The Strategic A**hole Reserve

Hi everyone. I’m working on the next installment of the Whose America supplement. I will talk more about honor culture and Appalachia, and how the disruptions caused by the introduction of industry helped fuel the famous Hatfield & McCoy feud. It’s not quite done, but I wanted to touch base with you guys and this was on my mind. Thanks again for all your support. Working on some very exciting things right now, which you’ll hear about soon.

In his 2011 farewell address to graduates of the US Military Academy at West Point, then-Defense Secretary Bob Gates raised eyebrows when he said that any future Pentagon chief “who advises the President to again send a big American land army into Asia or the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” He made the statement just months before NATO began its aerial assault on the Libyan state, and would prove to be one of his last major speeches as Secretary of Defense. That fall, having lost the argument over whether to deepen US involvement in the Syrian civil war, Gates was replaced as Defense Secretary by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta. Panetta was in turn replaced at Langley by unconventional warfare guru David Patreus, who would run the covert war as Director of Central Intelligence.

The jihad against Syria was a replay of the CIA’s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, except in reverse. In the 1980s, the agency worked with America’s Muslim allies to use existing madrassa networks to identify and radicalize potential mujahadeen recruits, and to train, arm, and transport them to Afghanistan. Young Muslim men were funneled out of slums from Karachi to Cairo to fight the Red Army. Operation Cyclone helped cause the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the sense that it was an historic success was hardly dampened by the unfortunate business a few of our new friends caused on September 11, 2001. The Soviets had been defeated, and it only cost the lives of people about whom no one cares, from places about which no one has even heard.

When the Arab Spring hit the streets of Damascus, CIA Director Panetta and many others argued that it was a prime opportunity to rid the world of the troublesome Assad regime. President Obama was unenthusiastic about involving the US military, but he was sold on the idea that Assad could be toppled, and Syria liberated, without ever placing an American boot on the ground. If mujahadeen could be employed to defend a country like Afghanistan, why couldn’t they also be used to destroy a country like Syria? Gates was skeptical, arguing that proponents of the jihad were overestimating our ability to calculate and determine outcomes. His position reflected a general squeamishness at the Pentagon over arming and training the same type of people who’d flown planes into our buildings just a decade earlier. Though his position would be vindicated soon enough, Gates was out, Panetta and Patreus were in, and the rest is history.