US Foreign Policy and The Evil Dictator

by Richard Butrick (October 2014)

“If at first you don’t succeed try, try again.” Most admirable. But it doesn’t mean using the very same approach again and again. It means reassessing the situation, trying to learn what went wrong and adjust the plan accordingly. To the contrary, failing to adjust a problem solving strategy which repeatedly fails is a sign of a fixation disorder. As Einstein quipped, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is a sign of insanity.

Now consider the following pattern.

Out with Chiang Kai-shek in with Mao

Out with Batista in with Castro

Out with the Shah of Iran in with Khomeini

Out with Gaddafi in with chaos

Out with Mubarak in with Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood

Out with Assad in with ?

President Carter has to be the poster child for the means perspective. His moral revulsion of the Shah’s (necessary?) brutality toward Islamists in Iran was readily apparent. Getting rid of the Shah had to be the right thing. It even got to the point that his potential successor, Khomeini was reflexively and without any real vetting heralded as a “Gandhi like figure” who was likened unto a “saint.”

During Saddam’s regime people who were perceived as any sort of threat to his rule were thrown off buildings, shoved into shredders, tortured and hung. He even used sarin gas to kill Kurdish recalcitrants. From a humanitarian replacement standpoint, how can it be argued that the eventual take down of the Hussein regime and replacement by Maliki was anything but an enormous humanitarian success story?

Tell that to the Christians, Assyrians, Yazidis and other minority groups in Iraq.

The persecution and cleansing Iraq of Christians started immediately after the fall of Hussein and continued during the whole period when American forces had substantial control of security in Iraq. How that was allowed is difficult to fathom. But the fact remains that both the Maliki and Obama regimes bear the responsibility. It is unquestionable that life for Christians, Assyrians and other minorities was worse after Hussein than it was during the Hussein regime.

Here is a report from the Reverend Canon Andrew White the “Vicar of Baghdad” in an interview back in 2008:

Moreover, UN observers on the ground (~ 2008) have argued that, as horrible as Hussein was, Iraqis were better off before than after the war.

More recently (2014) the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported:

The World Bank ranks Iraq as one of the least politically stable and most violent countries in the world, and as worse off under Maliki than under Saddam Hussein.

There it is, “worse.” Not just for Christians but in general. And this is before the ISIS situation.

Instead, the myopic moralistic mind set prevails. And Samantha Powers does the myopic moral posturing as well as any.

In addition to this White House briefing the U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power said in an e-mailed statement. “The Security Council needs to speak with one voice in the interest of the innocent men, women and children of Syria whose lives are hanging in the balance……. Every day the Council remains silent, we let down the Syrian people, and we fail to uphold our role as guardians of international peace and security.”

Assad used (or is alleged to have used) chemical weapons against “his own” people. That is all we need to know. Out with the horrible monster. Damn the consequences, full speed ahead. Meanwhile, the in gate swings open for ISIS.

As painful as it is to admit, it is the vacillating, indecisive President himself, our verbalizer in chief, who may have (or had?) the right approach. He seems loath to really go after Assad. But the reasoning does not seem to be that Assad’s successor might be worse or fail to protect Christians and Kurds and the Alawite minorities. Is it not that, as defender of the Islamic faith, the President feels it would be unseemly to go after recognized Sunni or Shia leaders or their satellites?

described  by Caroline Glick, a Director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, as “beyond madness.”

The lessons?

Maybe in any given situation there is no morally satisfying solution. Maybe with a large ungovernable, implacable jihadi cohort to deal with, the Shah, who had visions of being the Ataturk of Iran, did about as well as could anyone.

Gaddafi? Mubarak? Who could be worse? And now Assad. The Israeli assessment of Assad is pretty damning. Who could be worse? We may soon find out.

 

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Dr. Richard Butrick is an American writer who has published in Mind, Philosophy of Science, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, International Journal of Computer Mathematics among others.

 

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