the war, but the House did not take up the bill. It’s remarkable that it has taken so long for public awareness and official questioning to build to even this weak point of friction and resistance. The situation is characterized by a near-pyschopathic official indifference to mass casualties so long as it’s foreigners doing the dying. The vast amounts of money the Saudis pay U.S. defense contractors are also playing an outsized role, evidenced no more clearly than in Donald Trump’s gleeful accounting of the billions the Saudis are spending on American armaments. And as with so much of foreign and defense policy, the situation is deemed too complicated for the simple minds of the public; meanwhile, experts have proved themselves incompetent judges of basic questions of good and evil. If there is a way out of this war on Yemen and our other foreign policy catastrophes, it will need to involve a lifting of the mystifications and suppressions that allow the public no clear say or picture of what the U.S. government does in our name.