Obama’s Foreign Policy: A Legacy of Interventionism

My colleague Colin Wolfgang recently wrote about Pres. Obama’s speech last Wednesday, in which the president announced that US airstrikes would extend from Iraq into Syria to combat the growing threat of the terrorist group ISIS(/IS/ISIL/who-cares-what-they-call-themselves-they’re-nuts). While many, including Mr. Wolfgang, point to the speech as a turning point in the Obama administration away from isolationism, it in fact continues the Obama White House foreign policy that has been in place since he took office: namely, Pres. Obama’s policy of small- to medium-scale military intervention by another name.

Whether you call it “police action,” “counterterrorism,” “targeted airstrikes,” or any of the other Obama administration euphemisms, this White House has pursued interventionist tactics in almost every global hotspot where it has encountered national security threats. The supposed difference from the George W. Bush administration has been the absence of “boots on the ground,” despite the fact that there will now be nearly 2,000 American “advisors” and who-knows-how-many special operations and CIA agents in Iraq. While large-scale military operations such as the Bush-era wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been wound down, the United States is far from an isolationist nation.

Rewriting History in the Middle East: The Yazidis [No Longer] in Iraq

State borders in the Middle East have been in flux for millennia, with the strongest ruler of the day vying for control over fertile land, trade routes, and major water sources. Today, the region is populated with many countries whose modern-day borders were arbitrarily delineated by the British-French Sykes-Picot Agreement, whose peoples have been in a constant struggle to reclaim what they believe is rightfully their land. Much of a state’s validity comes from being able to show that they have the oldest claim to the region, so what happens when a people’s physical life, when their physical history is deleted?

What happens when a city is blown to smithereens by explosive charges, as with mosques and churches in Mosul, instead of falling to salvageable ruins? What happens when an entire people is removed from their ancestral homeland, fleeing to a neighboring country, leaving no trace of their existence in the former land? Or, in the grand scheme of political and strategic interests, is the individual human story irrelevant?

The Road Back to Baghdad Part 3: The Reckoning

Early this morning US time, two 500-pound, laser-guided bombs were dropped by US forces on Islamic State (IS) targets outside of Erbil, Iraq. Overnight, the Obama administration shifted its policy of non-military intervention in the ever-expanding conflict with the Islamic State, citing both humanitarian and strategic concerns. Since June 2014, Islamic State has made several alarming advances in Iraq and Syria, claiming major cities such as Fallujah, Ramadi, and Mosul, and re-engaging Syrian government and rebel forces across the border.

Islamic State positions. Courtesy NY Times.

The capture of key territory in both countries has reinforced the extremist group’s financial and military resources, and in IS strongholds, a strict form of Islamic law is being enforced. The US airstrikes come on the heels of the displacement of tens of thousands of Yazidi Iraqis, whose religion has been deemed “devil worship” by IS and who were warned to “convert or die.” In his statement last night, US Pres. Barack Obama indicated that the decision to expand humanitarian and military aid was based on fears that “acts of genocide” may soon be carried out against Iraqi Yazidis, approximately 40,000 of whom are trapped without food or water on Sinjar Mountain in Kurdish Iraq.