Anyone Sleeping Well at the Moment Is Badly Informed

The other day I spent a lot of time staring at Barack Obama’s socks. It was one of those photos from the Situation Room: the apparently windowless room with the leather armchairs and numerous monitors, where commander in chief O. and his uniforms always sit when bin Laden dies or another half-baked “operation” starts. This time, O. had just ordered air strikes in northern Iraq. His left foot was rested across his right knee.

The aesthetics that the White House has cultivated here are interesting — very withdrawn, without heroic pathos. The pictures exude sobriety and a tense working atmosphere. They depict a thoughtful superpower: The allegedly most powerful man in the world listens, inquires, reflects, decides, even suffers a little. These days, he isn’t stupid enough to believe that one always has to do the right thing. However….

Then the fighter jets and a couple of drones took off, to stop the quickly advancing IS militia fighters from the aircraft carrier “USS George H. W. Bush” — a joke in very bad taste. It is named after George Herbert Walker, the old Bush, who conducted the first Iraqi war in 1991. His great goal, he declared at the time, was “a new era, freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.”

Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm followed Desert Strike … Thunder … Viper … Fox … and many, many more. People died in six-figure numbers. And there were many interventions in other places — Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya, Mali…. As Bush I let loose, a Mr. Fukuyama posited “the end of history.” Rarely has something stupider been written.

Operation Desert Shit

And today? Nearly a quarter of a century and countless “Operations” later, anyone drawing up a balance sheet will be shocked. Iraq symbolizes the foolhardy confusion of a U.S. foreign policy which keeps maneuvering itself into tricky situations and notoriously relies on false friends (in this region, the Saudi royal family). Now, it actually appears to have no strategy — not even a wrong one. Its name could be “Operation Desert Shit.”

No, in my opinion, military interventions are not wrong in principle, including those currently in northern Iraq. But they are always products of acute dilemmas with sad histories, quick emergency operations after long periods of bad policies.

Now it is high time we look very carefully and ask: What is causing the galloping brutalization of the world? How many terrorists has this “war against terror” produced? Islamic fighters now cavort around in a corridor measuring several thousand kilometers, from Mauritania to the Philippines. In addition to this, there is (among others) the constant Near East conflict, which is currently ablaze in Gaza, and a new cold war, which is already rather hot in east Ukraine.

Anyone sleeping well these days is really very badly informed.

Obama said recently that before taking any steps toward an intervention, one must make sure that we “have an answer for the day after” —a correct and astonishingly late realization. Perhaps he should hang that sentence on the wall in the Situation Room.