This old semi-satirical article from The Atlantic disturbed me:
Defeating ISIS: The Board Game
I read this and ask myself, who is our ally against ISIS? Nobody.
(Granted, this was before Russia entered the picture; but it's surprising how little Russia changed things in the regional calculus).
This started by asking myself, why is our #1 ally in the Mideast, "the only democracy in the Middle East," Israel, not helping us against ISIS, at least not openly? I read the news; I read nothing about Israel in the fight against ISIS.
This thought alone disturbs me.
It disturbs me even more that countries in the region don't see ISIS as the biggest threat, but rather their neighbors, or homegrown groups. Or the Kurds, whom Russia and the U.S. love to love but can't really support too much, because of Turkey.
What disturbs me the most, I guess, is that the world's #1 military power seems to care a lot about ISIS while all the countries where ISIS actually exists don't seem particularly bothered by it.
It bothers me when I'm feeling manipulated. I don't like being jerked around. I think that's what's going on with ISIS.
Showing posts with label Syria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Syria. Show all posts
Monday, April 4, 2016
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Zakaria: ISIS wants U.S. '800-pound gorilla' to fight them
I've been saying this from the start, nevertheless, here you go, an expert opinion:
Remember, ISIS has gone from nothing to becoming the replacement for al Qaeda, the most well-known jihadi organization in the world. How? By taking on the 800-pound gorilla of the world, the United States of America.How exactly then would that create recruitment for wannabe jihadis?Because if you are one of the many jihadi organizations or one of the many radical Sunni organizations in Syria that is sort of struggling for market share and adherents, that's one thing. If you become the organization that battles the United States, the crusaders, the West – if you become the face of radical Islam that is up against this new crusade – now, all of a sudden, you are the place everyone wants to come to. You're the place everyone wants to send money to. There's a lot of this that has to do with fundraising.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Being an 'indispensable nation' is killing America
This op-ed is worth re-posting in full.
Never let it be said I'm a partisan hack: I support Borosage's indictment of President Obama's executive overreach in conducting military operations without Congressional approval for war.
More damning to my mind has been President Obama's failure to articulate to the nation (and Congress) a national security-military doctrine/vision (call it what you will) that makes it clear when he thinks the United States should send its troops into battle, and when we shouldn't. Granted, this may be the most difficult job of any POTUS in an ever-changing world, and with inherited conflicts of past presidents.
Is it because Obama and his team doesn't have the strategic capacity to develop such a vision? Is it because Obaama is too arrogant to articulate it for us, we're just supposed to trust him not to do "stupid shit"? Or, most likely, is it because a timid Obama fears that no matter what he says, it will be parsed and pilloried by Republicans -- who also can't agree among themselves on a foreign policy -- looking to score partisan political points?
Borosage is right to point out that the opportunity cost of U.S. military adventures abroad is investment in piss-poor education and crumbling infrastructure at home. Maybe our government can buy guns and butter... but not forever, not at a sustainable cost. This is where the "fiscally responsible" yet "pro-military" Tea Parties and Republicans have fallen on their faces as an opposition, by refusing to specify just what they are willing to give up to achieve their stated top priority of fiscal balance.
By Robert L. Borosage
October 20, 2014 | Reuters
America — proudly dubbed the “indispensable nation” by its national-security managers — is now the entangled nation enmeshed in conflicts across the globe.
President Barack Obama, scorned by his Republican critics as an “isolationist” who wants to “withdraw from the world,” is waging the longest war in U.S. history in Afghanistan, boasts of toppling the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya, launches airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State and picks targets for drones to attack in as many as eight countries, while dispatching planes to the Russian border in reaction to its machinations in Ukraine, and a fleet to the South China Sea as the conflict over control of islands and waters escalates between China and its neighbors.
The indispensable nation is permanently engaged across the globe. But endless war undermines the Constitution. Democracy requires openness; war justifies secrecy. Democracy forces attention be paid to the common welfare; war demands attention and resources be spent on distant conflicts. Democracy involves forging coalitions to get action in the Congress; war is waged on executive order. The Constitution restrains the executive in times of peace; constitutional strictures are trampled in times of war.
When the founders wrote the Constitution, they worried about the tendency of kings, or presidents, to make war for personal aggrandizement or national glory. So they gave Congress the power to declare war, intent on “clogging, not facilitating” the rush to war. For the Republic, peace would be the normal state of affairs. War was a disruption — entered into only with prior debate and consideration by Congress, the elected body whose members best reflected the attitudes of their constituents.
The United States, in the words of conservative John Quincy Adams, would provide a shining example of liberty as long as “she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
But now the pursuit of monsters to destroy is unrelenting. Almost inevitably, it seems, the restraints of the Constitution are being trampled. With little debate, U.S. leaders have chosen permanent global intervention even at the cost of undermining the Republic.
For the cost of war can be measured in dollars not spent here at home.
An educated citizenry is the foundation of a robust democracy. Yet from the absence of free, full-day pre-K to affordable colleges to advanced training, the United States is skimping on investment in educating its citizens. A modern infrastructure is also essential to a competitive, high-wage economy. But while Washington spends $3 trillion on Iraq, there hasn’t been a serious discussion about bringing America’s aged infrastructure, including our roads, bridges and airports, up to standard — which would cost about the same.
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| A bridge to somewhere... now a bridge to nowhere. |
Instead of this funding, the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies spend more on their militaries than the rest of the world combined. Washington maintains more than 1,000 bases, called “military sites,” across the globe, plus 11 aircraft-carrier task forces that are essentially moveable bases. U.S. conventional and nuclear forces are unrivaled — yet Washington plans to spend another trillion dollars over the next 30 years modernizing nuclear weapons that the United States aims never to use. U.S. intelligence and covert forces are permanently engaged, often secretly creating the implicit commitments that will force the next intervention.
It is only America, as the president said in a speech announcing his intention to “degrade and ultimately defeat” Islamic State, which he refers to as ISIL, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, that “has the capacity and the will to mobilize the world against terrorism … against Russian aggression … to contain … Ebola and more.”
This president, more than his predecessors, understands the perils of being the “indispensable nation.” Elected in large part to get the United States out of the seemingly endless wars in the Middle East, he now finds himself forced into another open-ended commitment.
In his speech to the National Defense University in 2013, Obama argued, “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison’s warning that ‘No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.’ ” Obama warned specifically about this. “The choice we make about war,” the president said, “can impact — in sometimes unintended ways — the openness and freedom on which our way of life depends.”
Yet even with this awareness, and no reelection race facing him, Obama could not escape the imperatives of America’s role as the indispensable nation. The commitments are too many, the engagement too permanent, the capacity unrivalled — seemingly making all things possible. As a result, this former professor of constitutional law has governed over the greatest assertion of executive authority — claiming the power to make war, to surveil, arrest, detain and even kill Americans without prior judicial review or due process.
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| Ike warned us about the growing "military-industrial complex" that sought to feed itself at the federal trough. |
His Justice Department has used espionage laws against reporters and whistleblowers. The secrecy shields massive waste, fraud and abuse, as the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against consumes the bulk of the national budget, aside from payments on the national debt and the insurance programs of Social Security and Medicare.
When President George W. Bush was about to launch the war in Iraq, millions of Americans – as well as many people around the globe — marched in protest. The large demonstrations against war led the New York Times to dub world public opinion a second superpower. Bush sought authority from Congress and a dramatic congressional debate took place, with strong dissent against the war.
When Obama committed the United States to the fight against Islamic State, he claimed the authority to act without Congress, though adding he would “welcome” congressional support. Yet with the midterm elections then a few months away, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress chose to postpone the debate and the vote.
The bombing began on presidential order. Americans accepted their role as spectators, registering no significant objection to this presidential war-making. The indispensable nation is not only spending lives and resources on endless wars abroad, it is shredding its Constitution at home.
Ironically, America’s democracy is still strong enough to render it less than competent as a global policeman. Our military is the finest in the world, but still finds it hard to win a war. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate that while presidents can commit the nation virtually anywhere, Americans sour on long, costly interventions on the other side of the world.
This leads to strategies like “no boots on the ground” — designed not to rouse public opposition but almost certain to fail. Polls show that Americans have no interest in policing the globe. If the Constitution no longer constrains the president from making war, the public still limits his ability to wage it.
Sunday, September 28, 2014
TSA agent: We must laugh at underwear and toothpaste terrorists
This one deserves to be reposted in full, because too many Americans are susceptible to the craven U.S. media's attempts to spur us to support military action (and an anti-civil rights intelligence apparatus) ostensibly meant to keep us safe from non-existent threats -- bumbling terrorists with soggy shoes, crotches on fire, and the like.
And as a frequent international traveler let me say, I'm sick of it! It's all because of unaccountable, CYA, security-apparatus bureaucrats in DHS and TSA whose only concern is, "Not on my watch!", statistics, facts and our comfort be damned.
Read on!
By Jason Edward Harrington
September 28, 2014 | Guardian
The other day in Syria, the US conducted air strikes on a relatively unknown and possibly non-existent entity called the Khorasan group, which sounds more like a job-killing consulting firm than a people-killing al-Qaida spinoff. It was a surprise plot point in the campaign against Isis that left the kind of Strangelovian headlines that have become par for the course in the War on Terror. Take this one, from the Independent: “Syria air strikes: Khorasan Group ‘were working to make toothpaste bombs and explosives that could pass through airport security’”. Or this one: “Khorasan Group plotted attack against US with explosive clothes”.
This isn’t the first time the plane-flying public has gotten word of cavity-fighting and/or sartorial threats to international airliners: the concept of the toothpaste bomb first surfaced during the Sochi Olympics earlier this year, and the clothes-dipped-in-liquid-
Now that the global aviation system has been menaced by a shoe bomber, an underwear bomber, a hypothetical “Frankenbomber” and even ecologically friendly bombers, pretty much any western government could conceivably spout the results of a terror plot-generating algorithm and successfully sell it to the public as casus belli:
Common item + bomb + plot = justified military action and hassle at airports. Deodorant bomb plot? Sure, why the hell not? Sounds scary. Send in the drones, confiscate all the Old Spice.
There have been conflicting reports as to how “imminent” the Khorasan group’s aviation attack really was. But regardless of whether these alleged terrorist masterminds had their favorite sweaters weaponized and ready to blow, or were just sort of thinking about it, exactly what are we supposed to feel when confronted with news of such counter-terror campaigns carried out on our behalf? Relief and fear? Relief that our military may have neutralized a tube of toothpaste, and fear that the next Hollywood-ready plot is still imminently lurking out there?
Having worked for the Transportation Security Administration for six years, I actually think laughter is one appropriate response. It’s hard not to see the funny facets of a never-ending campaign against a nebulous enemy (Axis of Evil a decade ago, Network of Death today) in which you are issued a terror intelligence memorandum detailing the standard operating procedure for the confiscation of cupcakes. (“Cupcakes have got to have a reasonable level of icing to be allowed onto a plane,” one TSA manager advised us.)
My former co-workers and I are not the only ones who found some of this stuff funny. In 2012, the international relations scholar Charlotte Heath-Kelly argued in a paper in the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research that the War on Terror can be viewed as the lovechild of Franz Kafka and Monty Python as much as that of any vice president and foreign minister.
“The War on Terror undermines itself by narrating a liminal space where its claims of security appear ridiculous,” Heath-Kelly writes. “A failure to laugh consolidates the War on Terror discourse and the joke it is playing on us by taking it seriously.”
If we could get Catch 22 out of World War II, and Dr Strangelove out of the Cold War, it should come as no surprise if the more skeptical among us laugh when our governments inform us, with a straight face, that we just launched a unilateral air strike so as to eliminate a guy who maybe had explosives in his dopp kit. Perhaps the best way to show our leaders that we’re no longer buying the chimerical terror threats sold to us as justifications for war is by laughing those claims right out of the room.
As Thomas Jefferson said long before the TSA made you walk around barefoot and beltless with a bunch of strangers, “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.”
Many would say the plots of the supposedly deadly and ingenious terrorists upon whom we’re dropping bombs would be no laughing matter if brought to fruition. But a few people bearing analogues to these hypothetical threats have actually made it aboard planes in the past, and the results comprised a relative comedy of errors:
- In 2001, Richard Reid attempted to bring down a plane by igniting his shoes, but his foot perspiration rendered his amateur IED’s fuse soggy.
- On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a flight to Detroit with a bomb sewn into his underwear, but managed instead to burn his genitals.
- Security experts still argue whether the liquids plot of 2006 – the reason we’re not allowed to bring a container filled with more than 3.4 ounces of liquid aboard planes in the US – was even plausible: Turns out, mixing hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid and acetone is difficult even in the calm of a science lab, let alone an airplane lavatory.
Real-life, successful terrorist plots tend to be too mundane to fit the narratives of big-budget Hollywood thrillers. Attempts at the movie-level terrorist plot end up playing out more like Benny Hill than Sergeant Brody.
I believe that it’s healthy to openly ridicule politically expedient, overblown terror threats such as this Khorasan group – that known unknowns, fashion menaces, underwear bombers and other political hobgoblins should be feared about as much, if not less, than a cab ride to the airport. But there is at least one deadly serious aspect to odd new turns and mysterious enemies in the War on Terror: real people die when missiles go flying in retaliation for absurd, hypothetical threats, and from the rubble of those missile strikes rise new waves of anti-western sentiment. The aspirations of the terrorists we bomb into existence may be grounded in gritty realism, as opposed to slapstick comedy.
And that may turn out to be no laughing matter.
War Nerd: ISIS threat is still overblown
The War Nerd maintains that Islamic State is indeed the JV team, albeit with good PR and a penchant for child rape, yet certainly not an existential threat to the U.S. or indeed Iraq or even the Kurds.
Check it out!
By Gary Brecher
September 28, 2014 | Pando Daily
Saturday, September 27, 2014
What we know about IS leads back to Iraq debacle
According to this report, the top three leaders of Islamic State are Iraqis: one from Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI); and two Sunni ex-generals from Saddam's army.
The leader and religious figurehead of IS, born Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai, (aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, aka Caliph Ibrahim), was captured in 2004 or 2005 and released in 2009 under "unknown" circumstances. (Smooth move!)
The two Sunni generals, we can surmise, almost certainly lost their jobs after Dubya's Coalition Provisional Authority issued an order on May 15, 2003 to dissolve the 250,000-man Iraqi army, a day after the order to implement "De-Ba'athification" of all public and government posts.
So it's still correct to blame Bush.
By Nick Robins-Early
September 27, 2014 | Huffington Post
Bergen: 'Jihadist threat is quite inconsequential'
Here's how CNN's Islamist terrorism expert Peter Bergen sums it up:
The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the threat posed by jihadist organizations around the globe is quite inconsequential when compared with what the West faced in the past century.
Why? First, because there aren't that many of them:
If we tally up the low and high estimates for all these groups, we can begin to have a sense of the total number of jihadist militants that are part of formal organizations around the globe. We found that on the low end, an estimated 85,000 men are fighting in jihadist groups around the world; on the high end, 106,000.
And secondly, because:
The vast majority of the estimated 85,000 to 106,000 militants fighting with militant jihadist groups around the world are fighting for purely local reasons, for instance, trying to install Sharia law in northern Nigeria or trying to impose Taliban rule on Pakistan and Afghanistan, while only a small number of these militants are focused on attacking the West.
So maybe we shouldn't be shitting our pants with fear, and itching for another Mideast war without a chance of victory or timeline?
By Peter Bergen and Emily Schneider
September 26, 2014 | CNN
Thursday, September 18, 2014
U.S. should stay out of bloody Mideast religious wars
Hear, hear! Before we insert ourselves in a sectarian conflict of Sunni vs. Shia in Syria, Iraq and beyonjd, Hoffman asks us to consider what bloody horrors we "reasonable, rational" Europeans inflicted on ourselves during our sectarian wars [emphasis mine]:
The agreements reached in Westphalia followed 130 years of strife, including the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, when Protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England beat back Catholic King Philip II of Spain’s rampage across Europe to put down heresy. Other rulers fomented mob violence with incidents such as the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France, when the Catholic king targeted well-born Protestants. The king’s assassins murdered nobles in their beds while commoners knifed and strangled Protestant neighbors in the streets.One-quarter of Europe’s population was killed during the devastating Thirty Years' War (1618-48), another bloody phase of the Reformation. Brutal punishments included burning at the stake and pouring excrement down the throats of captives, a torture known as the “Swedish drink.” War spread famine and bubonic plague across Europe. Like now, greed complicated religious conflict, as combatants wrestled over lands and gold.Exhausted, Protestants and Catholics finally agreed to negotiate. Gathering in separate towns, they sent messengers back and forth to avoid seeing one another’s despised faces. After five years of argument, the Peace of Westphalia concluded the tragic wars of religion. Separation of church and state took hold.
By Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman
September 16, 2014 | Reuters
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Bergen: Americans fighting for ISIS will die over there
We're all gonna diiiiieeeeeeee! Mobilize the army! Scramble the bombers! DEFCON 1! Kill 'em all! Kill, kill, kill! Aaaaaaaaaaa!
Now that I've done the obligatory Scaring The Shit Out Of You, followed by the customary Let's Kill Them All First that you've become accustomed to on cable and talk radio, here's some more sober analysis of the actual threat to America posed by Islamic State, from CNN's resident Islamist terrorism expert Peter Bergen (and some other dude).
By Peter Bergen and David Sterman
September 5, 2014 | CNN
ISIS has Americans worried. Two-thirds of those surveyed in a recent Pew Research poll said they consider the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to be a "major threat" to this country. But are such fears really justified?
Despite the impression you may have had from listening to U.S. officials in recent weeks, the answer is probably not really.
For a start, U.S. officials have been inflating the numbers of Americans fighting for ISIS, which has muddied the issue for the public. U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, for example, told CNN's Jim Sciutto on Wednesday, "We are aware of over 100 U.S. citizens who have U.S. passports who are fighting in the Middle East with ISIL forces." (ISIS is sometimes referred to as ISIL and now calls itself the Islamic State).
But the Pentagon soon corrected Hagel's comment, saying the 100 count is the total number of Americans fighting for any of the various groups fighting in Syria, some of which are more militant than others -- and some of which are even allied with the U.S. Indeed, Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center -- the government office tasked with assessing terrorist threats -- also confirmed that 100 is the total count of the various Americans fighting in Syria and not a count of those fighting for ISIS.
Hagel's comment is only the latest inflated claim regarding the number of Americans fighting with ISIS. Last week, the Washington Times cited anonymous official sources who said there are 300 Americans fighting with ISIS, despite the Pentagon estimating the figure to be more like a dozen.
True, a dozen is still too many. But it is important to remember that just because these Americans are fighting with ISIS, it doesn't necessarily translate into a significant threat to the American homeland.
One need only look at the example of Somalia to see why.
The last sizeable group of Americans who went overseas to fight with an al Qaeda-aligned group are the 29 Americans known to have traveled to fight with the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab after the 2006 invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian army. However, none of those 29 subsequently planned or conducted a terrorist attack inside the United States, according to a survey of more than 240 jihadist terrorism cases since September 11 conducted by the New America Foundation.
Indeed, for more than a third of the American militants who fought with Al-Shabaab, going to Somalia was a one-way ticket. In 2008, a missile strike in Somalia killed Ruben Shumpert, a resident of Seattle. A year later, Burhan Hassan, a 17-year-old from Minneapolis, was killed in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Abdirizak Bihi, Hassan's uncle, reportedly said at the time, "We believe he was killed because he would have been a key person in the investigation into the recruitment (of young Somali men) here in Minneapolis."
Al-Shabaab militants also are said to have killed Alabama native Omar Hammami, who joined the group in 2006 and took a high-profile position in its media operations before his death last year.
At least two Americans fighting for Al-Shabaab died while conducting suicide attacks in Somalia.
Shirwa Ahmed, a 26-year-old from Minnesota, became the first known American to conduct a suicide bombing for an al Qaeda-associated group when he drove a car packed with bombs into a government compound on October 28, 2008.
In 2011, meanwhile, the FBI confirmed that Farah Mohamed Beledi, a 27-year-old Minnesota man who was born in Somalia and moved to the United States at age 12, was killed while attempting to detonate a suicide bomb in Somalia.
In addition to the American militants who died in Somalia, six were arrested, four when they returned to the West and two in East Africa. Kamal Said Hassan, a 28-year-old Minneapolis man who traveled to Somalia and attended an Al-Shabaab training camp before returning to the United States, was arrested and in 2009 pleaded guilty to supporting Al-Shabaab.
In another case, Mahamud Said Omar, an American resident who helped organize Al-Shabaab's recruitment pipeline and visited a training camp, was arrestedin the Netherlands in 2009. Omar was extradited to the United States and in 2012 was convicted on terrorism charges.
Of course, the fact that 13 of the 29 American militants who fought in Somalia remain at large is a reminder that the CIA and FBI also need to pay attention to the potential threat posed by American foreign fighters in Syria. But this is no reason for U.S. officials to overhype the threat posed by ISIS to the United States.
Yes, Americans should always be mindful of the threats posed by extremists. But as the case of U.S. citizens in Somalia suggests, Syria could very well end up being a graveyard for Americans fighting there rather than a launch pad for attacks on the United States.
Friday, September 5, 2014
Zakaria: What's really wrong with the Middle East
This analysis by Zakaria is must-read stuff for everybody, but especially my dear conservative friends who are all ginned up for another open-ended U.S. troop engagement in the Middle East -- this time to fight ISIS.
On talk radio I am hearing supremely ignorant and stupid stuff that boils down to plain xenophobia anti-Muslim rhetoric. These conservative talking heads conflate ISIS, al Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood as if they are all one organization working in cahoots with grand, global aims. They only get away with such balderdash because of Americans' ignorance and eagerness to believe the worst about all Arabs and Muslims.
By Fareed Zakaria
September 5, 2014 | Washington Post
Watching the gruesome execution videos, I felt some of the same emotions I did after 9/11. Barbarism is designed to provoke anger, and it succeeded. But in September 2001, it also made me ask, “Why do they hate us?” I tried to answer that question in an essay for Newsweek that struck a chord with readers. I reread it to see what I got right and wrong and what I’ve learned in the past 13 years.
It’s not just al-Qaeda. I began by noting that Islamic terrorism is not the isolated behavior of a handful of nihilists. There is a broader culture that has been complicit or at least unwilling to combat it. Things have changed on this front but not nearly enough.
It’s not an Islam problem but an Arab problem. In the early 2000s, Indonesia was our biggest concern because of a series of terrorist attacks there after 9/11. But over the past decade, jihad and even Islamic fundamentalism have not done well in Indonesia — the largest Muslim country in the world, larger in that sense than Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya and the Gulf states put together. Or look at India, which is right next door to Ayman al-Zawahiri’s headquarters in Pakistan, but very few of its 165 million Muslims are members of al-Qaeda. Zawahiri has announced a bold effort to recruit Indian Muslims, but I suspect it will fail.
Arab political decay. The central point of the essay was that the reason the Arab world produces fanaticism and jihad is political stagnation. By 2001, almost every part of the world had seen significant political progress — Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, even Africa had held many free and fair elections. But the Arab world remained a desert. In 2001, most Arabs had fewer freedoms than they did in 1951.
The one aspect of life that Arab dictators could not ban was religion, so Islam had become the language of political opposition. As the Westernized, secular dictatorships of the Arab world failed — politically, economically and socially — the fundamentalists told the people, “Islam is the solution.”
The Arab world was left with dictatorships on one hand and deeply illiberal opposition groups on the other — Hosni Mubarak or al-Qaeda. The more extreme the regime, the more violent the opposition. This cancer was deeper and more destructive than I realized. Despite the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and despite the Arab Spring, this dynamic between dictators and jihadis has not been broken.
Look at Syria, where, until recently, Bashar al-Assad actually had been helping the Islamic State by buying oil and gas from it and shelling its opponents, the Free Syrian Army, when the two were battling each other. Assad was playing the old dictator’s game, giving his people a stark choice — it’s either me or the Islamic State. And many Syrians (the Christian minority, for example) have chosen him.
The greatest setback has been in Egypt, where a nonviolent Islamist movement took power and squandered its chance by overreaching. But not content to let the Muslim Brotherhood fail at the polls, the army displaced it by force and moved back into power. Egypt is now a more brutal police state than it was under Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood has been banned, many of its members killed or jailed, the rest driven underground. Let’s hope that ,10 years from now, we do not find ourselves discussing the causes of the rise of an Islamic State in Egypt.
What did I miss in that essay 13 years ago? The fragility of these countries. I didn’t recognize that if the dictatorships faltered, the state could collapse, and that beneath the state there was no civil society — nor, in fact, a real nation. Once chaos reigned across the Middle East, people reached not for their national identities — Iraqi, Syrian — but for much older ones: Shiite, Sunni, Kurd and Arab.
I should have paid greater attention to my mentor in graduate school, Samuel Huntington, who once explained that Americans never recognize that, in the developing world, the key is not the kind of government — communist, capitalist, democratic, dictatorial — but the degree of government. That absence of government is what we are watching these days, from Libya to Iraq to Syria.
Friday, August 29, 2014
Today's thoughts on ISIS
Just like our President, I don't yet have a strategy with regard to ISIS. I'm not even sure whether they're worth defeating.
The fact that President Obama has refused to be rushed by the media into taking action is refreshing; then again, it's typical Obama restraint that at other times is so frustrating. When our troops' lives and billions of dollars are on the line, his restraint is atypical of balls-to-the-wall Presidents trying to look tough, and who pay for it with the nation's credit card and somebody else's children.
Pop quiz: How many fighters does ISIS have? You probably don't know. If you nevertheless feel we must defeat ISIS, little facts like this one are important.
Spot check: If there were no YouTube videos or reports of ISIS carving off Westerners' heads, would you feel the same way about them? The answer is probably no. So is emotion -- or revulsion, as the case may be -- a proper basis for going to war?
My impression is that many Americans -- driven by FOX and talk radio -- have an ill-informed, fear-based, apocalyptic view of ISIS. Maybe ISIS is indeed worth our trouble to "take out," but let's be real: an Islamic state they are not. Al Qaeda they are not.
Because as I've said so many times before: conflict and religious extremism are encouraged by failed states, not vice-versa. ISIS is the orphan of Syria to the west and Iraq to the east, who got a huge, unexpected inheritance from its rich Uncle Sam with lots of guns who lives across the ocean.
Today I was listening to talk radio. First, Rush Limbaugh. He was slamming Obama's "no strategy yet" statement, naturally, but also Obama's caveat that we cannot "perpetually" destroy ISIS: as soon as we would leave, they would reconstitute. "Can you imagine FDR telling the American public that we couldn't perpetually defeat Nazi Germany?" Rush asked, incredulous, in perpetual outrage mode.
Bam. Rush hit one of my pet peeves: comparing everything with Nazis and WWII. Hell, Russia's president Putin is doing it right now, comparing Ukraine's army's actions against terrorists in its own country to the actions of Nazis in the siege of Leningrad. Crazy, right? Well it's crazy here, too.
Because ISIS is not a state. They may have pretensions or plans to statehood, but a state they are not. There is no infrastructure of theirs to blow up -- they'd probably blow it up first, just for the hits on YouTube. They have no political apparatus -- they are strictly a paramilitary organization. And ISIS has none of the other trappings of a state with which we'd go to war and eventually have to make peace with.
Incidentally, Obama is right: ISIS can be hurt or even crippled by the U.S., but with failing states and the ensuing anarchy in Syria and Iraq, not to mention volunteers from all over the world, and donations from our "allies" the Saudis, ISIS surely would come back. Indeed, they are not Nazi Germany. They don't intend to rebuild anything or hold any borders. All ISIS needs to do is re-arm.
So we should be careful about declaring war on groups of irregular soldiers with tons of outside support, some of it from our "allies." The U.S. is the most powerful and richest country on Earth; when we bend down to crush an ant, suddenly that ant gains status.
Do we really want to grant ISIS such "enemy" status? Methinks that is exactly what ISIS wants, that's why they're executing our citizens after demanding ridiculous ransoms they know that nobody will pay. ISIS wants the U.S. to get involved. Hey, there's no better recruiting and donations tool than the Great Satan as your adversary.
I mean, think for a second without emotion. Let's say the U.S. declares war on ISIS. Then we wipe them off the battlefield, winning every fight along the way.Then we go home, or leave yet another small training and security force in Iraq. And then... two months later ISIS is back. It doesn't matter in what guise. Nevertheless they're back on YouTube, back to taking hostages, back to seizing unprotected villages in the desert, whatever. Suddenly -- and this is important -- ISIS can say that it "defeated" the United States. It wasn't destroyed. All ISIS has to do to win is live, in whatever form, to fight another day.
Understanding that, if you were POTUS, would you want to commit yourself to total victory over ISIS in Rush Limbaugh's terms? Or would you hedge? Or would you even consider doing nothing at all? What's the upside? Does ISIS really represent a clear and present danger to the U.S.? No. To our allies? Well, yes (Iraq), no (Syria) and maybe (Saudi Arabia, et al). Meanwhile, those allies do not have armies capable of defending themselves -- they rely on the U.S.
Even worse, meanwhile, some of those allies -- cough, Saudi Arabi! cough! cough! -- spend billions exporting Wahhabist and jihadist religion all over the world that bites themselves and us in the ass.
And meanwhile, sadly, as our small attention span is captured by masked men with dull knives in the desert, a European country is being invaded for the first time since WWII by an honest-to-God scary military power. THAT'S where the WWII analogies should be drawn. THAT'S where America's attention should be.
Alas, our media loves sensation and so do we. Folks, let's be smarter and shrewder, eh?
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Zakaria: It was Maliki who lost Iraq (with Dubya's help)
You can check out Fareed Zakaria repeating his points from the Washington Post on CNN:
This week I heard Rush Limbaugh ranting that Obama "owned" what's happening in Iraq. He kept repeating that word, "owns," like it was a GOP talking point.
What does that mean though? It comes from the CEO-managerial culture where the top guy accepts ultimate responsibility for whatever happens on his watch. Except, of course, the analogy falls short here, because CEOs don't take the blame for stuff that happens in other companies, or indeed, in other countries where the company doesn't even operate.
So now the GOP wants to recycle the same old "solutions" that didn't work in Iraq before: a small U.S. ground force; training the Iraqi army; more airstrikes; and even regime change (!) of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Forget it.
By Fareed Zakaria
June 12, 2014 | Washington Post
It is becoming increasingly likely that Iraq has reached a turning point. The forces hostile to the government have grown stronger, better equipped and more organized. And having now secured arms, ammunition and hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from their takeover of Mosul — Iraq’s second-largest city — they will build on these strengths. Inevitably, in Washington, the question has surfaced: Who lost Iraq?
Whenever the United States has asked this question — as it did with China in the 1950s or Vietnam in the 1970s — the most important point to remember is: The local rulers did. The Chinese nationalists and the South Vietnamese government were corrupt, inefficient and weak, unable to be inclusive and unwilling to fight with the dedication of their opponents. The same story is true of Iraq, only much more so. The first answer to the question is: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki lost Iraq.
The prime minister and his ruling party have behaved like thugs, excluding the Sunnis from power, using the army, police forces and militias to terrorize their opponents. The insurgency the Maliki government faces today was utterly predictable because, in fact, it happened before. From 2003 onward, Iraq faced a Sunni insurgency that was finally tamped down by Gen. David Petraeus, who said explicitly at the time that the core element of his strategy was political, bringing Sunni tribes and militias into the fold. The surge’s success, he often noted, bought time for a real power-sharing deal in Iraq that would bring the Sunnis into the structure of the government.
A senior official closely involved with Iraq in the Bush administration told me, “Not only did Maliki not try to do broad power-sharing, he reneged on all the deals that had been made, stopped paying the Sunni tribes and militias, and started persecuting key Sunni officials.” Among those targeted were the vice president of Iraq and its finance minister.
But how did Maliki come to be prime minister of Iraq? He was the product of a series of momentous decisions made by the Bush administration. Having invaded Iraq with a small force — what the expert Tom Ricks called “the worst war plan in American history” — the administration needed to find local allies. It quickly decided to destroy Iraq’s Sunni ruling establishment and empower the hard-line Shiite religious parties that had opposed Saddam Hussein. This meant that a structure of Sunni power that had been in the area for centuries collapsed. These moves — to disband the army, dismantle the bureaucracy and purge Sunnis in general — might have been more consequential than the invasion itself.
The turmoil in the Middle East is often called a sectarian war. But really it is better described as “the Sunni revolt.” Across the region, from Iraq to Syria, one sees armed Sunni gangs that have decided to take on the non-Sunni forces that, in their view, oppress them. The Bush administration often justified its actions by pointing out that the Shiites are the majority in Iraq and so they had to rule. But the truth is that the borders of these lands are porous, and while the Shiites are numerous in Iraq — Maliki’s party actually won a plurality, not a majority — they are a tiny minority in the Middle East as a whole. It is outside support — from places as varied as Saudi Arabia and Turkey — that sustains the Sunni revolt.
If the Bush administration deserves a fair share of blame for “losing Iraq,” what about the Obama administration and its decision to withdraw American forces from the country by the end of 2011? I would have preferred to see a small American force in Iraq to try to prevent the country’s collapse. But let’s remember why this force is not there. Maliki refused to provide the guarantees that every other country in the world that hosts U.S. forces offers. Some commentators have blamed the Obama administration for negotiating badly or halfheartedly and perhaps this is true. But here’s what a senior Iraqi politician told me in the days when the U.S. withdrawal was being discussed: “It will not happen. Maliki cannot allow American troops to stay on. Iran has made very clear to Maliki that its No. 1 demand is that there be no American troops remaining in Iraq. And Maliki owes them.” He reminded me that Maliki spent 24 years in exile, most of them in Tehran and Damascus, and his party was funded by Iran for most of its existence. And in fact, Maliki’s government has followed policies that have been pro-Iranian and pro-Syrian.
Washington is debating whether airstrikes or training forces would be more effective, but its real problem is much larger and is a decade in the making. In Iraq, it is defending the indefensible.
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
On Iraq, Syria, Iran and U.S. engagement
For all my Fox News viewers, here is a quick primer on what really matters in Iraq (and Syria) now:
Where is the accountability on Iraq?, by Katrina Vanden Heuvel.
Piecing together the shattering Middle East, by David Ignatius.
Obama got it right on Iraq, by Eugene Robinson.
What's the upshot to all this?
First, actions have consequences. Some of those actions date back 100 years. The Middle East never had a system of nation-states with clear borders like Europe, that is until the Western powers drew them up. The invasion and regime change by the U.S. in Iraq has only served to question/break up those borders within Iraq. Iraq is now informally three or four states in one.
And actions to remove the dictator in Iraq had international consequences: it created a power vacuum that favored Iran. This did not start yesterday, or even since Obama became president.
Second, there is no military solution to this, in isolation of regional power politics. The Uncle T's of the world will say this is because Middle Easterners are not "reasonable rational people." In fact, they are a diverse group of ethnicities, tribes and confessions that were lumped together under borders of somebody else's choosing. Now those borders are under question in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere.
This means that the U.S. must engage with Iran, the Shi'ite heavyweight in the region, that has had significant influence in Iraq since Dubya's invasion in 2003. This is not to mention Saudi Arabia and Turkey. (Israel is a non-factor).
Conservatives will talk about the "success" of the surge, blah-blah-blah, but clearly the surge was not sustainable, and it did not take into account events in Syria.
The hallmark of the surge was more U.S. boots on the ground. Are Republicans seriously advocating for that? No. They should clearly state what they are for, instead of simply criticizing our commander-in-chief.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Cohen: 'Do something, anything!' in Syria
"Don't just sit there, do something! Anything!"
Do something... even if it means America's tripping on its own over-sized brass balls and landing face-first in another Mideastern civil war?
Richard Cohen cites the number of Syrians killed, displaced Syrians and refugees... but there were more deaths in Iraq, and just as many refugees flooded out -- and that was when thousands of U.S. boots were on the ground. So U.S. troops are no guarantee of stopping any of that. And U.S. missiles? U.S. weapons transfers? Even less likely.
I give Cohen credit for not giving up, not changing his emotional tack. But he's just plain wrong. Doing something, anything without a clear plan and exit strategy is usually worse than doing nothing, especially where U.S. lives and vital interests are not at stake.
Unfortunately, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator. However, it is not America's job to remove all the world's brutal dictators.
Finally, it's a dishonest cheap shot to blame U.S. inaction entirely on Obama, because there is no support in Congress for another war, or more support for Sunni jihadi-linked groups. Cohen should blame the entire U.S. government -- and by extension, the American public, which opposes intervention -- for America's prudence.
Sorry, Rick. The U.S. answer remains the same: not this time; not our problem.
By Richard Cohen
February 18, 2014 | Washington Post
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