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Sunday, May 31, 2015

How the Western Press (and everyone in the US) Spreads ISIS Propaganda



If the media is so concerned with ISIS propaganda, why do they keep disseminating it? 


This past weekend, several media outlets ran a story about how ISIS is seeking a nuclear weapon:
ISIS Claims It Could Buy Its First Nuclear Weapon From Pakistan Within a Year
—International Business Times
ISIS to Smuggle Its First Nuclear Weapon From Pakistan, Mulls Attack on US: Report
—Economic Times
ISIS Boasts It ‘Could Buy First Nuclear Weapon in Less Than 12 Months’
—Daily Mirror
John Cantlie Claims ‘Infinitely’ Greater Threat of Nuclear Attack on US
—The Telegraph
These “reports” are based entirely on a throwaway line from hostage-cum-ISIS spokesperson John Cantlie in an “op-ed” in the  ISIS magazine Dabiq a few days ago. As IBT reported:
“Let me throw a hypothetical operation onto the table,” [Cantile] continues. “The Islamic State has billions of dollars in the bank, so they call on their wilāyah in Pakistan to purchase a nuclear device through weapons dealers with links to corrupt officials in the region.”
It admits that such a scenario is “far-fetched” but warns: “It’s the sum of all fears for Western intelligence agencies and it’s infinitely more possible today than it was just one year ago.”
This “hypothetical operation” was a “far-fetched” scenario—but the meme, naturally, soon spread to popular right-wing media:
New Issue of ISIS Magazine: We Can Buy a Nuclear Weapon From Pakistan
—Breitbart
ISIS Suggests It Can Smuggle a Nuke Into US Through Mexico
—NewsMax
ISIS Wants to Buy Nuke From Pakistan
—Drudge Report
Is ISIS Now Powerful Enough for Nukes?
—Fox News
Other propaganda claims from this issue of Dabiq would find their way into Western media—namely viral-ready threats to behead President Obama and auction off his wife, First Lady Michelle Obama, to the sex slave market.

Now, there’s no actual evidence that any of this is anything more than deranged ranting, yet here we are: Millions of casual news observers who scrolled through western media this weekend came away thinking ISIS is plotting to acquire a nuclear bomb, kill the president and prostitute his wife.

This isn’t the first time the media has engaged in what I call the “Nancy Grace Factor” when it comes to ISIS. The Nancy Grace Factor, named after the perpetually indignant cable news host, is when a media outlet ostensibly condemns some terrible—yet titillating—menace while simultaneously trading in its exploits. It permits the pundit to excoriate the subject matter while also feeding its scary details to the rubbernecking masses to drive ratings and traffic.

This mentality explains most of corporate media’s ISIS coverage and—as is readily apparent by the never-ending stream of snuff films coming from their Al Hayat Media Center—ISIS propagandists as well. The media’s account of the rise of ISIS has uniformly been defined by hyping  its ambitionits scope and its sheer bad-assery, thus carrying water for ISIS’s core argument that it, and it alone, is the Islamic vanguard against Western colonial aggression.

Indeed, as much ink as has been spilled by corporate media pearl-clutching the “threat of the ISIS propaganda machine” and ISIS’s unstoppable “Twitter army,” what’s never mentioned is that by sheer reach, the vast majority of ISIS propaganda is, in fact, disseminated by corporate media themselves.

ISIS, like any good troll, requires predictable outrage from the trollee in order to justify its troll strategy.  For example, the primary source for almost all of the ISIS propaganda videos, Rita Katz of SITE Intelligence Group, feverishly demands Twitter ban jihadi social media (though presumably not the ones created by the FBI or DoD) while routinely tweeting out ISIS propaganda in its rawest form. Does the average giddy jihadists care how their fear goes viral? Of course not. Just as Kim Kardashian parlayed our collective indignation over her sex tape into a $130 million empire, so ISIS uses our own media outrage machine against us—enhancing its brand with each condemnation.

But ISIS propaganda is newsworthy, you say. Yes. The fact of propaganda is, of course, newsworthy, but the actual images and videos are, in most contexts, nothing more than pornography. Even setting aside something as goofy as this weekend’s idle threats, actually newsworthy pieces of propaganda like the beheading videos are covered by Western press like a medieval public execution spectacle.  Any murder is newsworthy; this doesn’t mean media need to show images of said murder on a loop to report the fact of this murder. That they do—with no apparent news value beyond conveying how savage ISIS is—belies their ostensibly journalistic motive.

Several outlets, like the New York Times and NPR, have been incrementally less terrible at this, skirting the Nancy Grace Factor and down playing the gruesome visuals. But this is likely more a product of medium rather than editorial discretion. Visual-heavy TV news and news tabloid outfits almost to a tee showed no such prudence, running the horrific images of Foley’s death nonstop.

But why? The irony is that in all ISIS “beheading videos”—except one—the actual beheading is never shown. Whoever edits these snuff films, from some reason, cuts away right before the actual act of violence and fades to the brutal aftermath, followed by a long-winded speech and Islamist chanting; in this sense, the editors atCNN and CBS showed about as much discretion as ISIS themselves.

Indeed, given that Fox News ran the Jordanian pilot torching video in its entirety, it’s possible the only thing preventing corporate media from actually showing the beheadings themselves is that no such footage is actually provided by our bloodthirsty yet squeamish terrorists. But the logic is the same. For the same reason that the threat of torture is legally indistinguishable from torture itself, the trauma of showing the images to the runup to the killing are as effective as the showing of the killing itself. As such, media’s constant use of pre-execution b-roll, the quivering testimony of the the victim, and the focus on the executioner’s ideology has just as much recruiting purchase for ISIS as simply reposting the video itself. The actual violence, as both Western media and ISIS alike understand, is incidental.

It’s an obvious moral hazard that’s been simmering under the surface since this whole ISIS phenomenon began—having been briefly touched upon by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Fox News’ Laura Ingraham last February. As Heather Digby Patron would note in Salon:
For months [Hayes] has been making the case that this lurid coverage is not only creating the conditions for war without any proper debate, it’s playing into the terrorists’ hands. When Fox’s Bill O’Reilly recently declared that we are in a “Holy War” with Islam, Hayes said on his program:
“That sort of rhetoric is, of course, exactly what ISIS wants. For if this is a Holy War, they aren’t some murderous cult or some fringe Sunni militia. No, if it’s a Holy War, then they are the representatives of Islam, which is why the president at today’s summit on countering violent extremism was so careful not to cast the fight on those terms.”
These terrorists produce this propaganda for recruitment purposes but produce them with slick production values for US and other Western media in order to try to make the US the common enemy of all Islam.  Hayes is one of the only cable news hosts to explicitly challenge not only the Holy War meme, but the reaction of the media to every alleged threat.
But he is on the same page with one very unlikely Fox News personality. Here’s Laura Ingraham, of all people, talking about the shopping mall threat assessment:
“I don’t think we should jump every time the freaks with the Ace bandages around their faces put out videos.… I think we should have a mature debate about how to secure the Homeland without changing our way of life.”
So where does this leave us? The solution seem readily apparent: If the media really wanted to prevent the dissemination of ISIS propaganda, they could stop disseminating ISIS propaganda. It’s really that simple. Report the substance—“James Foley Has Died,” “ISIS Releases Another Propaganda Magazine”—but avoid the smutty details, the empty threats and, above all, the titillating visuals.
There will no doubt be three main objections to this proposal:

But media can’t conspire to not cover something.

Wrong. They do this all the time, as a matter of course. The media, for example, have a widespread policy against publishing rape accusers’ names. This policy is a common-sense restriction media have informally imposed on themselves with the understanding that publicity not only traumatizes those who have been raped, but discourages future survivors from coming forward. It’s an admission that their industry can have harmful externalities in their narrow pursuit of a “story.” The name of the accuser typically has no news value and the reporting of the rape is not enhanced by the divulging of this information. On balance, therefore, avoiding this detail is seen as being in the greater public interest. The same is true for the weaponization of mass media by ISIS.

But if someone wants to find ISIS propaganda they will.

Great, then let them. If one actively pursues damn near anything on the internet, you can find it. This doesn’t mean major media outlets need to tee it up to the otherwise distracted and disinterested masses and radically amplify ISIS’s core propaganda memes.

Even if the media ignores ISIS’ social media propaganda, this won’t make it go away

Of course it won’t! But it will take away one of its primary avenues of dissemination.
The question media need to ask themselves is this: Is the average “impressionable” Sunni Muslim in London or Brussels or New York more likely to be introduced to the ISIS spectacle via a random jihadist on Twitter(the average of which has 1,014  followers) or from CNN, which reaches 387 million homes worldwide and gets over 14 million clicks a day? The answer, mathematically speaking, is of course the latter. Indeed, one can even trace the popularity of so-called ISIS social media propagandist by their corollary appearances in western media.

Consider the case of UK radical imam Anjem Choudary. During the escalation of the US war against ISIS in fall of 2014, the greatest thing that ever happened to his social media brand was his numerous appearances on corporate media—from CNN to Fox News to the Washington Post to the highest-rated news program on television, CBS’s 60 Minutes. His Twitter following, according archive records, more than doubled from August to November thanks to this exposure.
-

The Real Reason We Are Bombing Syria

Huffpost Politics


The Real Reason We Are Bombing Syria

We have met the enemy and he isn't only ISIS, he is us.

Posted: Updated:
TOMAHAWK SYRIA
The administration's response to the conjunction of this weekend's People's Climate March and the International Day of Peace?

1) Bomb Syria the following day, to wrest control of the oil from ISIS which gained its foothold directly in the region through the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Jordan funding and arming ISIS' predecessors in Syria.

2) Send the president to UN General Assembly, where he will inevitably give a rousing speech about climate and peace, while the destruction of the environment and the shattering of world peace is on full display 5,000 miles away.

Nothing better illustrates the bankruptcy of the Obama administration's foreign policy than funding groups that turn on the U.S. again and again, a neo-con fueled cycle of profits for war makers and destruction of ever-shifting "enemies."
The fact can't be refuted: ISIS was born of Western intervention in Iraq and covert action in Syria.

This Frankenstein-like experiment of arming the alleged freedom-seeking Syrian opposition created the monster that roams the region. ISIS and the U.S. have a curious relationship -- mortal enemies that, at the same time, benefit from some of the same events:

a) Ousting former Iraqi President Nouri al Maliki for his refusal to consent to the continued presence of U.S. troops in his country.

b) Regime change in Syria.

c) Arming the Kurds so they can separate from Iraq, a preliminary move to partitioning Iraq.

What a coincidence for war-profiteering neo-cons and the war industry, which has seen its stock rise since last week's congressional vote to fund the rapid expansion of war. We have met the enemy and he isn't only ISIS, he is us.
Phase two of the war against Syria is the introduction of 5,000 "moderate" mercenaries (as opposed to immoderate ones), who were trained in Saudi Arabia, the hotbed of Wahhabism, at an initial installment cost of $15 billion. These new "moderates" will replace the old "moderates," who became ISIS, just in time for Halloween.

The administration, in the belief that you can buy, rent, or lease friends where they otherwise do not exist, labor under the vain assumption that our newfound comrades-in-arms will remain in place during their three-year employment period, ignoring the inevitability that those "friends" you hire today could be firing at you tomorrow.

One wonders if Saudi training of these moderate mercenaries will include methods of beheading which were popularized by the Saudi government long before their ISIS progeny took up the grisly practice.

The U.S. is being played.

Qatar and Saudi Arabia can now overtly join with the U.S. in striking Syria, after they have been covertly attempting for years to take down the last secular state in the region. We are now advancing the agenda of the actual Islamic States -- Saudi Arabia and Qatar -- to fight the ersatz Islamic State of ISIS.

Now U.S. bombs and missiles might inadvertently "make the world safe" for theocracy rather than democracy. Today we read reports that Israel has shot down a Syrian warplane, indicating the terrible possibility of a wider regional conflict.

What does this have to do with the security of the 50 States United? Nothing!
Last week Congress acted prematurely in funding a war without following the proscriptions of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. (The day of the vote, I urged Congress to resist this dangerous and misguided legislation.) But even while the funding was given, the explicit authorization to go to war was not. To authorize a war, Congress must vote for war. It has not done that yet.

To sell its case, the administration is borrowing from the fear mongering tactics of the Bush administration. ISIS poses no direct, immediate threat to the United States -- The White House even said so yesterday, just hours before bombing commenced - yet we are being sold make-believe about ISIS sleeper cells.

This attack on Syria, under the guise of striking ISIS, is by definition, a war of aggression. It is a violation of international law. It could lead to crimes against humanity and the deaths of untold numbers of innocent civilians. No amount of public relations or smooth talking can change that.

And yes, members of this Democratic administration, including the president who executed this policy, must be held accountable by the International Criminal Court and by the American people, who he serves.

But as we know, war is a powerful and cynical PR tactic. I expect the bombing of Syria will momentarily boost the White House's popularity with self-serving heroic accounts of damage inflicted upon ISIS (and the U.S. equipment they use). Stuffing the November ballot box with bombs and missiles may even help the Democratic Party retain the Senate.

But after the election the voters will discover that the president played into the hands of extremists, hurt civilians, and embroiled our country deep into another conflict in the Middle East.

There were alternatives. The U.S. and the international community could have contained and shrunk ISIS by cutting off its funds and its revenue from sale of oil on the black market. We could have looked to strike a deal with Syria and Iran.
In foreign policy, the administration has failed. Congress has failed. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties have passed the national checkbook to their patrons in the war contracting business. And passed the bill to future generations.

The American people, who in 2008 searched for something redemptive after years of George W. Bush's war, realize in 2014 that hope and change was but a clever slogan. It was used to gain power and to keep it through promoting fear, war, the growth of the National Security state, and an autumnal bonfire of countless billions of tax dollars which fall like leaves from money trees on the banks of the Potomac.


Delusional Thinking in Washington, Desperate Plight of a Declining Superpower






 

What is a declining superpower to do in the face of widespread defiance? 

 


Take a look around the world and it’s hard not to conclude that the United States is a superpower in decline. Whether in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, aspiring powers are flexing their muscles, ignoring Washington’s dictates, or actively combating them. Russia refuses to curtail its support for armed separatists in Ukraine; China refuses to abandon its base-building endeavors in the South China Sea; Saudi Arabia refuses to endorse the U.S.-brokered nuclear deal with Iran; the Islamic State movement (ISIS) refuses to capitulate in the face of U.S. airpower. What is a declining superpower supposed to do in the face of such defiance?

This is no small matter. For decades, being a superpower has been the defining characteristic of American identity. The embrace of global supremacy began after World War II when the United States assumed responsibility for resisting Soviet expansionism around the world; it persisted through the Cold War era and only grew after the implosion of the Soviet Union, when the U.S. assumed sole responsibility for combating a whole new array of international threats. As General Colin Powell famously exclaimed in the final days of the Soviet era, “We have to put a shingle outside our door saying, ‘Superpower Lives Here,’ no matter what the Soviets do, even if they evacuate from Eastern Europe.”

Imperial Overstretch Hits Washington

Strategically, in the Cold War years, Washington’s power brokers assumed that there would always be two superpowers perpetually battling for world dominance.  In the wake of the utterly unexpected Soviet collapse, American strategists began to envision a world of just one, of a “sole superpower” (aka Rome on the Potomac). In line with this new outlook, the administration of George H.W. Bush soon adopted a long-range plan intended to preserve that status indefinitely. Known as the Defense Planning Guidance for Fiscal Years 1994-99, it declared: “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.”

H.W.’s son, then the governor of Texas, articulated a similar vision of a globally encompassing Pax Americana when campaigning for president in 1999. If elected, he told military cadets at the Citadel in Charleston, his top goal would be “to take advantage of a tremendous opportunity -- given few nations in history -- to extend the current peace into the far realm of the future. A chance to project America’s peaceful influence not just across the world, but across the years.”

For Bush, of course, “extending the peace” would turn out to mean invading Iraq and igniting a devastating regional conflagration that only continues to grow and spread to this day. Even after it began, he did not doubt -- nor (despite the reputed wisdom offered by hindsight) does he today -- that this was the price that had to be paid for the U.S. to retain its vaunted status as the world’s sole superpower.

The problem, as many mainstream observers now acknowledge, is that such a strategy aimed at perpetuating U.S. global supremacy at all costs was always destined to result in what Yale historian Paul Kennedy, in his classic book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, unforgettably termed “imperial overstretch.” As he presciently wrote in that 1987 study, it would arise from a situation in which “the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is… far larger than the country’s power to defend all of them simultaneously.”

Indeed, Washington finds itself in exactly that dilemma today. What’s curious, however, is just how quickly such overstretch engulfed a country that, barely a decade ago, was being hailed as the planet’s first “hyperpower,” a status even more exalted than superpower. But that was before George W.’s miscalculation in Iraq and other missteps left the U.S. to face a war-ravaged Middle East with an exhausted military and a depleted treasury. At the same time, major and regional powers like China, India, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have been building up their economic and military capabilities and, recognizing the weakness that accompanies imperial overstretch, are beginning to challenge U.S. dominance in many areas of the globe. The Obama administration has been trying, in one fashion or another, to respond in all of those areas -- among them Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and the South China Sea -- but without, it turns out, the capacity to prevail in any of them.

Nonetheless, despite a range of setbacks, no one in Washington’s power elite -- Senators Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders being the exceptions that prove the rule -- seems to have the slightest urge to abandon the role of sole superpower or even to back off it in any significant way. President Obama, who is clearly all too aware of the country’s strategic limitations, has been typical in his unwillingness to retreat from such a supremacist vision. “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation,” he told graduating cadets at West Point in May 2014. “That has been true for the century past and it will be true for the century to come.”

How, then, to reconcile the reality of superpower overreach and decline with an unbending commitment to global supremacy?

The first of two approaches to this conundrum in Washington might be thought of as a high-wire circus act.  It involves the constant juggling of America’s capabilities and commitments, with its limited resources (largely of a military nature) being rushed relatively fruitlessly from one place to another in response to unfolding crises, even as attempts are made to avoid yet more and deeper entanglements. This, in practice, has been the strategy pursued by the current administration.  Call it the Obama Doctrine.

After concluding, for instance, that China had taken advantage of U.S. entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan to advance its own strategic interests in Southeast Asia, Obama and his top advisers decided to downgrade the U.S. presence in the Middle East and free up resources for a more robust one in the western Pacific.  Announcing this shift in 2011 -- it would first be called a “pivot to Asia” and then a “rebalancing” there -- the president made no secret of the juggling act involved.

“After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region,” he told members of the Australian Parliament that November.  “As we end today’s wars, I have directed my national security team to make our presence and mission in the Asia Pacific a top priority.  As a result, reductions in U.S. defense spending will not -- I repeat, will not -- come at the expense of the Asia Pacific.”

Then, of course, the new Islamic State launched its offensive in Iraq in June 2014 and the American-trained army there collapsed with the loss of four northern cities. Videoed beheadings of American hostages followed, along with a looming threat to the U.S.-backed regime in Baghdad. Once again, President Obama found himself pivoting -- this time sending thousands of U.S. military advisers back to that country, putting American air power into its skies, and laying the groundwork for another major conflict there.

Meanwhile, Republican critics of the president, who claim he’s doing too little in a losing effort in Iraq (and Syria), have also taken him to task for not doing enough to implement the pivot to Asia. In reality, as his juggling act that satisfies no one continues in Iraq and the Pacific, he’s had a hard time finding the wherewithal to effectively confront Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, the various militias fighting for power in fragmenting Libya, and so on.

The Party of Utter Denialism

Clearly, in the face of multiplying threats, juggling has not proven to be a viable strategy.  Sooner or later, the “balls” will simply go flying and the whole system will threaten to fall apart. But however risky juggling may prove, it is not nearly as dangerous as the other strategic response to superpower decline in Washington: utter denial.

For those who adhere to this outlook, it’s not America’s global stature that’s eroding, but its will -- that is, its willingness to talk and act tough. If Washington were simply to speak more loudly, so this argument goes, and brandish bigger sticks, all these challenges would simply melt away. Of course, such an approach can only work if you’re prepared to back up your threats with actual force, or “hard power,” as some like to call it.

Among the most vocal of those touting this line is Senator John McCain, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a persistent critic of President Obama. “For five years, Americans have been told that ‘the tide of war is receding,’ that we can pull back from the world at little cost to our interests and values,” he typically wrote in March 2014 in a New York Timesop-ed. “This has fed a perception that the United States is weak, and to people like Mr. Putin, weakness is provocative.” The only way to prevent aggressive behavior by Russia and other adversaries, he stated, is “to restore the credibility of the United States as a world leader.” This means, among other things, arming the Ukrainians and anti-Assad Syrians, bolstering the NATO presence in Eastern Europe, combating “the larger strategic challenge that Iran poses,” and playing a “more robust” role (think: more “boots” on more ground) in the war against ISIS.

Above all, of course, it means a willingness to employ military force. “When aggressive rulers or violent fanatics threaten our ideals, our interests, our allies, and us,” he declared last November, “what ultimately makes the difference… is the capability, credibility, and global reach of American hard power.”
A similar approach -- in some cases even more bellicose -- is being articulated by the bevy of Republican candidates now in the race for president, Rand Paul again excepted. At a recent “Freedom Summit” in the early primary state of South Carolina, the various contenders sought to out-hard-power each other. Florida Senator Marco Rubio was loudly cheered for promising to make the U.S. “the strongest military power in the world.” Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker received a standing ovation for pledging to further escalate the war on international terrorists: “I want a leader who is willing to take the fight to them before they take the fight to us.”

In this overheated environment, the 2016 presidential campaign is certain to be dominated by calls for increased military spending, a tougher stance toward Moscow and Beijing, and an expanded military presence in the Middle East. Whatever her personal views, Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic candidate, will be forced to demonstrate her backbone by embracing similar positions. In other words, whoever enters the Oval Office in January 2017 will be expected to wield a far bigger stick on a significantly less stable planet. As a result, despite the last decade and a half of interventionary disasters, we’re likely to see an even more interventionist foreign policy with an even greater impulse to use military force.

However initially gratifying such a stance is likely to prove for John McCain and the growing body of war hawks in Congress, it will undoubtedly prove disastrous in practice. Anyone who believes that the clock can now be turned back to 2002, when U.S. strength was at its zenith and the Iraq invasion had not yet depleted American wealth and vigor, is undoubtedly suffering from delusional thinking. China is far more powerful than it was 13 years ago, Russia has largely recovered from its post-Cold War slump, Iran has replaced the U.S. as the dominant foreign actor in Iraq, and other powers have acquired significantly greater freedom of action in an unsettled world. Under these circumstances, aggressive muscle-flexing in Washington is likely to result only in calamity or humiliation.

Time to Stop Pretending

Back, then, to our original question: What is a declining superpower supposed to do in the face of this predicament?

Anywhere but in Washington, the obvious answer would for it to stop pretending to be what it’s not. The first step in any 12-step imperial-overstretch recovery program would involve accepting the fact that American power is limited and global rule an impossible fantasy. Accepted as well would have to be this obvious reality: like it or not, the U.S. shares the planet with a coterie of other major powers -- none as strong as we are, but none so weak as to be intimidated by the threat of U.S. military intervention. Having absorbed a more realistic assessment of American power, Washington would then have to focus on how exactly to cohabit with such powers -- Russia, China, and Iran among them -- and manage its differences with them without igniting yet more disastrous regional firestorms.

If strategic juggling and massive denial were not so embedded in the political life of this country’s “war capital,” this would not be an impossibly difficult strategy to pursue, as others have suggested. In 2010, for example, Christopher Layne of the George H.W. Bush School at Texas A&M argued in the American Conservative that the U.S. could no longer sustain its global superpower status and, “rather than having this adjustment forced upon it suddenly by a major crisis… should get ahead of the curve by shifting its position in a gradual, orderly fashion.” Layne and others have spelled out what this might entail: fewer military entanglements abroad, a diminishing urge to garrison the planet, reduced military spending, greater reliance on allies, more funds to use at home in rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure of a divided society, and a diminished military footprint in the Middle East.

But for any of this to happen, American policymakers would first have to abandon the pretense that the United States remains the sole global superpower -- and that may be too bitter a pill for the present American psyche (and for the political aspirations of certain Republican candidates) to swallow. From such denialism, it’s already clear, will only come further ill-conceived military adventures abroad and, sooner or later, under far grimmer circumstances, an American reckoning with reality.