Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
Last Tuesday night, President Obama gave his final State of the (Dis)Union address. It was clearly meant to sweep Donald Trump preemptively into the dustbin of history. In case you hadn't noticed, there's no need to "make America great again." From environmental achievements to less than $2 gas at the pump, job creation to military triumphalism, things simply could not be greater right now. American decline? An idle rumor. ("Anyone claiming that America's economy is in decline is peddling fiction.") American weakness? A fantasy. In his Disneyesque vision of a country aglow, the president even managed to make his ongoing campaign against the Islamic State sound upbeat and his approach to defeating it little short of an antiwar statement. In a perfectly reasonable fashion, for instance, he suggested that, "as we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands. Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence."
Resisting 2016 campaign proposals that range from the saturation bombing of civilians ("our answer needs to be more than tough talk or calls to carpet bomb civilians") to establishing no-fly zones and sending in U.S. forces to take the Islamic State's "capital," Raqqa, Obama's position is essentially: more of the same -- more planes, more drones, more bombs, more missiles, more "coalitions," more "man-hunting," and more destruction. That's what now passes for an antiwar position in Washington. To steal a line from today's TomDispatch author, what could possibly go wrong with such a plan -- especially when you're talking about the country that, as the president proudly reminded us, spends "more on our military than the next eight nations combined" and whose troops "are the finest fighting force in the history of the world"? (Take that Attila the Hun and crew, Genghis Khan and company, you Roman legionnaires, and all those other pathetic fighting forces that preceded us!)
Mind you, American presidents have been stuck on that formulation for at least a decade or more, which might seem strange when talking about a military that, since its last significant victory in World War II, hasn't won much of anything against any force that offered it serious opposition, no matter how lightly armed or informally trained. It's a military that, since 9/11, has proven incapable of effectively building allied armies in the Greater Middle East and has stumbled from one disaster to another in the region.
Despite this, the two poles of debate in Washington remain, militarily speaking, more of the same or staggeringly more of the same. Under the circumstances, we at TomDispatch decided to ask former State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren what a third option might look like when it came to Washington's Middle Eastern policy and the Islamic State. What, we wondered, would less of the same look like or, to go directly over a cliff, something else entirely? In "You Won't Like It, But Here's the Answer to ISIS," he offers his response.