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I saw a few lefties praising the new @QuincyInst report on US policy in the Middle East so I read (most of) it. Oy. That’s my short response. My longer one follows.
The report may look ok at first but as a lib/con billionaire-funded outfit, Quincy can't, by definition, get at the fundamental cause of US militarism: US imperialism…
So the report depicts US policy in the ME as a “failure” or “folly” -- the product of misguided but well-intentioned public servants trying to protect Americans. A typical statement: “The vast sums the U.S. has spent in the region have had the opposite of their intended effect.”
Likewise, the report depicts the US as a victim of its client states. For example, it claims that US military assistance & sales to Saudi Arabia & the UAE have “entangled and implicated the U.S. in a variety of regional conflicts.”
And it depicts “terror” as nearly entirely a response to US foreign policy – “blowback” – whitewashing the long US effort to produce & use Al Qaeda & co. Consider this astounding statement: “The origins of al–Qaeda lie primarily in resentments over the U.S. military presence.”
To be clear, ahistorical, imperialism-erasing claims like this do not reflect some savvy effort to flatter elites for political purposes. They reflect the longstanding, crap analysis of Quincy’s liberals & realists.
Here Quincy's @stephenwertheim claims the Pentagon hoped for peace after the Cold War. "In theory, armed supremacy could foster peace. Facing overwhelming force, who would dare to defy American wishes? That was the hope of Pentagon planners in 1992." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/sunday/endless-war-america.html
(What Pentagon planner Paul Wolfowitz was actually saying in 1992): https://twitter.com/DavidMizner/status/614520814017208320
And here's Quincy's Andrew Bacevich, every antiwar liberal's favorite conservative: "[N]ever in peacetime in our history had we maintained a large military establishment until the Cold War. Its primary purpose was to avert war."
Come again? https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/andrew-bacevich-on-foreign-policy-mistakes
Come again? https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/andrew-bacevich-on-foreign-policy-mistakes
Quincy-style advocacy might nip at the edges of the real issue, talking abt the "military industrial complex" or some such, but it doesn't, can't, tell the truth: that American militarism is primarily a product of the ruling class's effort to plunder & profit.
In most of Quincy’s stuff, imperialism is simply nowhere to be found. This piece by Quincy’s @PatPorter76 is every bit as bad as the headline suggests. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/americas-accidental-militarism/
Last, in this piece I wrote about Al Qaeda’s actual origins. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/united-states-saudi-arabia-isis/
