Pots and Kettles: “Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change”
There are 27 names on a high-profile statement released today by a group calling itself “Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change” denouncing current U.S. foreign and defense policy. It reads in part:
There are 27 names on a high-profile statement released today by a group calling itself “Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change” denouncing current U.S. foreign and defense policy. It reads in part:
American policies have failed… instead of building upon America’s great economic and moral strength to lead other nations in a coordinated campaign to address the causes of terrorism and to stifle its resources… insensitive to the concerns of traditional friends and allies, and disdainful of the United Nations… The United States suffers from close identification with autocratic regimes in the Muslim world… Responsible leadership would not turn to unilateral military action before diplomacy had been thoroughly explored… a cynical campaign…
We will pick the statement apart later. But the convoluted logic of calling the current policy simultaneously “insensitive to the concerns of traditional friends and allies” (read: “autocratic regimes of the Muslim world”) and “closely identified with autocratic regimes of the Muslim world” (read: “traditional friends and allies”) is a clue that the authors call themselves “diplomats.” These are the very people who brought us years of the dreadful bargain with Middle Eastern despots called “stability.” These are the people who, in the name of our government, gave religious and secular dictators carte blanche to oppress and punish their own people and pay off terrorists as long as the oil flowed.
They ran the State Department, the UN mission, the CIA and pieces of the Defense Department all through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s and the scary part is that they’re proud of it.
The list of their failures is staggering, beginning with the Iranian revolution and the internationalization of terrorism. The Iran-Iraq war, during which they tried to sell chemical weapons antidote injectors to the Iraqi army. Saddam’s chemical attacks on the Kurds. The Lebanese Civil War and the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Saudi funding of terrorism and madrassahs not only in Saudi Arabia, but also in Pakistan, Afghanistan and in Europe. The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The rise of fundamentalism in Bosnia, Chechnya, the former Soviet “Stans,” the Sudan and Nigeria. The Oslo Accords that resulted in the radicalization and pauperization of the Palestinian people.
It might be that the “diplomats and commanders” (and CIA Directors) never saw the misery, poverty, radicalism, repression of women, anti-Semitism, intolerance and hatred of democracy boiling under the surface of the Arab and Muslim world that they call our “traditional friends.” Or worse, they saw it, didn’t understand it, and made the Faustian bargain anyhow.
Either way, these are the people who got it all wrong. American policy failed when terrorists and the states that harbor and support them started this war in the early 1980s. Our response to the Beirut embassy and Marine barracks bombings, the first attack on the World Trade Center, the embassy bombings in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole were ineffectual diplomatic and legal maneuvers, encouraging the terrorists to find bigger targets.
On September 11, 2001 they found one.