Most of us agree we should stand by our friends and that we should keep our promises. However the U.S. has a decidedly mixed record in doing this. I will look at that record but the reason to really think about it are recent events:
Looking at the sudden rise of the caliphate in Iraq where perhaps 20000 jihadists managed to get control of an area of eight million people and looking at the spectacle of their opposition that we trained and equipped melting away before them we do need to take stock.
The conservative personality Glenn Beck who supported our original intervention now wants us to stay completely away from Iraq. Not one more lost limb! he says.
Nonie Darwish an Egyptian woman who grew up in an Islamic environment and strongly criticizes that environment has said in the past that we should stay away from the Middle-east because all sides there hate us anyway.
On the other hand if we had bombed ISIS when Maliki who was the prime minister of Iraq had originally asked us to many victims who met horrible fates (including crucifixions having their eyes torn out of their sockets etc.) would have been spared this fate.
The situation was complicated in that Maliki was seen with justification as siding against the Sunnis.
Lets start by looking at our record in picking friends and standing by them. I break commandment #1 of blog posts Keep it short! in this post but there is disturbing material that I thought had to be included.
In an article What Really Happened at the Bay of Pigs Humberto Fontova tells this story:
They fought like tigers writes the CIA officer who helped train the Cubans who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs 53 years ago this week. But their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach.
That CIA manGrayston Lynch knew something about fighting and about long odds. He carried scars from Omaha Beach The Battle of the Bulge and Koreas Heartbreak Ridge. ..Lynch trained in his own words brave boys who had never before fired a shot in anger college students farmers doctors common laborers whites blacks mulattoes. They were known as La Brigada 2506 an almost precise cross-section of Cuban society of the time. The Brigada included men from every social strata and race in Cubafrom sugar cane planters to sugar cane cutters from aristocrats to their chauffeurs. But mostly the folks in between as befit a nation with a larger middle class than most of Europe.
Short on battle experience yes but they fairly burst with what Bonaparte and George Patton valued most in a soldier: morale. No navel-gazing about why they hate us or the merits of regime change for them. Theyd seen Castroism point-blank.
...They knew of the Mass graves that dotted the Cuban countryside piled with hundreds whod crumpled in front of Castro and Che Guevaras firing squads....
Where are the planes?" kept crackling over U.S. Navy radios two days later. Where is our ammo? Send planes or we cant last!" Commander Jose San Roman kept pleading to the very fleet that escorted his men to the beachhead. Crazed by hunger and thirst his men had been shooting and reloading without sleep for three days. Many were hallucinating. By then many suspected theyd been abandoned by the Knights of Camelot.
...If things get rough the heartsick CIA man Grayston Lynch radioed back we can come in and evacuate you.
We will NOT be evacuated! San Roman roared back to his friend Lynch. We came here to fight! We dont want evacuation! We want more ammo! We want PLANES! This ends here!
Adm. Burke pleaded with John F Kennedy Mr. President TWO planes from the Essex! (the U.S. Carrier just offshore from the beachhead) thats all those Cuban boys need Mr. President. Let me order...!
JFK was in white tails and a bow tie that evening having just emerged from an elegant social gathering. Burke he replied. We cant get involved in this.
WE put those Cuban boys there Mr. President! The fighting admiral exploded. By God we ARE involved!
Admiral Burkes pleas also proved futile.
The freedom-fighters spent ammo inevitably forced a retreat. Castros jets and Sea Furies were roaming overhead at will and tens of thousands of his Soviet-led and armed troops and armor were closing in. The Castro planes now concentrated on strafing the helpless ammo-less freedom-fighters.
Cant continue" Lynchs radio crackled - it was San Roman again. Have nothing left to fight with ...out of ammo...Russian tanks in view....destroying my equipment."
Tears flooded my eyes wrote Grayston Lynch. For the first time in my 37 years I was ashamed of my country.
So what is the lesson from Fontovas account? I think it is that if you encourage people to fight and say you will back them you have to do just that. You cant have a strategy of deniability - that you are not behind their efforts. You have to do what it takes.
Then there was the Vietnam debacle. It was certainly a terrible and long war and we lost 58000 soldiers in it. We also put the wrong general Westmoreland in charge of the war a man who believed in a strategy of attrition and body-counts which was not the way to fight guerillas. In addition for quite a while we did not arm the South Vietnamese except with cast-off World-War II equipment because we were going to do the job ourselves. So the South Vietnamese did badly in their confrontations with the enemy and their morale deteriorated. (We never learn because a few years earlier in the Korean war we did not arm the South Koreans for fear they would attack the Communist North and so when the North attacked they were overwhelmed)
When we finally pulled out of Vietnam we made promises to the South Vietnamese. Those promises were not kept because the Democrats in Congress cut off funding.
Historians have directly attributed the fall of Saigon in 1975 to the cessation of American aid. Without the necessary funds South Vietnam found it logistically and financially impossible to defeat the North Vietnamese army. Moreover the withdrawal of aid encouraged North Vietnam to begin an effective military offensive against South Vietnam... Historian Lewis Fanning went so far as to say that it was not the Hanoi communists who won the war but rather the American Congress that lost it.
The NVA began its final assault in March of 1975 in the Central Highlands. Ban Me Thout a strategically important hamlet quickly fell to North Vietnam. On March 13 a panicked Thieu called for the retreat of his troops surrendering Pleiku and Kontum to the NVA. Thieu angrily blamed the US for his decision saying If the U.S. grant full aid we will hold the whole country but if they only give half of it we will only hold half of the country." His decision to retreat increased internal opposition toward him and spurred a chaotic mass exodus of civilians and soldiers that clogged the dilapidated roads to the coast. So many refugees died along the way that the migration along Highway 7B was alternatively described by journalists as the convoy of tears" and the convoy of death." 6On April 21 President Thieu resigned in a bitter televised speech in which he strongly denounced the United States.
So what is the lesson here? If you do get involved in a war then make sure you get feedback not just from an inept General in charge but from the few officers who are succeeding in the field. And dont shortchange the allies who eventually will be left with the burden of defending themselves. And dont defund those allies.
But wait a minute. Didnt we arm the Iraqi army to the hilt? And didnt we spend a huge amount of money over there? Didnt we sacrifice for many years losing limbs as Glenn Beck says and worse?
That raises the following issue. In Iraq former president George W Bush says in his book Decision Points Maliki told him that his Shiite constituents didnt want any Americans there. So the friendship of our allies was problematic to begin with. And later events showed that the Sunnis did not want to fight for a Shiite dominated government that had already accused two Sunni politicians of treason.
But lets continue with another example of American ambiguity to an ally:
In 1973 Israel almost ceased to exist. It was attacked by Egypt from the south and Syria from the north. The U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger tried to withhold arms from - Israel! It was President Nixon a man who ranted anti-Jewish epithets who countermanded this. In delaying the arms supply to Israel Kissinger now says he wanted to signal to Egypt and Syria that the U.S. was not interested in humiliating the Arabs. He wrote in Years of Upheaval" he had thought Israel would get out a little bloodied but still win the war. But...
In view of the losses Israel was taking on October 6 and for the first week of the fighting Israel was losing the war. Had this happened the entire population of Israel would have been slaughtered Nazi style by the Arab haters. In face of these developments Kissinger himself a refugee from Nazi Germany refused to supply Israel with the ammunition and weapons needed to defend themselves. It was only when the then Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir appealed directly to President Nixon and also threatened to use the atomic bomb that Israel was given the needed tanks guns and ammunition to turn certain defeat into victory. In fact General Ariel Sharon and his troops crossed the Suez Canal and came within 50 miles of Cairo when Kissinger threatened to cut off all aid to Israel unless they retreated back to the Suez. Israeli troops had surrounded 50000 Egyptian troops and utterly defeated both the Egyptian and Syrian armies....
Although Kissinger held up arms shipments to Israel he told the Israelis that the then Secretary of Defense Schlesinger was responsible for the delays. He also told Moshe Dayan Israels Minister of Defense that the Soviets were about to attack Israel with nuclear weapons. This was not true but led the Israelis to agree to Kissingers demands.
So what can we learn from this? Here one man in the State Department lied several times to an ally and tried to weaken that ally. You cannot play such games with allies who are faced with the prospect of total annihilation.
In the same region of the world we gave really bad advice to the leader of Iran according to an article by James Perloff.
We know that Iran is now a radical Islamist state with government meetings often starting with the chant Death to America.
However suppose a progressive pro-Western regime ruled Iran representing no threat? ..... Yet many forget that until 30 years ago exactly such a regime led Iran until it was toppled with the help of the same U.S. foreign policy establishment recently beating war drums.
From 1941 until 1979 Iran was ruled by a constitutional monarchy under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Irans Shah (king).
Although Iran also called Persia was the worlds oldest empire dating back 2500 years by 1900 it was floundering. Bandits dominated the land; literacy was one percent; and women under archaic Islamic dictates had no rights.
The Shah changed all this. Primarily by using oil-generated wealth he modernized the nation. He built rural roads postal services libraries and electrical installations.
Long regarded as a U.S. ally the Shah was pro-Western and anti-communist and he was aware that he posed the main barrier to Soviet ambitions in the Middle East. A voice for stability within the Middle East itself he favored peace with Israel and supplied the beleaguered state with oil.
On the home front the Shah protected minorities and permitted non-Muslims to practice their faiths.
Houchang Nahavandi one of the Shahs ministers and closest advisers reveals in his book The Last Shah of Iran: We now know that the idea of deposing the Shah was broached continually from the mid-seventies on in the National Security Council in Washington by Henry Kissinger whom the Shah thought of as a firm friend....
Suddenly the Shah noted the U.S. media found him a despot an oppressor a tyrant. Kennedy denounced him for running one of the most violent regimes in the history of mankind.
At the center of the human rights complaints was the Shahs security force SAVAK. Comparable in its mission to Americas FBI SAVAK was engaged in a deadly struggle against terrorism most of which was fueled by the bordering USSR which linked to Irans internal communist party the Tudeh. SAVAK which had only 4000 employees in 1978 saved many lives by averting several bombing attempts. Its prisons were open for Red Cross inspections....
For Western TV cameras protestors in Teheran carried empty coffins or coffins seized from genuine funerals proclaiming these were victims of SAVAK. This deception later admitted by the revolutionaries was necessary because they had no actual martyrs to parade. Another tactic: demonstrators splashed themselves with mercurochrome claiming SAVAK had bloodied them......
Meanwhile internationalist forces rallied around a new figure they had chosen to lead Iran: Ruhollah Khomeini. A minor cleric of Indian extraction Khomeini had denounced the Shahs reforms during the 1960s especially womens rights and land reform for Muslim clerics many of whom were large landholders....
The Carter administrations continuous demand upon the Shah: liberalize. On October 26 1978 he freed 1500 prisoners but increased rioting followed. The Shah commented that the more I liberalized the worse the situation in Iran became. Every initiative I took was seen as proof of my own weakness and that of my government. Revolutionaries equated liberalization with appeasement. My greatest mistake the Shah recalled was in listening to the Americans on matters concerning the internal affairs of my kingdom.
... Air Force General Robert Huyser deputy commander of U.S. forces in Europe was sent to pressure Irans generals into giving in without a fight. Huyser directly threatened the military with a break in diplomatic relations and a cutoff of arms if they moved to support their monarch.
...U.S. officials pressed the Shah to leave Iran. He reflected:
You cannot imagine the pressure the Americans were putting on me and in the end it became an order.... How could I stay when the Americans had sent a general Huyser to force me out? How could I stand alone against Henry Precht the State Department Director for Iran and the entire State Department?
He finally accepted exile..
When the Islamists took charge at least 1200 Imperial Army officers who had been instructed by General Huyser not to resist the revolution were put to death. Before dying many exclaimed God save the King! On February 17 reported du Berrier General Huyser faced the first photos of the murdered leaders whose hands he had tied and read the descriptions of their mutilations.
What is the lesson of this? If you see an allied leader as an obstacle to Democracy and a person who is alienating people you want to court take a look at the opposition first. Are they humane? Are they believers in freedom? Is your allied leader being portrayed to you accurately? Does he trust you? Does he support the West? Should you really throw him under the bus?
Back to Iraq:
Philip Dermer served in Iraq and says this:
A former colleague with whom I served in the coalition forces in Iraq recently sent me one of the slick YouTube productions by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS now rampaging through the country. I was extremely reluctant to watch the video by this al Qaeda spin-off. I was already depressed about the chaos in Iraq given how much effort my colleagues and I spent with Iraqis after 2003 attempting to forge the great democratic experiment in the Middle East.
As the video of jubilant ISIS members extolling their bloody conquests slipped by I began to fast forward to get through the madness but I froze when I saw ISIS thugs attacking captured Iraqis. Many of the men being taunted tortured and killed were leaders of the Sahwa the Sunni militants who once fought against the American military and the Iraqi government before they realized that their bigger enemy was al Qaeda and joined us in the fight. U.S. forces grateful for their support dubbed them Sons of Iraq.....
After the victory on the battlefield the coalitions payment program for the Sahwa necessitated gathering personal identification data on every member close to 100000 names; continuing the payments was going to be under the obligation of the Iraqi government after the coalition turned over governing authority to Baghdad. I remember when we delivered the database to Prime Minister Malikis office. The rest is history. He never attempted to fulfill his part of the bargain. Instead the Sahwa were dismembered piecemeal including extrajudicial killings internment and expulsion from Iraq. After U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011 U.S. diplomats sat idly by behind concrete walls.
.... Americas promises and moral commitments must stand for something. If not we may pay an even greater price as events unfold. No one will believe anything we say and will act strictly in their own interests. The Sahwa from 2007-09 is no more. And yes the Sunni are now doing what it takes for their own political interests so things have come full circle because ISIS is the new al Qaedathe vanguard.
It could be added that if you dont identify your true allies and stand behind them you lose the people who could stand up to your enemy. Israel is guilty in that regard too. As in this last story:
In southern Lebanon which borders on Israel Lebanese Christians were exposed to the Palestinians gangster-like presence. Consequently these Christians turned to Israel for help. This transformed what were Israels incursions into southern Lebanon in response to PLO insurgency warfare into an enduring alliance of interests with southern Lebanese residents.
In 1975 as part of Israels security policy against the Palestinians a young IDF intelligence officer named Yair Ravid organized a militia force that was first called the Free Lebanese Army then renamed the South Lebanon Army (SLA) in 1984. Over time the SLA added Druze and Shiite elements to the Maronite Christians who constituted its ideological pillar....
This Israeli-Lebanese alliance began to unravel in the Israeli public mind. The loss of approximately twenty to thirty soldiers per year in south Lebanese warfare was the backdrop to a popular campaign for withdrawal.. As a result during the Israeli election campaign in mid-1999 Ehud Barak promised that as prime minister he would bring the boys home from Lebanon. The IDF was not winning the war and Hizbullah the primary adversary demonstrated that it had the religious conviction and tactical capabilities to continue its adamant resistance against Israel.
The new prime ministers pledge which enjoyed much popularity among the Israeli public seized the south Lebanese in general and members of the SLA in particular with uncertainty and insecurity if not panic. Israeli political leaders military commanders and other officials never stated clearly what the future might hold for the SLA. The result within the ranks of the SLA and the south generally was demoralization and trepidation that they might be abandoned at the last moment.
...For Israeli and SLA personnel officers and soldiers alike the events of late May unfolded without prior preparation notice or warning.
A soldier named Roni with six years experience in the SLA related that on Monday night at eleven oclock we got a call from the Israelis telling us that Hizbullah is approaching and telling us to leave. Another soldier said We could have stopped them with our weapons but the IDF did not shoot and would not allow the SLA to shoot either....
Thus did the decision for an IDF withdrawal cause the SLA to disintegrate and create havoc among its forces. Southerners feared being massacred immediately by Hizbullah or being tried and tortured as enemies of the state by the Beirut authorities...
In effect the Israeli government abandoned an SLA that very much wanted to stay in existence. This clearly was not what the SLA desired. Over 600 of its men had lost their lives in the many years of warfare but its fighters showed no inclination to leave their country....
Two meetings that I attended with senior Israeli officials prior to the withdrawal confirmed the governments ambiguous intentions toward the SLA. From Reserve General Menachem Einan appointed by Barak to conduct peace negotiations with the Lebanese government I learned in March that there was no Israeli inclination to strengthen the SLA as the sole and credible military alternative to the IDF in south Lebanon.
...
Nevertheless many SLA fighters later felt that their army had been strong enough to sustain the war. After the SLA had been exiled to Israel therefore the sad refrain was repeated: Israel betrayed us. The IDF and SLA were one... and we thought it was possible to befriend Israel. We helped them in our land. For twenty-five years we were with her. The nephew of Aql Hashim himself an SLA soldier commented on the connection with Israeli soldiers in Lebanon: We ate with you together we fought with you together we went to funerals with you together. We were your allies...
Expressions of general Israeli concern and responsibility for her allies in the end served as an elusive formulation that culminated in betrayal.
These are harsh words but again it illustrates some of the points that came up with American behavior in other situations. Now Hezbollah has enough missiles to carpet Israel from corner to the other and their leader Nasrallah has said that the good thing about Israel is that the worlds Jews will gather there so they can all be destroyed at once.
Standing by your ally if the ally really is an ally is good policy. Unfortunately we have fallen short in that regard. Kissinger of all people said this To be an enemy of America can be dangerous but to be a friend is fatal".
Lets hope he was wrong.
Sources:
(a note on the following sources none of them are primary sources though some do quote primary sources. I found them by remembering some historical events and then searching for them on the internet. I try to leave out speculation (for instance the Perloff article is full of speculation that I disagree with). Not being a historian I cannot really evaluate the sources too well. I use what rings true based on what I already know.)
The story told by Humberto Fontova is at:
http://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2014/04/19/what-really-happed-at-the-bay-of-pigs-n1826030/page/full
The Vietnam story is told by Lauren Zanolli at:
http://hnn.us/article/31400
The story of Henry Kissinger & Israel is told by Dr. Gerhard Falk at
http://www.jbuff.com/c081210.htm
Philip Dermer tells the story of the fate of the Sons of Iraq at:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/philip-dermer-the-sons-of-iraq-abandoned-by-their-american-allies-1404253303
James Perloff tells the story of how we treated the Shah of Iran at
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4690-iran-and-the-shah-what-really-happened .
Mordechai Nisan tells the story of how Israel treated the Lebanese SLA at:
http://www.meforum.org/49/did-israel-betray-its-lebanese-allies
