Path To Paris Started Many Years Ago
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By Gary [email protected]
A group of radical Islamic terrorists shot up a concert venue and a few bars and restaurants, killing 129 people and injuring hundreds more. Some of the terrorists detonated suicide vests.
It’s hard for lots of people to wrap their heads around what drives these people to such wanton, senseless, violence.
I don’t claim to be an expert on such things – far from it. And while I’m sure the pathology of a terrorist is highly complex, I think I have some idea what makes them tick.
President George W. Bush, angling for the political soundbite, used to say, “They hate us because we’re free.” I always thought was an inane, sophomoric oversimplification.
I think it has more to do with decades of U.S. policy in the Middle East. I’m not saying that this policy was always wrong, I’m just saying it made people in Middle East very angry with us.
The Palestinian problem has been smoldering for nearly 50 years, with occasional flareups in places like Syria and Lebanon where lots of people died. Most notably, the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982.
The U.S position – pretty much unilaterally, and perhaps deservedly – has been to support Israel.
But whether that policy is right or wrong bears little consequence with regard to how it is perceived by many in the Middle East. They see us as pro-Israel bullies.
There are other reasons.
In the 1980s, the U.S. and other Western countries recruited and armed up to 35,000 non-Afghan fighters from across the Middle East – “the Mujahideen” – to help run the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan.
(A lot of U.S. weapons remain in Afghanistan today. That’s why some of our own soldiers in the current Afghan war were being shot at with U.S. rifles.)
It was a bloody war. It is estimated that between 850,000 and 1.5 million civilians were killed. Millions more Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran.
After the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, the U.S. lost interest. During President Bill Clinton’s first term, all aid to Afghanistan was halted and reconstruction efforts were handed over to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Abandoned and battle-hardened, many Mujahideen fighters thirsted for jihad and joined up with the likes of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida.
In 1991, after Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, the U.S. – at the behest of the United Nations – chased Saddam back to Baghdad.
I think most right-minded individuals would agree that was the right thing to do. I always admired President George H.W. Bush’s restraint in that conflict. Many hawks in the Republican Party thought the U.S. should have toppled Saddam at that time.
But Bush the elder refused, saying the U.N. decree was only to remove Saddam from Kuwait.
But what followed was a dozen or so years of crippling U.N. sanctions – a near-total financial and trade embargo imposed on Iraq. And while the U.N. imposed the sanctions, the U.S. was still perceived as the bad guy.
High rates of malnutrition, lack of medical supplies and diseases from lack of clean water were common in Iraq.
Food rationing was instituted, limiting intake to 1,000 calories a day per person. It was seven years later before the “Oil For Food” program started to ease the situation.
A United Nations Childrens Fund survey in 2000 noted that almost half the children under age 5 in Iraq suffered from chronic diarrhea.
The overall literacy rate plummeted as 20 percent of Iraqi kids stopped going to school. There also was a big increase in child labor, which had become virtually non-existent in the decade before.
UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said, “If the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-5 in the country as a whole during the eight-year period 1991 to 1998.”
Pretty confident most people in Iraq blamed the U.S. for killing a half million of its babies.
Then, along comes Sept. 11, 2001, and the resultant wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Things were just starting to return to some remote semblance of normalcy in Iraq by 2003 when the U.S. invaded and toppled Saddam.
By all accounts Saddam was a bad man – a very bad man. A cruel dictator he was, but he was a dictator. After the sanctions were lifted under his rule – as long as you followed along – you could actually live a relatively normal life and provide for your family.
After the U.S. invasion and Saddam’s ouster, all bets were off as various factions struggled to fill the power vacuum. As long as the U.S. maintained a strong military presence, things were marginally manageable.
But once our troops came home, the country became ripe for the rise of ISIS.
During the Obama administration, hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan have killed 41 terrorists. But the strikes also killed 1,147 others including a couple hundred women and children.
How do you suppose relatives of innocent drone strike victims feel about the U.S.?
Please understand, I am not saying that U.S. foreign policy is a decades-long series of blunders.
What I am saying is that I can view terrorism from the perspective of a poor young farmer in the Iraq countryside, struggling to provide for his family. One day he finds himself confronted by a group of armed ISIS fighters. The message is clear. Join – and get a paycheck sent to your family – or die.
Whether he’s religious or not, whether he cares about jihad or not, he kisses his wife and kids goodbye and joins the battle.
But franky, at this point, what motivates ISIS terrorists seems almost irrelevant. Past U.S. foreign policy – whether brilliant or boneheaded – is, well, in the past.
The problem is that ISIS is expanding its reach – today.
ISIS is not the “J.V. team” or “contained” as President Barack Obama has suggested.
You don’t have to be an intelligence adviser to see that what we are currently doing to thwart ISIS isn’t really working. Does anybody outside the Obama administration truly believe ISIS is weaker today than it was a year ago?
And it’s troubling to me when I hear our commander in chief engage in petulant outbursts like “if folks want to pop off and have opinions about what they think they would do, present a specific plan.”
There have been numerous “specific plans” touted with regard to ISIS. The president is just stubborn and doesn’t want to hear them. "We have the right strategy and we're going to see it through," the president said.
U.S. Sen. John McCain briefly outlined a plan Tuesday morning on National Public Radio. He said we should assemble a coalition of Arab countries and NATO countries, including France. We should establish a no-fly zone over Syria and establish a safe zone inside Syria to accommodate refugees.
He said it would take roughly 10,000 troops in different specialties, including air controllers and Apache helicopters.
“... We have a plan,” McCain said. “We’ve articulated that plan specifically for a long time.”
He added, “I would ... have U.S. trainers and I would like to have U.S. capabilities there, along with other nations in the region, to take ISIS out. And that can be done, and it could easily be done. They are not 10 feet tall. They can be defeated. The United States of America is the strongest nation in the world...”
I know that sounds hawkish and I know most Americans – me included – are sick and tired of unending wars.
But it begs the question.
Aside from killing terrorists, how do you rid the West of the growing terrorist threat?
All things considered, I’m pretty sure we’re never going to convince them to be our friends.[[In-content Ad]]
A group of radical Islamic terrorists shot up a concert venue and a few bars and restaurants, killing 129 people and injuring hundreds more. Some of the terrorists detonated suicide vests.
It’s hard for lots of people to wrap their heads around what drives these people to such wanton, senseless, violence.
I don’t claim to be an expert on such things – far from it. And while I’m sure the pathology of a terrorist is highly complex, I think I have some idea what makes them tick.
President George W. Bush, angling for the political soundbite, used to say, “They hate us because we’re free.” I always thought was an inane, sophomoric oversimplification.
I think it has more to do with decades of U.S. policy in the Middle East. I’m not saying that this policy was always wrong, I’m just saying it made people in Middle East very angry with us.
The Palestinian problem has been smoldering for nearly 50 years, with occasional flareups in places like Syria and Lebanon where lots of people died. Most notably, the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982.
The U.S position – pretty much unilaterally, and perhaps deservedly – has been to support Israel.
But whether that policy is right or wrong bears little consequence with regard to how it is perceived by many in the Middle East. They see us as pro-Israel bullies.
There are other reasons.
In the 1980s, the U.S. and other Western countries recruited and armed up to 35,000 non-Afghan fighters from across the Middle East – “the Mujahideen” – to help run the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan.
(A lot of U.S. weapons remain in Afghanistan today. That’s why some of our own soldiers in the current Afghan war were being shot at with U.S. rifles.)
It was a bloody war. It is estimated that between 850,000 and 1.5 million civilians were killed. Millions more Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran.
After the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, the U.S. lost interest. During President Bill Clinton’s first term, all aid to Afghanistan was halted and reconstruction efforts were handed over to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Abandoned and battle-hardened, many Mujahideen fighters thirsted for jihad and joined up with the likes of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida.
In 1991, after Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, the U.S. – at the behest of the United Nations – chased Saddam back to Baghdad.
I think most right-minded individuals would agree that was the right thing to do. I always admired President George H.W. Bush’s restraint in that conflict. Many hawks in the Republican Party thought the U.S. should have toppled Saddam at that time.
But Bush the elder refused, saying the U.N. decree was only to remove Saddam from Kuwait.
But what followed was a dozen or so years of crippling U.N. sanctions – a near-total financial and trade embargo imposed on Iraq. And while the U.N. imposed the sanctions, the U.S. was still perceived as the bad guy.
High rates of malnutrition, lack of medical supplies and diseases from lack of clean water were common in Iraq.
Food rationing was instituted, limiting intake to 1,000 calories a day per person. It was seven years later before the “Oil For Food” program started to ease the situation.
A United Nations Childrens Fund survey in 2000 noted that almost half the children under age 5 in Iraq suffered from chronic diarrhea.
The overall literacy rate plummeted as 20 percent of Iraqi kids stopped going to school. There also was a big increase in child labor, which had become virtually non-existent in the decade before.
UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said, “If the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-5 in the country as a whole during the eight-year period 1991 to 1998.”
Pretty confident most people in Iraq blamed the U.S. for killing a half million of its babies.
Then, along comes Sept. 11, 2001, and the resultant wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Things were just starting to return to some remote semblance of normalcy in Iraq by 2003 when the U.S. invaded and toppled Saddam.
By all accounts Saddam was a bad man – a very bad man. A cruel dictator he was, but he was a dictator. After the sanctions were lifted under his rule – as long as you followed along – you could actually live a relatively normal life and provide for your family.
After the U.S. invasion and Saddam’s ouster, all bets were off as various factions struggled to fill the power vacuum. As long as the U.S. maintained a strong military presence, things were marginally manageable.
But once our troops came home, the country became ripe for the rise of ISIS.
During the Obama administration, hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan have killed 41 terrorists. But the strikes also killed 1,147 others including a couple hundred women and children.
How do you suppose relatives of innocent drone strike victims feel about the U.S.?
Please understand, I am not saying that U.S. foreign policy is a decades-long series of blunders.
What I am saying is that I can view terrorism from the perspective of a poor young farmer in the Iraq countryside, struggling to provide for his family. One day he finds himself confronted by a group of armed ISIS fighters. The message is clear. Join – and get a paycheck sent to your family – or die.
Whether he’s religious or not, whether he cares about jihad or not, he kisses his wife and kids goodbye and joins the battle.
But franky, at this point, what motivates ISIS terrorists seems almost irrelevant. Past U.S. foreign policy – whether brilliant or boneheaded – is, well, in the past.
The problem is that ISIS is expanding its reach – today.
ISIS is not the “J.V. team” or “contained” as President Barack Obama has suggested.
You don’t have to be an intelligence adviser to see that what we are currently doing to thwart ISIS isn’t really working. Does anybody outside the Obama administration truly believe ISIS is weaker today than it was a year ago?
And it’s troubling to me when I hear our commander in chief engage in petulant outbursts like “if folks want to pop off and have opinions about what they think they would do, present a specific plan.”
There have been numerous “specific plans” touted with regard to ISIS. The president is just stubborn and doesn’t want to hear them. "We have the right strategy and we're going to see it through," the president said.
U.S. Sen. John McCain briefly outlined a plan Tuesday morning on National Public Radio. He said we should assemble a coalition of Arab countries and NATO countries, including France. We should establish a no-fly zone over Syria and establish a safe zone inside Syria to accommodate refugees.
He said it would take roughly 10,000 troops in different specialties, including air controllers and Apache helicopters.
“... We have a plan,” McCain said. “We’ve articulated that plan specifically for a long time.”
He added, “I would ... have U.S. trainers and I would like to have U.S. capabilities there, along with other nations in the region, to take ISIS out. And that can be done, and it could easily be done. They are not 10 feet tall. They can be defeated. The United States of America is the strongest nation in the world...”
I know that sounds hawkish and I know most Americans – me included – are sick and tired of unending wars.
But it begs the question.
Aside from killing terrorists, how do you rid the West of the growing terrorist threat?
All things considered, I’m pretty sure we’re never going to convince them to be our friends.[[In-content Ad]]
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