When ISIS burst into the American consciousness by capturing the Iraqi cities of Tikrit and Mosul in June, many US elites blamed a lack of US intervention. The US should have kept troops in Iraq, they said, and intervened in Syria’s civil war. This analysis, coming from both conservatives and liberals, went virtually unchallenged by journalists whose response to the latest US wars has been a depressing replay of the coverage of more than a decade ago. Few lessons seem to have been learned.
“It’s like watching a train wreck,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told CNN (9/29/14). “A residual force would have stabilized the situation. It is a direct result of our failure to leave a residual force there.” McCain, who once said it “would be fine” with him if the US stayed in Iraq for “a hundred years” (Mother Jones, 1/3/08), added, “If we had armed the Free Syrian Army [two years ago], the situation on the ground would be dramatically different now.”
These messages were repeated incessantly on Fox News and conservative talk radio (e.g., O’Reilly Factor, 10/2/14; Townhall Weekend Journal, 9/25/14), echoed by the corporate center—“We Never Should Have Left Iraq,” read a Slate headline (6/12/14)—and by prominent pundits like Sen. Lindsey Graham (National Review, 9/22/14) and Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post, 9/26/14).
Touring with his new book about his years as Barack Obama’s Defense secretary, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace, putative liberal Leon Panetta criticized his old boss in a USA Today interview (10/6/14). Panetta chided Obama for not intervening earlier in Syria and, more pointedly, for not maintaining US troops in Iraq.
Though Panetta has been telling this story in various media outlets, virtually no journalist has reminded him that when the US withdrew from Iraq in 2011, he defended the White House, explaining that the decision was the Iraqi government’s. As Walter Pincus reported at the time (Washington Post, 11/22/11), both Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Martin Dempsey, who has also recently criticized Obama on this point,
insist[ed] that negotiations broke down primarily because the Iraqis—based on their own domestic political situation—insisted that any remaining US forces would not continue to have immunity from prosecution under Iraq criminal law.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (Independent, 6/15/14) wrote a 3,000-word essay in which he blamed premature withdrawal from Iraq for the rise of ISIS—not the 2003 invasion he had championed. “It is a bizarre reading of the cauldron that is the Middle East today, to claim that but for the removal of Saddam, we would not have a crisis,” he said.
Though no one actually makes the strawman claim that Blair was attacking, it is hard to see how, without the invasion of Iraq, ISIS would have become a regional factor. No Islamist militias were operating in Iraq before the 2003 invasion. In fact, the removal of Saddam Hussein wasn’t the key issue. The Iraq War and occupation were catastrophic for Iraq. Besides killing hundreds of thousands, and maiming and displacing many more, Iraqi society was ravaged by the corruption and ethnic resentments exacerbated by the war.
Close observers of the rise of ISIS see the chaos resulting from the Iraq War and occupation, and Syria’s civil war, as the key events leading to ISIS’s emergence. “It is the product of the Iraq War,” Trinity College history professor Vijay Prashad told FAIR’s radio show CounterSpin (8/15/14), adding, “If they had not gone and destroyed the Iraqi state, we wouldn’t be in the state we are in today”:
It took about 100 years to build the Iraqi state, and the Americans and British destroyed it in an afternoon. So it’s on the detritus of the destruction of the Iraqi state that the Islamic State first emerges….
It has everything to do with the Iraq War and the policy that followed, which was to utterly destroy the Iraqi army. I mean, once you tell people, “There’s no jobs for you, you are all ex-Baathists, go home,” well, they went home and they joined the Islamic State.
‘s Cokie Roberts: «We’re not acting like a superpower, that’s the problem.»
While some pundits blamed ISIS on the failure to maintain an occupation force in Iraq, others insisted that the militant movement could have been thwarted if only the US had intervened in Syria against the Assad government that ISIS was fighting against. Hillary Clinton made that claim in the Atlantic (8/10/14), and ’s Cokie Roberts (8/10/14) concurred:
We’re not acting like a superpower, that’s the problem…. I agree with Hillary Clinton, as you quoted her earlier, saying, well, if we had gotten into Syria when the rebels were begging us to come in, and saying, here we are, trying to secure our freedom, where is America, then you wouldn’t have had this group filling the vacuum.
Such arguments generally rest on the assumption that US policy towards Syria can be characterized as nonintervention. As the New York Times (9/10/14) reported:
Mr. Obama has resisted military engagement in Syria for more than three years, out of fear early on that arming the rebels who oppose Mr. Assad would fail to alter the balance in the civil war while more direct military intervention could have spillover effects in the volatile region.
This is seriously misleading—and contradicted by the Times’ own reporting. Under the headline “CIA Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition” (6/21/12), the paper reported that the US government was playing a very active role in supporting the armed revolt, with CIA officers in Turkey helping to deliver weapons to particular opposition groups. Days earlier, the Wall Street Journal (6/13/12) was reporting that the CIA was working with opposition groups to “develop logistical routes for moving supplies into Syria and providing communications training.”
As journalist Patrick Cockburn, who has covered the region for three decades for the Independent and other outlets, reports in his new book The Jihadis Return (see page 11), the arms that the CIA was “steering” to Syrian rebels were instrumental in enabling ISIS to expand the territory it held in Iraq:
An intelligence officer from a Middle Eastern country neighboring Syria told me that ISIS members “say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments.”…Arms supplied by US allies such as Qatar and Turkey to anti-Assad forces in Syria are now being captured regularly in Iraq.
The US has gone back to war in Iraq and entered Syria’s civil war over the murder of two journalists and bombastic threats from a militia that US intelligence says poses little threat (FAIR Media Advisory, 9/12/14). Why have these new wars commenced with so little debate?
The real story of the rise of ISIS shows that US interventions in Iraq and Syria were central in creating the chaos in which the group has thrived. But that story doesn’t get told in US corporate media. Nor will you often see the likes of Prashad or Cockburn on network television or in major newspapers. The informed input of actual experts on the region, who don’t march in lockstep with Washington elites, might put a crimp in the public’s support for the war, support largely informed by pro-war pundits (see page 8) and reporters, and the familiar retired military brass—often with ties to the military/industrial complex (Nation, 9/16/14).
With pundits reflexively calling for more attacks, there’s virtually no one to note that US wars have been catastrophic for the people in the targeted countries—from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya. Nor have we heard much about the catastrophic policy failures that have resulted from the wars, which have not even achieved the sort of anti-democratic “stability” Washington actually prefers (Extra!, 3/11), let alone the thriving democracy of US official rhetoric. In a media culture that sees military violence, against all evidence, as an effective way to solve conflicts, sources who point out the folly in that thinking will not be readily welcomed.
Sen. John McCain on ISIS: «Kill ‘em… They’ve got to be destroyed.»
And so here we are again. The journalistic mistakes made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks are being repeated today. The same press corps and commentariat that cheered the earlier aggressions have returned, largely intact.
“Kill ‘em,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) barked at host Greta Van Susteren (9/2/14). “They’ve got to be destroyed.” Bill Kristol glibly told radio host Laura Ingraham (8/25/14) that the US should try bombing ISIS: “What’s the harm of bombing them at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens?”
And McCain’s hawkish Senate comrade Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told (9/14/14) that if ISIS wasn’t stopped with a full-spectrum war in Syria, we were all going to die: “This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home.”
Face the Nation anchor Bob Schieffer (9/14/14) quoted Graham’s hair-on-fire rant—not to question the lawmaker’s grip on reality, but to suggest the US wasn’t doing enough to counter this threat: “So, should there be more of a sense of urgency about meeting this threat? We haven’t had any airstrikes in it seems like a week.”
