No, this is not a post about the risk and morality of a 'liaison dangereuse', but a commentary on letting others do your dirty work, something I remarked on briefly at the end of my post in June. Marwan Muasher, a former foreign minister of Jordan, noted on GPS today that none of Iraq's (Muslim Arab) neighbors would likely be sending troops to fight ISIS.
Indeed, why should they; after all, isn't that that America is for? The US helps one side or another in a violent regional squabble, taking the blame from the vanquished and leaving the local victors in the clear. They didn't kill innocent civilians; that was the Yanks...
There is every reason in the world for Jordan, the Saudis, the UAE and Turkey not to put their countrymen in harm's way; and until the US stops treating every problem in the world as one it, and only it, can sort out, nor will there be any reason for then to do so.
A situation which presents moral hazard is one in which actors behave in a ways that they would not otherwise do, because they are insulated, to some degree, from the negative consequences of their actions. The US penchant for fixing everyone else's problems, even when well intentioned, creates just this problem (as is also abundantly evident in the failure of many European countries to meet their NATO commitments on defense spending).
Henry Kissinger noted that of the five military conflicts in which the US has been involved since the Second World War (Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan) in only one (Iraq I) were the original goals of the intervention achieved. You'd have thought that might be a lesson worth remembering.
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