Commentary: Foreign Policy Should Be More Glacial

Thursday will be the 13th anniversary of 9/11. This is my yearly remembrance column. Things are worse than ever.

ISIS is everything we were told Iraq was 10 years ago and more. For those 10 years, people responded to criticism of our invasion by saying "Isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein?" Well, folks, we have our answer. I've never seen a more extreme example of "things could always be worse" in my 55 years of living.

So what do we do now? Let's start by admitting there are no quick fixes here. We're talking about the Middle East, the homeland of war. What we call America was a land of maize-growing and hunting buffalo on foot long, long after the Hittites figured out how to forge iron weapons and improve the chariot. These are the consequences of geography, for unlike pre-Colombian America, the Middle East is a crossroads between continents and empires. There's no cure here. There's only treatment.

The sanctions against Saddam Hussein were working before we invaded. Those with long memories know that we uncovered the evidence of how unexpectedly effective those sanctions were soon after we occupied Iraq. ISIS can be isolated, too.

But they're cutting off the heads of American journalists. How can we just do nothing to retaliate immediately? We are. In fact, we beat them to it. We've been assassinating people all over the world. Drones are just more high-tech than blades, and we have the decency to not make video shows out of our executions. Still, the method doesn't seem to be working so well.

Sam Houston, the famous patriot of Texas, was dead-set opposed to his state seceding from the union as the Civil War was breaking out. A crowd once demanded to know why. He replied that northerners "are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche."

We need to be less fiery and more glacial. We need our leaders, presidential and congressional, to find a strategy and stick to it. That may be the biggest hurdle of all.

We were wrong to invade Iraq in the first place. We are also doing too little now. So if we're looking for someone to point fingers at, "We the People" need to look in the mirror. We were right to invade Afghanistan and wrong to start another war somewhere else before we were finished there. We were too hot to invade Iraq and too cold to giving the Iraqi people a livable country after the invasion was over. We also ignored the suffering of the Syrian people when they tried to do what we wanted the Iraqis to do all along: Throw out the dictator on their own.

In 2004 and and in 2008, we elected the president who suited our mood. The only difference is our mood changed. We went from one extreme to the other. Congress, meanwhile split between those extremes.

The most important lesson we can possibly draw from modern Iraqi history and our part in it is this: Don't ignore the problems of other people until they become a threat to us or after they are no longer a threat. We didn't succeed in helping the people in either Afghanistan or Iraq found a government the people could support, one that could keep them safer. We didn't help the people of Syria at all because we were war weary.

We aren't doing much for the people of the Ukraine because nobody wants to get in a land war with Russia. However, let's recognize that Russia is making the same mistake we did in Iraq. They're not any better at going slow than we are.

"Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars." John Steinbeck wrote that in a book called "The Moon is Down."

So let's have a little confidence that we will prevail. But let's admit that we're not off to a great start -- and after 13 years, we're only getting started.

Commentary on 09/07/2014

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