FEIN: Obama’s stupid war

In the annals of the United States, there may be more stupid conflicts than President Obama’s soon-to-be announced war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but if there are, they do not readily come to mind.

There is nothing in it for the United States!

Even defining the enemy is problematic. ISIS is not a nation. It rules over no fixed territory. It has no citizens. It has no government. It is not even a membership organization with a roster of members or identifying insignia. There are no articulable earmarks of ISIS membership. How dangerous can an enemy be that eludes definition?

Mr. Obama’s professed war aim is to degrade or destroy the enemy. But as Carol von Clausewitz taught in “On War,” “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Without an articulable political goal, Mr. Obama’s war against ISIS is fatuous if not obscene. Killing for the sake of killing is not a political objective. The war will be endless in time and global in scope. Success will be measured by body counts, which proved a disaster in Vietnam.

According to Obama’s propaganda, ISIS has grown from a tiny acorn into a mighty oak threatening the entire globe in a few months, vastly faster than Adolph Hitler needed to construct the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe. Any war that is underwritten by lies is destined to fail, like the domino theory and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that fueled the Vietnam War.

Any inhabitant of the United States who goes abroad to train with ISIS has committed the crime of material assistance to a foreign terrorist organization. They can all be detained and prosecuted if they seek to return to the United States. They do not justify war.

Mr. Obama’s euphemistically styled war allies against ISIS — e.g., Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait — will prove as worthless as currency of the Confederate States of America. Iraq daily becomes more unglued. Its endless factions are incapable of fighting ISIS because preoccupied with internecine warfare and worries over who will rule Iraq if ISIS is crushed.

Kuwait’s armed forces raced into the sunset when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded in 1990. And Saudi Arabia provides financial support to mosques or madrassas that have given birth to the ISIS extremism.

Mr. Obama’s war against ISIS will soon resemble the interminable and unresolvable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That is why it should not be fought. Mr. Obama should learn from the advice of Thomas Jefferson in urging President James Monroe to refrain from involvement in Spanish upheavals. What Jefferson deplored about Europe applies in spades today about the Middle East (sans Israel):

“I have ever deemed it fundamental for the US. never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government, are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property and lives of their people. On our part, never had a people so favorable a chance of trying the opposite system of peace and fraternity with mankind, and the direction of all our means and faculties to the purposes of improvement instead of destruction.”