Early on Tuesday morning, President Barack Obama made a statement in which he confirmed the United States, along with a coalition of five other Middle East countries, had begun to attack the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) headquarters in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa.
Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby said the United States used “a mix of fighter, bomber, and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles.”
This use of military force made good on President Obama’s promise to take the fight to ISIL in the Middle East. Unfortunately, President Obama also declared the U.S. would train and equip Syrian rebels to be able to fight the growing ISIL threat.
In his press conference Tuesday, the president also said America would “train and equip Iraqi and Syrian opposition fighters.” This remark by Obama makes it sound like the arms being supplied are going directly to the “good guys” in this conflict and will only be used to destroy ISIL.
Sadly, we have already seen something contradictory taking place in Syria and Iraq. The Internet is teeming with pictures of ISIL militants carrying around American-made weapons. There is even a Buzzfeed article depicting 11 pictures of American weapons taken from ISIL fighters. The arms include many M16A4 assault rifles which are standard issue weapons for American service members.
Supplying weapons to foreign countries is no new feat for the U.S. government. The U.S. leads the world in exporting weapons of war. We’re supposed to hold disdain for war and we claim to yearn for peace yet we propagate its continuation time and time again.
Even worse, according to the Arms Trade Resource Center, a majority of U.S. arms sales go to countries which the U.S. State Department deems “undemocratic.” What better way to spread our values across the globe than to arm the world with weapons of war?
The Arms Trade Resource Center also stated that between 1992 and 2003 the U.S. government sold $177.5 billion worth of arms to foreign countries. This incredible volume of arms traffic has unforeseeable consequences for American foreign policy down the road.
This example is most poignantly illustrated by the U.S. government’s decision to arm Afghan rebels in the 1980s to rout out the invading Russians. The U.S. was short sighted in its decision-making and only focused on the threat directly in front of them in the form of the Soviet Union. At the time, the weapons we sent to the Afghan rebels were hailed as a success and forced the Soviet Union to retreat out of Afghanistan. Yet, unbeknownst to the U.S. government at the time, they empowered one of the most well-known terrorists of all time, Osama Bin Laden.
Observing the success Bin Laden had against one of the world’s super powers, the Afghan rebel victory became a beacon for fellow freedom fighters across the globe to turn to. Not long after he kicked the Soviets out of Afghanistan, Bin Laden created Al Qaeda and used U.S.-supplied weapons and tactics against us.
The U.S. government, apparently opposed to learning from history, has already begun the steps to provide arms to Syrian rebel groups whom we know little about. The situation in Syria is so clouded that U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., both members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have stated multiple times, as far back as February 2012, the American government ought to supply arms to a group of “moderate” Syrian rebels so they can dispose of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Together they claimed the Assad regime was a friend of Iran and therefore a threat to American security. If successful, the senators said, the rebels could instill a Syrian government opposed to Iran.
Many of the rebel groups McCain and Graham had advocated funding, training, and arming with American weapons have since defected to join ISIL and would have taken all of our resources with them had we listened to their advice.
While the new bill, which President Obama signed into law last Friday, does require the recipients of aid to be “vetted thoroughly,” there is no mechanism to control what the rebels do with the arms after they receive them.
It’s frustrating to sit back and watch history repeat itself. President Obama’s statement that the U.S. will indeed provide weapons and training to the Syrian rebels combined with his signature on the bill have all but assured that this calamity will take place. America has seen the disastrous consequences when our own weaponry is used against us on the battlefield. We shouldn’t let Syria become the same mistake Afghanistan was.
Cullen is a senior majoring in History and Political Science. Do you agree with the U.S. policy of providing military arms to foreign countries? Do you see an acceptable benefit to providing arms? We’d like to hear your view. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com
