Author: Jonah Shepp

The Adaptable ISIS

by Dish Staff

While US airstrikes and advances by Kurdish forces have begun to reverse the gains ISIS has made in recent weeks, Joshua Keating doubts the group will be easily defeated:

Over the past few months, the group has shown remarkable flexibility in both its tactics and its targets, one of its key advantages over the national governments trying to stamp it out. If its progress against Baghdad stalls, it can turn against Erbil. If it suffers a setback in Iraq, it can simply focus its efforts on Syria (or Lebanon), where the dynamics of the ground as well as the international alliances work completely differently. If U.S. airstrikes turn the tide against it on the battlefield, it can turn back to urban warfare or suicide bombings.

In other words, a group like ISIS is perfectly positioned to exploit the hazy national boundaries, sectarian divisions, and mistrust among governments in the region where it operates. Given that those factors don’t seem to be going away anytime soon, my guess is that the Islamic State will find a way to regroup. British Prime Minister David Cameron is probably right to be warning the public of a long fight to come.

Yochi Dreazen warns that ISIS is also getting better at governing the territory it controls:

U.S. intelligence officials say the leaders of the Islamic State are adopting methods first pioneered by Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite militia, and are devoting considerable human and financial resources toward keeping essential services like electricity, water, and sewage functioning in their territory. In some areas, they even operate post offices. …

Taken together, the moves highlight the fact that the Islamic State, already the best-armed and best-funded terror group in the world, is quickly adapting to the challenges of ruling and governing. That, in turn, dramatically reduces the chances that the extremists will face homegrown opposition in what amounts to the world’s newest territory.

Accordingly, Faysal Itani argues that the key to defeating ISIS is to treat it like the state it claims to be:

Above all, ISIS wants to control territory and borders. Otherwise it is just one militia among many others in Syria and Iraq. This requires fighting on multiple fronts against multiple enemies, within both Syria and Iraq. That means openly moving fighters, arms and equipment across vast desert areas. Therefore, like any conventional army, ISIS is prone to overstretch. These increasingly lengthy lines of communication are prime targets for ground and air attacks that would destroy ISIS’ territorial integrity and fighting capability. …

But ISIS is adaptive, creative and ambitious. By contrast, the international community’s response has been rigid, predictable and unimaginative. If it continues to see and treat ISIS as simply a terrorist group, the international community will forever be playing defense, which ISIS can happily live with, until it no longer has to and can go on the offensive abroad. Unless its rivals understand and treat ISIS as a state, and exploit the vulnerabilities statehood presents, ISIS will continue to outclass them in ambition and sophistication, and it will have its state.

A Better Set Of Lies

by Jonah Shepp

Rosie Gray flags Russia Today’s new ad campaign:

“The campaign will be comprised of several different posters, and we kicked it off with wild postings in the New York City,” RT spokespersongrid-cell-30824-1408370582-5 Anna Belkina said in an email. “Soon it will be extended to Washington, DC, and London.” … The ads feature a picture of Colin Powell with the tagline: “This is what happens when there is no second opinion. Iraq War: No WMDs, 141,802 civilian deaths. Go to RT.com for the second opinion.” Another poster says, “In case they shut us down on TV, go to RT.com for the second opinion.”

Asked whether RT believes it is in danger of being shut down on American television, Belkina provided a statement from RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan: “Alternative voices, however rare, are often met with fear, hostility and bureaucratic obstructionism in the attempt to stifle them — because they are inconvenient to the establishment. We want the viewers to know that no matter what, RT will remain THE place to go to for that second opinion.”

That’s a well-crafted message, and it illustrates one of the many ways in which the massive missteps of the Bush era are coming back to bite us.

Lies empower lies, and the lies that underpinned the neoconservative project, helped along by a cowed press that parroted them, were inevitably going to create an opening for foreign propaganda outlets and homegrown conspiracy theorists to tell a skeptical public what was “really” going on. When the establishment’s narrative is revealed to be false, that lends credibility to “alternative” narratives, whether they are true or not, and creates a market for anything that contradicts the official line. A deceitful government and a wimpy media make us vulnerable to propaganda. The Obama administration shares some blame for this, but, well, there’s a reason it’s Colin Powell on that poster and not Hillary Clinton.

The most disquieting feature of the poster is that its headline is correct. The foreign propaganda outlets masquerading before American liberals as objective news sources (RT and al-Jazeera in particular, but Iran’s Press TV also comes to mind) are enabled by the fact that when they tell us that our government has lied to us about matters of great magnitude, that thousands have died because of those lies, and that even well-respected mainstream media outlets failed to uncover those lies until it was far too late, whatever else they may be, they’re right about that.

The Tyranny Of The Anonymous

by Jonah Shepp

Jack Shafer rails on news outlets for being way too generous with anonymity for their sources:

An Aug 13 Times piece noted that U.S. administration officials “spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.” This justification has become so popular in modern journalism that when you drop it into Nexis, the database burps and informs you that the query will return more than 3,000 stories containing the passage or something very close to it. If a lower anonymity bar than “was not authorized to speak publicly” exists, I cannot imagine it. Very few people are authorized to speak publicly in government, corporations, and institutions. Does that mean that anybody who has accepted a muzzle can expect anonymity from the press? The huge numbers coughed up by Nexis support that notion.

Another anonymity justification that rattles Nexis’ foundations is the source who “spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.” On Aug. 12, the sensitive-topic source was an Iraqi official speaking the Washington Post. And what sort irreplaceable information did the official impart? “We are entering a potential clash. … On the ground, [there are] tanks and armored vehicles. It’s a very complicated situation with the army.” Yes, yes, tanks, armored vehicles, and a complication situation! Very sensitive information. For giving the paper these gems, the source deserves placement in the Post‘s witness protection program.

I learned a lot about the perniciousness of anonymous sources while working as a newspaper editor in Jordan, a country whose press isn’t censored or brutalized as it is in, say, China or Iran, but isn’t exactly “free” either. I can’t tell you how many times I had some variant of the following conversation:

Me: Who’s this “source in the ministry who declined to be named”?

Reporter: Well, actually, it’s the minister himself. But he doesn’t want to announce this officially yet, so he asked me not to use his name.

Me: That’s dishonest.

Reporter: I know, but if I quote him by name he’ll get mad at me and stop answering my phone calls.

Me: …

…and so of course we’d quote the minister anonymously. The lame explanations Shafer cites (“not authorized to speak to the press” and “because of the sensitivity of the topic”) appeared in the paper daily, and still do. But that’s not because The Jordan Times is specifically lacking in journalistic integrity: rather, journalistic integrity is simply not an option in a country where the anonymous government source is often the only source available, and where looking for other, better sources can get a journalist in all sorts of legal or extralegal trouble.

Of course, hardly anybody in the government is “authorized to speak to the press”, but leaking information – or misinformation – through anonymous sources is a great way to establish a veneer of transparency without any real accountability. It’s also a great way to mislead the public that a source is speaking against the government’s wishes, when in fact he is revealing exactly what he’s been instructed to reveal. One of the most important lessons I took away from that experience is that crafty, illiberal governments can still exercise significant control over an ostensibly “independent” press, through vague laws, self-censorship, “soft containment”, and anonymity as the rule rather than the exception. The payoff comes in the form of praise and aid from Western governments for whom press freedom in name alone is too often good enough.

In light of that lesson, the scourge of government anonymity in the American press is even more unsettling. While Shafer’s right to criticize the NYT and the WaPo for lowering the bar here, what worries me most is that the leak-by-anonymous-source method of engagement with the media has become standard operating procedure in Washington. A government that can’t tell the public what it’s up to without hiding behind vague statements from nameless officials is simply not to be trusted, and a press that goes along with it is not quite as “free” as we’d like to think.

Did Snowden Tip Off Al-Qaeda’s Cryptographers? Ctd

by Jonah Shepp

Not by a long shot, Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman answer, hitting back forcefully at the report claiming that al-Qaeda overhauled its cryptography in response to the Snowden leaks. To begin with, they point out that Recorded Future, the intelligence firm that issued the report, has deep and longstanding financial ties to the US intelligence community and as such cannot be considered an independent referee. Furthermore, another Snowden document reveals that al-Qaeda already knew about Western intelligence agencies’ surveillance technologies and how to get around them, long before Snowden came into the picture:

The Recorded Future “report”—which was actually nothing more than a short blog post—is designed to bolster the year-long fear-mongering campaign of U.S. and British officials arguing that terrorists would realize the need to hide their communications and develop effective means of doing so by virtue of the Snowden reporting. … But actual terrorists—long before the Snowden reporting—have been fixated on developing encryption methods and other techniques to protect their communications from electronic surveillance. And they have succeeded in a quite sophisticated manner.

One document found in the GCHQ archive provided by Snowden is a 45-page, single-spaced manual that the British spy agency calls a “Jihadist Handbook.” Though undated, the content suggests it was originally written in 2002 or 2003: more than 10 years before the Snowden reporting began. It appears to have been last updated shortly after September 2003, and translated into English by GCHQ sometime in 2005 or 2006. … So sophisticated is the 10-year-old “Jihadist Manual” that, in many sections, it is virtually identical to the GCHQ’s own manual, developed years later (in 2010), for instructing its operatives how to keep their communications secure[.]

Greenwald and Fishman also stress that the report offers no evidence to support a causal link between the Snowden leaks and al-Qaeda’s recent crypto upgrades:

Critically, even if one wanted to accept Recorded Future’s timeline as true, there are all sorts of plausible reasons other than Snowden revelations why these groups would have been motivated to develop new encryption protections. One obvious impetus is the August 2013 government boasting to McClatchy (and The Daily Beast) that the State Department ordered the closing of 21 embassies because of what it learned from an intercepted “conference call” among Al Qaeda leaders

This speaks to an infraction we in the media are frequently guilty of: lending greater weight to new information when it feeds into a pre-existing narrative, regardless of whether that new information is credible on its own merits. Officials in the government and the intelligence community have spent the past year crying to the press that Snowden’s revelations have weakened America’s defenses against terrorism by revealing our tradecraft to our enemies. Spooks are not wont to provide proof for such claims, because the evidence always seems to be classified, but “if only we knew what they knew”, we’d see that they were right. And it requires no great leaps of logic to intuit that al-Qaeda and its allies, who clearly know a thing or two about the Internet, might have come across the Snowden leaks and used them to their advantage.

So that narrative, underpinned by intuition but not hard evidence, became conventional, at least on one side of the surveillance debate. There was a demand for proof of that received wisdom, and when something purporting to be that proof came to light, the product was delivered to the market with all due speed. And giving people tools to support the opinions they already hold, rather than distinguishing truth from propaganda, is the core business of much of today’s clickbaity media. That’s a serious problem.

On the other hand, the full impact of these leaks won’t be clear for some time, and the question of whether and to what extent they exposed us to new threats is not conclusively settled, so Snowden and Greenwald can’t claim vindication any more surely than their critics can call them traitors and terrorists. But the broader point, that Snowden shouldn’t be convicted of treason in the court of public opinion solely based on accusations and innuendo, stands strong. We’d do well to remember that the next time we come across “evidence” like this.

Kurdistan’s Sticky Situation

by Jonah Shepp

iraq_oil_map

Oil may not be the be-all, end-all of the Iraq conflict, but it does play its part. Brad Plumer examines the oil politics of Iraqi Kurdistan and what’s at stake in the fight against ISIS:

By June of this year, Iraqi Kurdistan was producing 360,000 barrels per day — about 10 percent of Iraq’s production (and about 0.5 percent of the world’s supply). And much more was expected. In a 2009 State Department cable leaked by Wikileaks, one foreign firm said Kurdistan “has the potential to be a world-class hydrocarbon region.” Yet ISIS posed a (partial) threat to that boom when they showed up on the outskirts of Erbil, a city of 1.5 million that is hosting many of the oil and gas firms in the Kurdish region. On August 8, Reuters reported that some 5,000 barrels per day had gone offline in Kurdistan as a result of the fighting. Various oil firms, including Chevron, said they would withdraw some non-essential personnel from the region.

So far, the disruptions have been relatively minor, particularly since the US has launched airstrikes against ISIS that allowed the Kurdish military to retake a number of towns. The Kurdish regional government now insists that “oil production in the region remains unaffected.” ISIS, for its part, clearly has an interest in seizing oil fields. The group reportedly controls seven oil fields and two refineries in northern Iraq, as well as a portion of a pipeline running from Kirkuk to the port city of Ceyhan in Turkey. Reports have suggested that ISIS is now selling some 10,000 barrels of oil per day to fund its activities.

So it would make sense that, in an effort to help the Kurds defend themselves, the US might have some concern for an industry that serves as a major driver of development in Kurdistan. But Steve LeVine pushes back against those who believe the American intervention is primarily about protecting that industry. He sees two problems with their argument:

The first is that the Obama administration has steadfastly discouraged ExxonMobil, Chevron and the other companies from working in Kurdistan.

Until recently, it sought to sabotage the region’s efforts to export its oil. The White House’s rationale has been that, to the degree Kurdistan gains de facto financial independence from Baghdad, the less likely that Iraq will hold together as a country. On Twitter, Middle East energy expert Robin Mills has been among those pushing against the it’s-about-oil theory. A second problem is Obama himself—he is fixated on renewable energy and opposed to oil. When he has embraced oil, such as shale, Obama has done so reluctantly and often in order to placate the fossil fuels industry and its advocates. There may be rational speculation surrounding the role of oil in former George W. Bush’s original assault on Iraq, but there is little likelihood that it featured on Obama’s list of reasons to bomb ISIL.

Yishai Schwartz agrees that the all-about-oil argument, though “seductive”, is also reductive:

It seems likely that the decades of U.S. involvement and the vast web of American relationships in the region—both of which have a great deal to do with oil—play a role in making Americans more viscerally concerned with the region and its people. In that sense, our humanitarian impulse in this conflict is quite likely connected to oil, albeit in a distant and complex way. But that is a long chain and a nuanced argument, to which the “Obama is worried about the world’s oil supply” thesis bears very little resemblance. So where does this conviction come from? Perhaps it’s cynicism borne of past experience: Oil has played a major role in Western interventions in the Middle East, often with disastrous results. But we shouldn’t assume that every statesman is Henry Kissinger or every action is a new Suez operation. The colonialist paradigm is a useful lens for historians, but when it becomes an ideological commitment for the political commenter, it’s simply another set of blinders.

Schwartz gets it exactly right here. Nobody doubts that petroleum, its ubiquity in the modern economy, and our dependence on it factor heavily into American foreign policy; it is, after all, the only reason we’ve been allied for 70 years with the Saudis, a regime whose values, interests, and activities contradict our own at every turn. It’s right and necessary to acknowledge how damaging petro-politics can be and to worry about our government being beholden to the whims of despotic rentier states. I’m not a huge Thomas Friedman fan, but he’s right to harp on this point as he has done periodically for years.

But the presence of oil interests in Iraq does not ipso facto preclude the possibility that American policy there might also be guided by something else. I used to buy into the theory that the 2003 Iraq invasion was about oil, and as LeVine mentions, it was likely part of the equation, but then so were the domestic politics of the War on Terror and a settling of scores between the Bush family and Saddam Hussein. A conspiracy-minded focus on any of these drivers obscures the key fact that the war was driven by an ideology – the neoconservative theory that democracy can be exported by force – that is dangerous in and of itself and whose promulgators have yet to exit the public sphere despite having been pretty conclusively proven wrong. So by all means, let’s talk about the oil, but let’s not mislead ourselves that it’s all about oil.

Water, on the other hand, might really be what it’s all about:

Mosul is not the only dam for which IS has fought. After taking large parts of Iraq in a campaign that started in Mosul, the country’s second largest city, in June, on August 1st IS battled to take control of Haditha dam on the Euphrates in the eastern province of al-Anbar. The fighters were repelled by Iraqi troops and Sunni tribes, but reports suggest the offensive continues.

IS may want to control these resources in order to bolster its claim to run a state. But it may have additional motives. Baghdad and southern Iraq rely on water being released from these dams. So IS could cut off the water, limiting flows to Baghdad and the south or, conversely, release large amounts that could cause floods (although this would also flood areas controlled by IS, including Mosul city, south of the dam). Any change in water flows would also affect the availability of food, because Iraq is heavily dependent on irrigation to grow wheat, barley, rice, corn and fruit and vegetables.

I’m at a loss for why people aren’t freaking out about this a whole lot more.

On Behalf Of Israel’s Foul-Weather Fans …

by Jonah Shepp

In a response to the repeated assertions by the likes of Jonathan Chait, Ezra Klein, and Peter Beinart that Israel’s actions are making it harder for liberal Zionists like themselves to defend their positions, Shmuel Rosner accuses these writers of being “fair-weather fans” of the Jewish state:

Sometimes it feels as if liberal Zionist critics are trying to ensure that Israel’s deeds do not rub off on them. At other times, it feels as if they’re trying to clear their conscience of something for which they feel partially responsible. They seem to believe that the implied threat that Israel might lose Jewish supporters abroad will somehow convince the government to alter its policies. This is a self-aggrandizing fantasy and reveals a poor grasp of the way Israel operates. To put it bluntly: These Jews are very important, but not nearly important enough to make Israelis pursue policies that put Israeli lives at risk.

Let me be clear: I believe Israel’s relations with Jews around the world are crucially important. Indeed, I’ve devoted a great deal of my career to thinking and writing about this topic. I often find myself preaching to Israelis about the need to be more considerate of more liberal Jewish views on issues ranging from religious conversion to women’s prayer at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. But I would never expect Israelis to gamble on our security and our lives for the sake of accommodating the political sensitivities of people who live far away.

Rosner is clearly letting his passions get in the way of his reasoning here. We Jews who criticize Israel aren’t asking Israelis to “gamble on their security”; indeed, the point liberal Zionists have been trying to get across for decades now is that the policy of complete disregard for Palestinian rights and grievances that Israel has adopted is, in fact, gambling on the security of Israelis and Jews everywhere by calling the Zionist project’s long-term sustainability into question. We’re not asking Israel to be less heavy-handed and more conciliatory out of concern for our own consciences, but rather out of recognition that Israel cannot be secure as a Jewish homeland if it continues to lash out reactively at Palestinian resistance rather than honestly and justly addressing the catastrophe that befell the Palestinians as a result of its creation and the ongoing suffering that engenders that resistance. Chait hits back at Rosner, who he says mischaracterizes his argument entirely by conflating feelings with opinions:

My Zionism — that is, my belief that the Jewish people, like other people, deserve a homeland where they can live free of persecution — is immutable. My disposition as a defender of Israel depends on the character of the Israeli state. A decade ago, I’d argue, it was a fair reading of the facts to view Israel as a state that mostly desired peace and whose use of force was mostly justifiable. I think that argument has weakened substantially in the intervening years.

To provide a corresponding example, right now I’d describe myself as pro-Ukraine — my analysis is that Ukraine is mostly within its rights, and that the cause of its current conflict lies mostly in the aggressive intentions of Russia. It is possible the world will change in such a way that I no longer regard this as true. Now, I lack the sort of personal and cultural attachment to Ukraine that I have to Israel. But the emotional component is not all that matters.

Responding to John Podhoretz, who applauds Rosner’s piece, Larison finds the line of thinking that Rosner and Podhoretz advance disturbing:

I have often cited the Russian proverb that Solzhenitsyn used, “The yes-man is your enemy, but your friend will argue with you.” … The main mistake that Rosner and Podhoretz make, unsurprisingly, is that they consider otherwise sympathetic critics to be “fair-weather” friends when these are potentially some of the best friends that Israelis have precisely because they don’t simply back whatever the Israeli government happens to do. Considering the stifling of dissent inside Israel that has been taking place lately, that would seem to be all the more valuable. But then one would have to understand the value of dissent against reckless and hawkish policies to appreciate that, and naturally Podhoretz doesn’t.

The odd thing about these complaints is that there is less sympathy for Israel around the world now than at almost any time that I can remember in the last twenty years. One would think that “pro-Israel” hawkish Americans and Israelis would be more appreciative of the sympathizers that Israel does have, including the critical ones, but instead the latter are treated dismissively and berated for having the temerity to express their concern. As this rate, there will continue to be fewer sympathizers as it becomes clear that friendly criticism is just falling on deaf ears.

My fear is that Larison is absolutely right about this, and that the Israeli state and its polity have both become so convinced of their categorical righteousness that legitimate criticism becomes impossible to imagine. This sensitivity speaks to the existential paranoia that underpins Zionism, and while that paranoia is understandable given what we Jews have been through, it leaves Israel operating in an alternate reality in which all criticism of Israel is anti-Zionism, all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and thus anti-Semitism becomes the sole and sufficient cause of all criticism of Israel, even from Jews!

Not only is this perception incorrect, it’s also self-destructive. There’s no point pretending that Israel does no wrong, has no hard choices to make, and faces no uncertainty in its future. And that’s why, like Chait, Klein, and Beinart, I criticize Israel for the same reason Israel gives for doing the things I criticize: out of concern for my safety as a Jew on this earth.

Why Intervene In Iraq And Not Syria? Ctd

by Jonah Shepp

Aki Peritz believes that ISIS poses a genuine terrorist threat to the US, and on that basis, suspects that Obama will eventually see fit to target the group in Syria as well as Iraq:

It is well and good that the president said he won’t “rule out anything,” but the reality is that multiple jihadist groups already have a permanent foothold in Syria. … Will ISIL, or another Syria-based jihadi group, try to strike American targets before Obama leaves office in January 2017? If past actions predict future behavior, then the answer is probably yes. Would the administration respond to a terror attack on America or Americans with airstrikes—or perhaps more—of its own? That too is likely in the cards, given that the United States just bombed Islamic State positions to help our Kurdish allies.

Hopefully, America’s airstrikes near Irbil will prove to be the high-water mark for ISIL’s ability to export its fanatical ideology. But the group has shown itself to be an adaptable, ruthless foe bent on destroying its enemies—including the United States. Since that’s the case, it’s only a matter of time before this White House decides that America must strike Syria as well.

And maybe it will, but the argument that it should fails on two levels. First, if ISIS wants to attack Americans, deploying more American soldiers in its areas of operation makes the targeting of Americans more likely, not less (and creates a justification for it, at least in the militants’ own view). And second, if ISIS wants to carry out an attack on US soil, it won’t do so with the soldiers and materiel in Syria that Peritz would have us bomb. Rather, that threat would likely take the form of a few fanatics with American or European passports, and I don’t see how airstrikes would address that, short of killing every single ISIS member and sympathizer in Syria and Iraq (and not only there – Peritz might want to start ginning up support for airstrikes on London and New Jersey as well).

No, this conflict is not ultimately about US homeland security; it remains, first and foremost, a regional power struggle. Certainly, some of the Syrian rebels would like us to get involved:

Moderate Syrian rebels argue that, in order to challenge ISIS in Iraq, it would be necessary to tackle them in Syria too. “To protect [the Iraqi city of] Irbil from ISIS, you need to hit ISIS hard in the Euphrates river valley in Syria,” said Oubai Shahbandar, spokesman for the opposition Syrian National Coalition. “Stopping ISIS expansion requires a ground game. U.S. needs to coordinate with the tribes and the Free Syrian Army that have been fighting ISIS since January.”

“Airstrikes won’t deny ISIS territorial gain,” Shahbandar said. “U.S. needs to support those forces like FSA and tribes in Syria already on the ground fighting ISIS.”

But others, Hassan Hassan reports, appear to have joined forces with the jihadists:

According to Samer al-Ani, an opposition media activist from Deir Ezzor, several fighting groups affiliated to the western-backed Military Council worked discreetly with Isis, even before the group’s latest offensive. Liwa al-Ansar and Liwa Jund al-Aziz, he said, pledged allegiance to Isis in secret, with reports that Isis is using them to put down a revolt by the Sha’itat tribe near the Iraqi border.

He warned that money being sent through members of the National Coalition to rebels in Deir Ezzor risks going to Isis. Another source from Deir Ezzor said that these groups pledged loyalty to Isis four months ago, so this was not forced as a result of Isis’s latest push, as happened elsewhere. Such collaboration was key to the takeover of Deir Ezzor in recent weeks, especially in areas where Isis could not defeat the local forces so easily.

This complication reveals how facile and ignorant the neo-neocon case for intervention in Syria is. Simply sussing out who our friends and enemies are within the fragmented rebel “coalition” has always been a much more daunting task than the hawks were willing to admit. We don’t have the intelligence to conduct such an intervention, well, intelligently, and there’s just no getting it now. Compare that to Iraq: it’s a mess, sure, but at least our friends (Kurds), enemies (ISIS), and liabilities (Baghdad) are much more clearly defined. That’s why Michael Totten finds the question in the headline of this post sort of boring:

The Kurds of Iraq are our best friends in the entire Muslim world. Not even an instinctive pacifist and non-interventionist like Barack Obama can stand aside and let them get slaughtered by lunatics so extreme than even Al Qaeda disowns them. There is no alternate universe where that’s going to happen. Iraqi Kurdistan is a friendly, civilized, high-functioning place. It’s the one part of Iraq that actually works and has a bright future ahead of it. Refusing to defend it would be like refusing to defend Poland, Taiwan, or Japan. We have no such obligation toward Syria.

That’s it. That’s the entire answer. Washington is following the first and oldest rule of foreign policy—reward your friends and punish your enemies.

In any case, ISIS’s positions in eastern Syria are already being bombed by the Assad regime, with much collateral damage:

Militants from the Al-Qaeda splinter group are fighting on a multitude of fronts in Syria’s complex civil war – against an array of rebel groups, regime forces, and the Kurdish YPG militia – while also being targeted by locals in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor. When ISIS entered Deir al-Zor last month, it seized a number of towns and villages along the Euphrates River, often by making agreements with locals. Since then, attacks have been staged against the jihadists, who have been accused of breaking their word and detaining residents of the area. Regime forces have only recently begun targeting ISIS positions in several provinces, while anti-regime activists say the strikes have led mainly to civilian casualties.

That’s another reason why, I suspect, Obama remains set against getting involved. A war of attrition between Assad and ISIS is very bad news for the Syrian people, but as soon as American bombs begin to fall, those civilian deaths accrue to us, and those terror attacks on Americans that Peritz fears start looking like a much more attractive option for ISIS and its allies.