Ten Lessons On U.S. Foreign Policy From "Enough Already"

 

“Enough Already” by Scott Horton is a must read for any American who wants to know the truth about what our government has been up to in the Middle East for the last 35 years.  Horton starts his expose with the terrible 9/11 tragedy, explaining who did this great evil and why they were motivated to do it.  Turns out that the U.S. had been causing major problems in the Middle East going all the way back to the Carter Administration's interventions in Iran in the 1970s. Among all the facts and figures Horton gives us ten important lessons about U.S. foreign policy. Each chapter focuses on a specific country, but these lessons are woven throughout each.

Lesson 1 - The U.S. is not loyal to its allies

                “If you want to know who America’s next enemy is, look at who we are funding

                right now,” - Dave Smith (in his old Part Of The Problem podcast intro).  

I used to think this statement was an oversimplification, but now I know how fundamental it is to describe U.S. foreign relations.  Our government routinely supports a country for years and then turns around and attacks them. This is true of Iran even though our government has been hostile to them throughout my whole lifetime.  But right after World War 2, Iran was considered an ally off and on for about 20 years, until the Islamic revolution deposed the Shah.

A clearer example of this is Afghanistan.  Back in the 1980s the U.S. funded and armed Al Qaeda to fight the Russians.  Then after 9/11 Al Qaeda became their top enemy.  But then ten or so years later, they started supporting Al Qaeda again to fight Sunnis in Iraq and Assad in Syria.  In addition to that the U.S. supported Al Qaeda forces in Yemen and Libya during the same timeframe.

Also in Afghanistan, the U.S. at first supported the Taliban during the Clinton Administration.  Then Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden fought a war against them in 2001-2021.  The U.S. fought a 20 year war against them, only to give full control of the country back to the Taliban in 2021.

The same pattern followed Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  The U.S. funded his war with Iran during the 1980s.  They supported him all the way to Iraq War I in 1990.  Then they bombed and sanctioned his country until he was captured in 2003.

Ironically, the U.S. never allied with Iraq or the Taliban to bring Al Qaeda to justice.  Because both of them considered Al Qaeda a threat, they would have allied with the U.S. after 9/11 to destroy them.  This would have made common sense, because out of those three groups, only Al Qaeda had harmed any Americans.

Lesson 2 - The U.S. prolongs wars

U.S. support for one side in these conflicts either starts the war or extends the length of the war.  Without the U.S., the two sides would be more equally matched and would have to negotiate soon after hostilities started.  The U.S. started the wars in Syria and Libya directly.  Then their actions in both places indirectly started wars in Mali and Yemen.  Then the U.S. became directly involved in Yemen’s war by giving funds and arms to Saudi Arabia who then sent that materiel to Yemen to fight the Houthis.  The fighting is still going on even though the Houthis “won” years ago.  They don’t control the whole country but they do control the capital and most of the population centers.  The other sections of the country are controlled by Yemen’s previous Sunni government that is supported by Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda, and the U.S.  Take the U.S. out of the equation and the Sunni side wouldn’t have enough weapons to continue an offensive war.

The same thing happened in Somalia when the U.S. armed Ethiopian forces to invade them. The intervention escalated tensions within the country and gave the U.S.-backed Ethiopians extra incentive to continue fighting once it started.

Outside the Middle East, this lesson played out the exact same way in the Ukraine-Russia war.  Ukraine couldn’t continue if the U.S. wasn’t constantly sending them weapons.  Plus, months into the war Zelensky and Putin started negotiations, butthe U.S. stopped it through their proxy Boris Johnson.  It should be clear that the U.S. government is a source of destruction and bloodshed in the world, not a peacemaker or peacekeeper.  

Lesson 3 - The U.S. justifies starting wars with non-sense

The best example is Iraq War II. One of the main intellectual justifications for attacking Iraq in 2003 was a white paper titled “A Clean Break”, written by David Wurmser.  In it he dreams that if the U.S. military would only overthrow the Baathist Party, the U.S. could set up a Hashemite, Shia government that would be our close allies.  He asserted that with a U.S. puppet regime in charge of Iraq, the rest of the Shia groups in the region would distance themselves from Iran and align themselves with the U.S.  He imagined that Syria, Hezbollah, and Lebanon would all prefer to follow an Iraqi leader over Iran, and that the new Shia Iraqi government would pledge their allegiance to the U.S. over Iran.  These assertions showed a complete failure to understand how Shiite Muslims think.  Even if the U.S. gave them this new power, they were never going to prefer a secular Western government over fellow Shia.  Contrary to Wurmser’s new myth, Shia led Iraq immediately allied with Iran and the rest of the Shia world and ignored the U.S. as much as it could get away with.

We also all know about the false accusations the Bush Administration made to get popular support for Iraq War II. They lied about them having chemical and biological weapons and about having an active nuclear weapons program. They also lied about Hussein's relationship with Al Qaeda claiming that he had allowed them to train in Iraq and had given them safe harbor.

Lesson 4 - The U.S. causes the problems they say they will prevent

The clearest example of this is Libya in 2011.  The U.S. government justified their intervention saying that without it, Muammar Gadhafi would massacre civilians by the thousands in response to a military faction opposing his rule.  Of course one group involved in the rebellion was none other than Al Qaeda.  In another traitorous twist, U.S. officials were more worried about what Gadhafi would do to them than what they had planned for Libya. Therefore, the U.S. supported the Al Qaeda aligned rebels.

Publicly the U.S. got involved for humanitarian reasons.  However, the result was the opposite of humanitarianism, and in fact fulfilled their own prophecy of mass violence against civilians.  During the war the U.S.-backed, Al Qaeda affiliated rebels massacred civilians wherever they gained control.  It was so bad that the rebels initiated a new slave trade in the chaos.  Once again the outcome of U.S. involvement was an absolute abomination for normal people living in the Middle East.

Lesson 5 - The U.S. wars don’t defend America

First, while the U.S. started the terror wars in Afghanistan as a response to 9/11, they didn’t continue it with the purpose of bringing the perpetrators to justice. The Taliban actually offered to help the U.S. capture Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.  Instead of working together to avenge the lives of dead Americans, the U.S. attacked the Taliban in a war to take over Afghanistan and install a Western allied government.  They showed their true purpose was to build an empire.  The same was true of Iraq War II.

After that, many of the subsequent wars started because that is what either Israel or Saudi Arabia or both wanted us to do.  One of the reasons that the U.S. started Iraq War II was so that a new pipeline could be built through the area to Israel.  That would have clearly benefited Israel, though it did nothing for the American people.  The author of the white paper "A Clean Break" which intellectually justified starting the war was Jewish. I don't think those two things are a coincidence.

Other evidence teaching this lesson comes from Iraq War III and Syria, which was fought to reduce the influence Shia Iran had in the area.  Iraq War II resulted in a Shia led Iraqi government which formed much closer ties to Iran than to the U.S., to the surprise of no one but David Wurmser. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia didn’t like that, so they convinced the U.S. to fight another war. 

The Yemen war is the example of a war the U.S. funded solely for Saudi Arabia.  They didn’t send troops in, but the Saudis couldn’t wage that war without U.S. weapons.  At the same time, Saudi Arabia was funding groups that were fighting and killing U.S. troops in other regions..  With allies like these who needs enemies?

Lesson 6 - The U.S. lies about every aspect of these wars

Lesson 3 explained how they use lies to start wars.  But the lies go much deeper than that. They lie about why we should stay.  They lie about how successful the war is.  They lie about the groups they support.  In one of Scott Horton’s radio commercials he states “they lied us into war, all of them.”  I used to think that was an oversimplification, but after reading this book I see it as a fundamental fact. 

They lied about what motivated Bin Laden to coordinate the 9/11 attack.  It was because the U.S. had bombed Iraq for the last 10 years and had bases in the Middle East. They didn't hate us because of our freedom. Reports on the war in Afghanistan routinely lied about how well the war was going. Soldiers on the ground knew that it was virtually impossible to eliminate the Taliban and turn the country into a Western style democracy. Yet military officials routinely said that they were on the cusp of ultimate victory.

In 2012, the U.S. government blamed the killing of U.S. officials in Benghazi on an anti-Islamic video made by an Egyptian-American living in Los Angeles. They even threw him in jail for almost a year based on spurious "probation violations" charges. In reality, these Islamic terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya to exact revenge for secret raids coordinated personally by Obama's Counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan against them. The victims of this attack were in Benghazi to facilitate weapons transfers from terrorists in Libya to others in Syria. In other words a U.S. ally attacked U.S. officials because the U.S. had previously attacked them. Then, these weapons went to supposedly "moderate" rebels in Syria, but that was also a lie. The fact is these rebels were led by radical Al Qaeda groups who formed ISIS.

In Iraq, the surge in Iraq War III was not successful because more U.S. troops were fighting insurgents, but because they paid off Sunni tribal leaders to stop attacking them and start attacking other Sunni groups.  Before that, the U.S. told Iraq in 1990 that they could invade Kuwait and then went back on their statement last minute.  Then they used that as justification to attack Iraq when they didn’t listen to them. The list could go on and on, so I will cut it short here.

Lesson 7 - The U.S. led terror wars have produced more terrorists

It is a numerical fact that U.S. military intervention in the Middle East has created more terrorists.  In September 2001, Al Qaeda consisted of 400 people who were hiding in the mountains of Eastern Afghanistan.  Scott Horton doesn’t give an exact number of their numbers today, but he listed Al Qaeda affiliated organizations operating all over the Middle East.  Just about every country mentioned in “Enough Already” now has Al Qaeda or Bin Ladenite style forces in it; Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Mali, Yemen, and Libya.  Ironically, Al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan is at another low point now that the Taliban is back in control.

Lesson 8 - The U.S. kills civilians primarily

Throughout the book Scott Horton presents death and casualty numbers for these wars.  I roughly estimate that they kill 100 times more civilians than combatants.  During the 1990s, U.S. bombings and sanctions killed around 500,000 Iraqi civilians.  Drone strikes in Pakistan often targeted civilians based on faulty intelligence.  Even when they hit terrorists, the strike usually took place in a public space like a market or in community gatherings like weddings and funerals.  We should all remember that the U.S. killed a U.S.-allied Afghani social aid worker and his family when they left Afghanistan, because they mistakenly identified them as Taliban fighters.  Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians have died because of the war and the blockade resulting in mass starvation there.  I already mentioned that U.S. backed Al Qaeda forces killed thousands of civilians during the Libyan Civil War of 2011.  The same exact thing happened in Syria as ISIS was notorious for massacring civilians in the areas they conquered.  Due to these facts it can be said that the U.S. military is the largest terror organization in the world today.

Lesson 9 - The U.S. has lost every war it started in the Middle East

They haven’t “won” one war in the Middle East.  Nothing they did made America more safe.  Afghanistan ended by the U.S. giving the country back to the Taliban.  In Yemen, the Houthis won and continue to control the main population centers.  In Mali, Somalia, and Libya Al Qaeda affiliated groups are in power.  The closest thing to a U.S. victory is Libya since they armed Al Qaeda to take out Gadhafi.  Yay!?  In Syria, Bashar Al Assad is still in power.  Even though the U.S. was successful in deposing Saddam Hussein, the current government is strongly allied with Iran over the U.S.  One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  If the U.S. wants to have a healthy relationship with Middle Eastern countries that lead to peace and prosperity for all, then wars aren’t the answer.

Lesson 10 - The U.S. terror wars hurt Americans

The wars hurt normal American citizens in several different ways.  Most directly, 7000 American soldiers have been killed with more wounded.  Thousands more are suicidal and living lives of desperation because of PTSD.

The factor affecting the most Americans is that the U.S. government pays for military interventions through inflation and taxation.  Simply put, they are stealing from us.  As a result, it has become harder for Americans to purchase a home or build a family.  This lack of economic opportunity also affects crime rates and homelessness.

Last, the tools used in those foreign wars are now used on American citizens.  The most serious threats to our liberty come from the PATRIOT Act, police militarization, and the NDAA which allows the government to jail citizens with no due process.  I would say that is enough already.  It’s time to end the war on terrorism and every other war we are supporting in the world.