The calls for the United States to send ground troops back to Iraq are growing - especially among the Republican Party. All to combat ISIS. As if America's last foray into Iraq ended well. In fact, it's America's past failed policies that created the stage for ISIS' rise in the first place - something seemingly utterly lost on GOP demagogues. What is frightening is that these war mongers in the GOP seem to be slowly getting their wish as America slides toward another Middle East disaster. Here are highlights from a piece in Salon:
The last time the United States of America launched a ground war in Iraq, it did so only after engaging in a public debate. The debate was far from the democratic ideal; in retrospect, it was more of an ersatz form of public deliberation. But even though the lead-up to the war was truncated and riddled with scaremongering, falsehoods and conscious misrepresentation, it still happened.
Considering how most of us remember those blinkered and bloodthirsty months, it feels bizarre to write these words, but those are beginning to look like the good old days. Because what’s happening right now, out in the open and yet barely under the surface, is even worse. The signs that the United States is headed for its third invasion of Iraq in 30 years are growing. But because this new war, in marked contrast to the last one, is gestating during the tenure of a president who’d rather not fight, the public hasn’t subjected it to nearly the same degree of scrutiny.
The U.S. is slowly but surely moving closer to doing what so many of its citizens recently said it never should. It is drifting toward making yet another major military commitment to the Middle East; and it is moving toward doing so by hoping that, this time, its guns, bombs and soldiers can do what they heretofore never could.
America is sleepwalking back into a quagmire. And too many of its citizens have yet to notice.
If you listen to the rhetoric of the GOP’s presidential aspirants, you can almost hear the taboo against promoting a new war in Iraq begin to crumble. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, for example, has left the door to invasion noticeably open. He won’t rule out invading Syria, either. Walker’s chief opponent, former Gov. Jeb Bush, also won’t make any promises about putting “boots on the ground” in Syria or Iraq.
More disturbingly, the appetite for war is not only growing among always-hawkish Republicans, but also in the public at large. According to a CBS News poll released last week, a shocking 57 percent of survey respondents — which, to underline the point, is nearly six out of 10 — support sending American troops to Iraq and Syria.
[T]he error here isn’t so much the fault of the American people as it is the fault of their media and political leadership. Because the president is not advocating for a greater escalation, thus providing the political press with a recognizable pro-war figure to put in conflict with anti-war arguments; and because the media seemingly cannot resist trumpeting the latest act of barbarism from ISIS with a lurid and barely concealed excitement, the American people are unaware of the many reasons to see ISIS more realistically.
More and more, it seems as if the country’s best hope for avoiding further entanglement is for ISIS to collapse under its own fanatical cruelty — before President Walker or President Clinton gets a chance to do it first.
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