Rare News Desk
It’s been a wrenching week in the Middle East. Thugs from the Sunni jihadist group ISIS rolled across western and northern Iraq, taking many of its population centers with little resistance. The most recent city to fall is Tal Afar, which sits in a crucial position along the highway to Syria. Alarmed by the Sunni onslaught, officials in Shiite Iran have said they’re open to working with the United States to save Iraq.
Videos by Rare
That Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham think we should intervene shouldn’t surprise anyone.
That they’re open to Iran’s overtures is downright shocking.
“We need to coordinate with the Iranians and the Turks need to get in the game,” Graham said on CNN. The show then cut to breaking news as the world tilted and pigs flew out of a frozen hell.
By extending a hand to Iran, Lindsey Graham put himself on a collision course with another hawkish lawmaker: Lindsey Graham. Graham said in 2010 that the United States should be prepared to bomb Iran so as “not just to neutralize their nuclear program, which are probably dispersed and hardened, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force, and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard.”
So the United States needs to simultaneously obliterate the Iranian regime while working with it to pacify Iraq.
But wait, there’s more.
Last year, as atrocities increased on both sides of the Syrian civil war, John McCain advocated arming Sunni rebels and striking Bashar al-Assad’s military. This was a tricky needle to thread: the United States would have to wrangle with Assad while ensuring its own weapons didn’t fall into the hands of homicidal extremist groups allied with the rebels (like ISIS).
But the stakes were high. As Graham later said, “I believe that if we get Syria wrong, within six months—and you can quote me on this—there will be a war between Iran and Israel over their nuclear program.” (It’s been nine months and counting.)
McCain and Graham talk tough on Afghanistan too. While they generally support ending the war there, both have doggedly objected whenever the Obama administration tries to do anything about it.
Both support kicking ass in Libya. In early 2011, McCain demanded that the president increase America’s drone presence there. Later that year, Lindsey Graham went even further, telling Fox News: “Let’s get in on the ground and help the Libyan people establish a democracy and a functioning economy based on free market principles.”
In Nigeria, McCain wanted to take the fight to the terrorist group Boko Haram after it kidnapped 200 schoolgirls. He declared, “If they knew where they were, I certainly would send in U.S. troops to rescue them, in a New York minute I would, without permission of the host country,” and mocked the Nigerian president’s name for good measure. Boko Haram loomed as a threat in part because it was armed to the teeth with weapons that had been smuggled out of Libya after the U.S. helped overthrow Moammar Gaddafi. (One imagines thumbing through McCain’s dictionary and finding the words “unintended” and “consequence” crossed out.)
McCain has also called for “regime change” in North Korea, while Graham has demanded that President Obama “do something” about Russia’s invasion of Crimea.
So if you’re keeping track, that means that, if John McCain or Lindsey Graham were president, the United States would be…
- Waging war on the Syrian regime and its Iranian proxies…
- while supplying arms and airstrikes that would boost Syrian rebels groups like ISIS…
- while fighting ISIS in Iraq with the help of Iran’s military…
- while destroying Iran’s military…
- in addition to beating back the Taliban in Afghanistan…
- building a Lockean democracy in Libya…
- and mopping up Boko Haram in Nigeria…
- and managing two peripheral conflicts in North Korea and Ukraine.
This is the foreign policy not of a serious statesman, but of a middle-school shut-in whose philosophy on war comes from long nights of playing Starcraft and drinking Mountain Dew.
It’s Bush thinking on PCP, and it makes the same mistake of seeing the defining divide in the Middle East as between autocrats and democrats. In fact, it’s between Sunnis and Shias, a fight in which we have no interest and no business taking sides.
We’ve paid a steep price for listening to McCain and Graham. It’s time we stopped.
