Ronald Reagan Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The American withdrawal from Iraq leaves in place a Sunni insurgency against an American-supported, corrupt Shi’ite prime minister, Nouri Kamal al-Maliki, who has a shaky alliance with the Kurds. On June 10, 2014, the Sunni fundamentalist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which originated as Al Qaeda in Iraq, with the help of Sunni insurgents from the current civil in Syria, took control of the oil-rich city of Mosul on the Tigris River in northern Iraq. They then proceeded south along the river valley, capturing Tikrit on June 11th. The Iraqi army refused to fight and tore off their uniforms. An estimated 500,000 residents of Mosul, about 25 percent of its population, fled either to nearby villages, Baghdad, or the autonomous Kurdish region. However, Sunni residents of the region are welcoming the insurgents, despite summary executions of supporters of the government. Meanwhile, Kurdish forces have seized control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk to in the Kurdish autonomous region. Under pressure from the Republican-dominated House of Representatives “raising the bloody shirt” that 4,000 American troops died in Iraq, President Obama is considering measures short of “boots-on-the-ground” to prop up the Maliki government. This civil war may well result in the division of the country into three, a result which might better be resolved by a UN supervised plebiscite. After all, it is the lack of resolution of these issues of self-determination that fuels the fire of Islamic revitalization movements that resort to the tactic of terrorism.

The Obama Doctrine of May 2014 asserts that the terrorism is “the most direct threat to America, at home and abroad.” Every president from Ronald Reagan to Obama has bought into the premise that we are engaged in a War on Terror. But terrorism is not an enemy, it is a tactic used in asymmetrical warfare. The modern usage of the notion of a War on Terror as applied to Islamic fundamentalists was originated by Benjamin Netanyahu and endorsed by George P. Shultz, the former president of the international construction firm Bechtel, who became Reagan’s secretary of state and a foreign policy advisor along with Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condoleezza Rice in George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential election. What is not well-known is that Netanyahu’s parents were supporters of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the radical right-wing founder of the Zionist terrorist group known as the Irgun, and Menachem Begin, later prime minister of Israel, succeeded Jabotinsky as leader of the Irgun and ordered the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. (See, Chapter Twenty-One—Partitioning the Holy Land)

The War on Terrorism has put the United States on the wrong side of self-determination in various parts of the world--with the Russians against the Chechen and Dagestanis in the Caucausus, with the Chinese against the Uighurs in central Asia, and with the Israelis against the Palestinians in the Middle East. In fact, most of these Muslim groups see the continued occupation by Israel of the West Bank and Jerusalem and our unconditional backing for Israel as the reason we are viewed as their enemy. What the Obama Doctrine fails to understand is that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not just an issue of Israel’s national security, but since September 11, 2001, our national security as well. The argument for a refuge for Jews has its roots in the anti-Semitism hidden in the New Testament (See, Chapter Eleven—The Blood Libel and the Wandering Jew) and the Koran and the Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) (See, Chapter Sixteen—Mapping and Remapping the Arab World-Part 1, Mapping), but the notion that the Holy Land belongs to one people and one religion has its roots not so hidden in the Old Testament (See, Chapter Seventeen—The Chosen People and the Promised Land). History has shown that the so-called Two-State Solution will not work in the long run. It didn’t work with East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), West Pakistan, and India, nor with East and West Germany, nor with North and South Korea. Nor do the internationalization or division of Jerusalem, just as such measures didn’t work in Berlin or Istanbul. Ultimately, Israel must become a single, secular state in which both Palestinians and Jews enjoy equal citizenship. This might take a generation to achieve, after a temporary partition into two states, as originally recommended by the United Nations. After the horrific attack on New York’s World Trade Center in September 2011, the settlement of the Israeli Palestinian conflict is not a matter solely of the security of Israeli, it has become a threat to the security of the United States.

Since World War Two we have allowed ideology trump self-determination, first with the opposition to Nazism over the reunification of German-speaking peoples after World War One, second with anti-Communism over national liberation in Vietnam and the Middle East after World War Two, and finally in our War on Terrorism over the arbitrary dividing of peoples (such as the Sunni, the Shi’a, the Kurds, the Palestinians) by the Russian, British, and French empires. In each case, extremists have usurped the principle of self-determination for their own ends .

Thus, we have found ourselves abandoning the anti-colonial principle embraced by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and instead we have become defenders of the status quo established by the victors of World War Two. Unfortunately, we have allowed the status quo to become the standard of defining aggression in international institutions such as the United Nations, and allowed the victorious powers (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China) of World War Two to veto measures that upset the arbitrary decisions they made after the war. While we as a nation have not always lived up to our ideals, now more than ever we need to follow Abraham Lincoln’s advice to listen to the Better Angels of Our Nature.