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Circle of death

Some of the US foes could be found on the Capitol Hill.

The extraordinary attempt earlier this month by 47 United States senators to sabotage one of their nation’s most significant diplomatic initiatives served as a reminder that some of the Obama administration’s most formidable foes are to be found not in the battlefields of Syria or Iraq but on the Capitol Hill.

It was presumably not entirely coincidental that the senators’ letter to their Iranian counterparts, which declared that any agreement reached between Tehran and Washington would be worthless as it could be rescinded at the stroke of a pen, followed hot on the heels of Benjamin Netanyahu’s congressional performance, in which he made the case for effectively torturing Iran through enhanced sanctions to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

There was an obvious subtext, though. Over the past decade or so the Likud-led regime has reputedly sought on more than one occasion to initiate hostilities, preferably in league with the US, to thwart Iran’s nuclear designs. Even the Bush administration proved reluctant to come to that particular party, though, and prominent military and intelligence figures within Israel appear to have shot down any ideas of going it alone.

A second subtext, of course, was yesterday’s Israeli election. Amid a backlash both in the US and within Israel, opinion polls suggested that Netanyahu’s campaign rally on Capitol Hill might have failed to sufficiently impress the Israeli electorate. The consequences should be evident by today. And although it would be gratifying to see the back of Netanyahu, it would be folly to put too much store by the predilections of an alternative administration in context of resolving the core conflict closer to home.

Israel is by no means the only Middle Eastern entity to be alarmed by the prospect of a nuclear Iran, and concerns among its neighbours have lately been compounded by its key role in combating the so-called Daesh in Iraq as well as the Houthi ascendancy in Yemen.

It’s well worth recalling, though, that many of those who vociferously supported the US-led assault on Iraq a dozen years ago — long after, mind you, the sanctions that followed a previous bout of hostilities had persuaded Saddam Hussein to dismantle his nation’s nuclear weapons industry — ignored warnings that the war would undoubtedly serve Iran’s strategic interests.

It also seemed patently obvious that the military engagement would afford an opening to forces whose aims went beyond resisting the American occupation. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a key manifestation of this phenomenon, although it would admittedly have been difficult back then to envisage its transformation into what today goes by the name of Daesh.

What sets Daesh apart from the likes of Al Qaeda is not so much its outrageous brutality but the territory it controls across Iraq and Syria, and its successes have prompted vows of allegiance from like-minded groups in Libya, Nigeria and Afghanistan, for starters. Efforts to dislodge it involve Western air support for ground offensives mounted by Iraqi armed forces in collaboration with Shia militias and the Iranians, on the one hand, as well as the Kurdish peshmerga, arguably with even more complications in Syria, where the forces ranged against Daesh are largely irreconcilable.

Amid all this lack of clarity, the Obama administration last week sent Secretary of State John Kerry to Congress to seek geographically open-ended authorisation for use of military force (AUMF) against “Dash” (as Kerry pronounces it), ostensibly to demonstrate that the American military effort enjoys bipartisan backing, but also in fact to move on from reliance on resolutions passed back in 2001-02, when Daesh was non-existent.

Kerry’s presentation before the Senate foreign relations committee was remarkable in several ways, not least because it was interrupted twice by a Code Pink protest — a democratic intervention of the kind that the Obama administration and its adversaries find it easy to jointly resist. What stood out like a sore thumb, though, was the persisting lack of American self-awareness.

Kerry said: “We simply cannot allow this collection of murderers and thugs to achieve in their group their ambition — which includes, by the way, most likely the death or submission of all those who oppose it. The seizure of land, the theft of resources, the incitement of terrorism across the globe, the killing and attacking of people simply for what they believe or who they are…”

That may be seen as a reasonably accurate description of Daesh. But could Kerry seriously be unaware that much of it applies to the US as well? “Murderers and thugs” fits the Daesh mould, but its scope cannot even begin to match what the US hath wrought. The “submission of all those who oppose it”? Let Uncle Sam show the way.

The “seizure of land” and “theft of resources” are a common feature of the imperialist experience. But as far as “the incitement of terrorism across the globe” is concerned, Daesh could not ever hope to match what the US has achieved.

And it wasn’t all-inadvertent, mind you. It could coherently be argued that instigating terrorism was not the aim of the post-9/11 initiatives, but merely an inevitable consequence. On the other hand, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, attracting Muslims to the jihadi cause was clearly a policy a plank, and one that was instrumental in eventually yielding both Al Qaeda and the Taleban. Jihadis were also not unwelcome in Bosnia.

Sure, the US had collaborators in its endeavours, many of whom remain unrepentant. But that’s a different story. The key question is whether the US itself is willing to imbibe the lessons of recent history. If the answer is a clear “no” in respect of the 47 senators, from the standpoint of the supposedly less unreasonable Obama administration it is at best a very tentative “maybe”.

Mahir Ali is a Sydney-based writer.