Whose Boots on the Ground? Ask Hilary Benn and Hillary Clinton

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

07 December 15

 

e are here faced by fascists,” said the Labour Party’s shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn, urging the House of Commons to vote for Britain to extend its bombing of Islamic State, or Daesh, from Iraq to Syria. “And what we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated.”

Breaking with his party leader and long-time family friend Jeremy Corbyn, the son of left-wing stalwart Tony Benn eloquently backed Tory prime minister David Cameron’s highly symbolic escalation of the war in Syria. The bombing followed in the proud tradition of socialist internationalism, he said. “We act to protect civilians from Daesh – who target innocent people.”

Defeating fascism was why “socialists and trade unionists and others joined the International Brigade in the 1930s to fight against Franco,” he explained. “It’s why this entire House stood up against Hitler and Mussolini. It is why our party has always stood up against the denial of human rights and for justice. And my view … is that we must now confront this evil.”

It was a brilliantly moving speech, which the usually sedate British law-makers cheered and applauded before voting 397 to 223 to support the new intervention. But, it also recalled former prime minister Tony Blair’s speech leading Britain into the ill-fated war against Saddam Hussein. “I’m always anxious,” said Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell, “that the greatest oratory is going to lead us to the greatest mistakes.”

Where Benn’s father staunchly opposed Blair’s often lap-dog alliance with Washington, Hilary’s speech now makes him the recognized candidate of those who want to remove Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader and return to Blair’s approach, which won elections but completely destabilized Iraq and Syria.

To my aging and very American ears, Hilary’s speech also echoed the earlier rhetoric of our own Cold War liberals, who led us into a quagmire in the jungles of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. We should never forget the mantra of Dr. Tom Dooley, the poster boy of the CIA’s campaign to sell the American public on the “struggle for freedom” in Southeast Asia. We are just trying, said Dooley, “to do what we can for people who ain’t got it so good.”

For our long-term survival, we need to figure out how real all this idealism is and was, and how much it serves as only a ploy to sell weapons, defend Big Oil, and give cover to imperial ambitions, old and new. But, in the Syrian tragedy we now face, the distinctions make little difference. Even if Hilary Benn and Hillary Clinton – today’s have-gun, will-travel paladin of liberal intervention – believe what they say, their rhetoric blinds them and their followers to the military reality of yet another escalation in the Middle East.

No matter how you separate the shit from the poetry, it all comes down to this: Who is going to provide the boots on the ground? Who is going to take and hold the land the Islamic State now occupies in Syria and Iraq? And how long will they have to sit there and hold it?

Benn highlighted the most frequently mentioned contenders, the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds who took advantage of allied airstrikes to retake Sinjar and Kobani and help turn back Islamic State’s seemingly effortless drive last year toward “the gates of Baghdad.”

Clinton goes much further, calling for the US to directly arm not only the Kurds but also Iraq’s Sunni tribes. “We’ve been in a similar place before in Iraq,” she recently told the Council on Foreign Relations. “In the first Sunni awakening in 2007, we were able to provide sufficient support and assurances to the Sunni tribes to persuade them to join us in rooting out al-Qaida. Unfortunately, under Prime Minister Maliki’s rule, those tribes were betrayed and forgotten.”

“So the task of bringing Sunnis off the sidelines into this new fight will be considerably more difficult,” she added. “But nonetheless, we need to lay the foundation for a second Sunni awakening.”

It sounds like a neat idea. But the Shi’a government in Baghdad has shown little desire to see a new Sunni awakening. The Sunnis themselves have so far shown little willingness to fight the Islamic State in either Ramadi or Mosul, let alone Raqqa, in Syria. And the Kurds know how disastrous it would be for them to try to take over Arab cities, whether in Iraq or Syria.

The situation in Syria is even more complex. Cameron talked of as many as 70,000 “moderate” troops available to fight Islamic State, a mythic number that appeared to include Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite-led Syrian Army. But Assad’s troops are committed to defend their own corner of Syria, not to fight the Islamic State in and around Raqqa.

Anti-Assad forces are no more dependable to fight the war Paris, London, and Washington now seem to want them to fight. Divided into more than 100 disparate groups, with differing tribal and regional interests, the so-called moderates in the Free Syrian Army and other umbrella configurations are mostly opposed to leaving Assad in power.

Many are Sunnis funded by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf States, who are opposed not just to Assad but to all the Alawites, whom they see as Shi’a heretics. Others, like the Sunni Turkmen, are tied to Turkey, which is willing to work with the Iraqi Kurds, but not the Syrian Kurds, whom they see as too close Turkey’s own Kurdish populations.

An agreement among Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Arab States, and the NATO allies could change the game. But, until it does, it’s silly to think that very many of these groups will be willing to do what any Westerner tells them to do.

From his speech, I don’t think Hilary Benn has any idea what all this might mean. I suspect that Hillary Clinton does. Besides wanting to arm the Kurds and Iraqi Sunnis, she has called for far larger numbers of US and allied special forces with much greater flexibility to embed themselves with local troops on the frontlines and target airstrikes. I assume she would go along with Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s plan to use the Special Forces to conduct combat raids against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria.

Clinton presents this amalgam of local forces and US commandos as an alternative to deploying the large number US troops Washington sent to Afghanistan and Iraq. But if local forces prove too few and Special Forces too limited to dislodge the Islamic State, what would president Hillary do?

Would she pull out and declare Mission Impossible? Would she let the situation fester, as Obama has done? Or would she as “a last resort” deploy the tens of thousands of ground troops that the Republicans are now demanding? I think we all know the likely answer.

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A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

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