Throughout President-Elect Donald Trump’s election campaign, a constant refrain of his foreign policy positions was to say that the U.S. should not get needlessly involved in external conflicts — that we should never have gone into Iraq, Libya or numerous other countries where the U.S. has invaded and sown chaos, death and destruction (and expended thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars in the process).
There’s much merit to these words, and now, a Congresswoman has gone beyond them to actually make a bill that would outlaw the U.S. arming and/or funding extremist groups and armies, as it has done for the last five years in Syria and in other places. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii has introduced legislation that would outlaw U.S. aid for extremist organizations, either directly or indirectly, via intelligence assistance, field training or weapons delivery.
This restriction would apply to both overt and covert aid given by any branch of government. It also would outlaw giving indirect assistance via a second nation, so we couldn’t, say, give arms to Lebanon, which could give them to a terrorist organization such as Hezbollah, for instance.
The bill would require the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to formulate a list of individuals, groups and rogue nations that could be considered such terrorist organizations or states and/or supporters of them.
The immediate scenario this would apply to would be in Syria, where the cast of belligerents ranges from the Syrian government — which at times the U.S. has strongly opposed and at other points it’s warmed up to due to the government’s opposition to ISIS — to indisputably brutal terrorist factions. In fact, there are many analysts who argue that “ISIS” is simply another name for the “rebel groups” the U.S. has extensively funded and armed.
There’s even a picture circulating on the web of U.S. Senator John McCain talking to men, one of whom is believed to be the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It’s alarming to say the least.
But regardless of whether McCain met directly with ISIS or not, it’s unquestioned that the U.S. has supported groups that have split off from or reformed from pieces of ISIS and al-Qaeda in Iraq. Even if these groups oppose Assad, the fact that the U.S. has given them weapons, assistance and funding is apocryphal and not something the American government is eager to publicize.
Regarding Syria, Congresswoman Gabbard said, “If you or I gave money, weapons or support to Al-Qaeda or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet, the US government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of Al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons and intelligence support in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”
Gabbard, who was on President-Elect Trump’s short list for nominees to be his Secretary of State, has met with Trump and spoken with him about her bill and this issue in general. It’s unknown at this time if Trump will get behind it; he may want to get into office first before committing to such an action publicly.
If Syria were the only case where the U.S. has formed dubious alliances and possibly supported the wrong side in a conflict, perhaps this issue wouldn’t require legislation to correct. Unfortunately, that’s far from the case; the U.S. has recently been involved with conflicts in Libya, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia in addition to many others.
In fact, there’s a very long list of countries — many third-world nations, often containing rich caches of oil and/or other natural resources — where our government has intervened and given money, arms or support to groups and regimes of very dubious virtue. In the last 50 years, one can point to nearly one country every two years that the U.S. has invaded, sent arms to or funded groups, factions or individuals fighting therein to gain an advantage.
President-Elect Donald Trump is right in saying that in many cases, we should simply stay out of these conflicts.
A good example is Libya. Several years ago, that country’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi was beginning to cooperate with the U.S. and had agreed to give up his program of weapons of mass destruction; he had previously started down a path of trying to acquire nuclear weapons.
The human rights abuses and charges of terrorism that the U.S. had accused Gaddafi of were considered to be in the past. Libya had given up two suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland and paid $1.5 billion in restitution in exchange for the U.S. taking Libya off the U.S. State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring regimes.
Diplomatic relations between the two countries had just begun to be restored, and there was much talk of cooperation between the two governments in the brief “honeymoon” period after Libya had cast off its pariah status.
But soon, the 2011 movement of the “Arab Spring” turned the tide against Gaddafi. He was scapegoated as a corrupt ruler who had been oppressing his people for decades. And indeed, it’s true that as with Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, there was evidence to support this — impoverished people, political prisoners and even executions and hoarding of resources by a close inner circle of the country’s despot and his confidantes.
As with the other Arab Spring uprisings, the U.S. eventually decided that politically, it would back the opposition, and in Libya’s case, this meant effecting regime change. It wasn’t long before Gaddafi and his sons were being chased from the city of Sirte with reported billions in gold and cash in a convoy of 75 vehicles, fleeing toward a safe haven in the south of the country.
At some point, U.S. intelligence got wind of Gaddafi’s exact location and fed information to the government’s opposition, the National Transitional Council, who ultimately fired on the convoy of vehicles and pulled Gaddafi from a hiding place in a drainage pipe and summarily beat, sodomized and executed him.
In the wake of Gaddafi’s removal, a power vacuum opened up, and suddenly, Libya became a political no-man’s-land. Different armed groups tried to claim they were the legitimate heirs to power, and many of these were either deemed terrorists by the United States or were allied with groups identified as such.
Slowly, over the course of several years, ISIS began to establish a presence in Libya, to the point whereby in August of this year, the U.S. decided military action was necessary to combat them. American armed forces began a bombing campaign that the Pentagon has since paused but not necessarily finished; special forces troops have also been sent to the country. At this point, it doesn’t look like a campaign that will end anytime soon.
As President-Elect Trump has said, it would have been far better for America (and Libya) had we simply left Gaddafi alone; thousands of deaths could have been prevented, and the U.S. could have had another stable ally in the region. Much of this intractable mess can be attributed to the poor decision-making of President Barack Obama, who’s called military interference in Libya one of the worst mistakes of his administration.
It’s time to stop letting our government make more of the same mistakes and putting our troops in harm’s way; it’s time to stop spending trillions of dollars on foreign wars that gain the U.S. little or nothing while making a small group of billionaires rich. Write to your Senator or Representative today to support Congresswoman Gabbard’s bill, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act (HR 6504), and help the government put your tax dollars to better use at home.
