Why Picking Sides in the Middle East Is Hard -- and Pointless

Remember last year when John McCain was stomping around the world insisting that the United States help the Syrian rebels and attack Syria, this very instant? Flash forward a year later, and the Syrian rebels, now calling themselves ISIS, have swept into Iraq, murdering thousands of innocents based solely on their religion. Now John McCain is stomping around the world insisting that we attack ISIS, this very instant.

Tea Party and Libertarian websites are now claiming that McCain was consorting last year with the very ISIS terrorists he's now advocating we attack. Not long after these photos were taken it was discovered that the terrorists McCain was palling around with  were "bad rebels" that were holding Lebanese Shiites hostage.

Now, I'll be the first to criticize John McCain for his buffoonish impulse to get the United States to butt into every conflict around the planet: from the ISIS invasion of Iraq most recently, to the Russia-backed rebellion in Ukraine and Crimea, to Egypt, to the Syrian revolution, to the Libya revolution, to the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008.

But I can't claim to know whether the Syrian rebels John McCain met with were good guys or bad guys. Obviously, neither can John McCain.

That's why we don't just pick sides, rush in and start dropping bombs every time John McCain says so. It's very difficult to know who the good guys and the bad guys are when we have utterly no idea who any of them really are, or what their history is. And even if we think we do, they wind up switching sides on us. If we had supplied those Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft weapons when McCain said we should, they would now be using them against the U.S. aircraft that are now bombing their mortar emplacements to protect Yazidi civilians and Kurdistan. Unfortunately, they may still be using U.S. weapons because ISIS may have captured some when the Iraqi army cut and ran.

George Bush had the same problem of knowing who the good guys were when he invaded Iraq. He took the word of Ahmed Chalabi about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. It turned out that Chalabi was an Iranian agent and had lied about everything. The main reason that ISIS is able to invade Iraq is that the Iraqi government that George W. Bush installed is run by an Iranian puppet, Nouri al-Maliki, who has used his power to oppress Sunnis in Iraq. He appointed Shiite loyalists to lead the army instead of competent officers, and used the army to attack Sunnis. When ISIS invaded the Sunnis did nothing, and the Iraqi army fled in disarray. The Sunnis don't like ISIS any more than they like Maliki, but they figure they'll be able to eject a small number of foreign terrorists, as they did during the "Surge," once the Shiite Iraqi army has been ejected.

Remember George Bush's "Surge" in Iraq to stop Al Qaeda? The reason that succeeded was not because we increased our troop levels, but because Bush reversed course on the Sunnis who had once been allied with Saddam. Instead of treating them like enemies, we used their hatred of Al Qaeda (whom they viewed as foreign terrorists trying to take over their country) and made allies of them.

However, the Maliki government trashed all that after the United States left Iraq, by denying Sunnis any real say in the Iraqi government and persecuting them. And why did the U.S. leave Iraq? Because George Bush signed an agreement that said we would: the Iraqis were tired of an American occupation and our meddling in their internal affairs. Barack Obama was obliged to abide by Bush's agreement, no matter how much John McCain blustered.

We knew there was a distinct possibility that the majority Shiites would oppress the minority Sunnis after we left, but it's impossible to use force to make people behave reasonably -- unless you stay there and babysit them for 50 or 60 years, like we did in Europe and Japan. Can we really afford to occupy every country in the Middle East?

Pretty much the same thing happened in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. The U.S. allied itself with several groups, including the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's nascent Al Qaeda, to force the Soviets out. After the Soviets left, we let the Taliban have a free hand and they imposed an oppressive theocracy on Afghanistan. Was Afghanistan better off under the Soviets or the Taliban? At least the Soviets would have kept Al Qaeda out.

We crossed bin Laden by stationing troops in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War to eject Saddam from Kuwait, and thus inspired him to hate us and spawned 9/11. I'm not saying 9/11 was our fault, I'm just saying that no good deed goes unpunished in the Middle East. Time and again we knowingly allied ourselves with bad guys to deal with a more pressing problem, and it always comes back to bite us in the end.

This is why invading Middle Eastern countries has such poor outcomes. Many of the people who live there aren't united by any concept of national identity: they don't consider themselves Iraqi, or Afghan, or Syrian. Instead, they are motivated by religious identity or extreme ideology -- Sunni, Shiite, Alawite, Wahabi, Christian -- or by ethnicity -- Kurdish, Persian, Turkish, Arab, Pashtun -- or even by local tribal association.

As such, all alliances are viewed as temporary, merely to gain their splinter group an advantage toward their ultimate goal of exacting retribution for grievances that have been boiling over for centuries and millennia.

This is why the United States cannot successfully pick sides in the Middle East. There is no loyalty to the concepts of equality, justice and freedom, only a fervent devotion to a particular cause or group.

This should serve as an object lesson to Americans. Republicans have been criticizing Maliki for practicing exactly the kind of divisive all-out political warfare the Tea Party has been practicing against Democrats and even fellow Republicans.

We have to stop thinking of ourselves first as conservative or liberal; Tea Party, Democrat, or Republican; Christian, Jew or Muslim; white, Hispanic, or African American. We have to think of ourselves as Americans first and foremost, and acknowledge that other American citizens are just as American as we are.

And then work together to make sure this country doesn't devolve into the same sort of cesspit that Iraq and Syria have become. We have to stop splintering apart, and start coming together.