David Sterman points out another reason why the threat of homegrown jihadis fails to live up to our outsized fears of it:
Once in an American city, an extremist must still acquire weapons. And if he plans to conduct a large-scale strategic attack (rather than a lone wolf-type shooting), he must also connect with others, engage in planning and surveillance activity, and finally prepare and carry out the attack. All of these steps are constrained by the willingness and ability of local Muslim and non-Muslim communities to report extremist and suspicious activity, as well as by the domestic efforts of law enforcement. …
None of this is to say that Jihadist groups in Syria should be allowed to fester and develop the capability to conduct attacks in the United States, or that it is impossible that a returning Syrian foreign fighter will evade the layered defenses that protect the American homeland. That Abu Salha was able to return undetected to the United States after participating in Jihadist training should concern law enforcement. The layered defense system may need reinforcement to deal with new challenges, but the constraints it imposes upon jihadist activity ought not be obscured, particularly when making the case that the threat posed by foreign fighters calls for military action. Doing so does a great disservice to the admirable efforts of Muslim communities, local and federal law enforcement, and American citizens in confronting Jihadist extremism at home.
Flagging the above tweet, Jacob Siegel points to Iran’s deepening involvement in the ISIS conflict:
The photo reportedly shows the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Qods force, Tehran’s chief military strategist, and the man many American officials consider to be America’s most dangerous foe on the planet. His visit to the site underscores the convergence of U.S. and Iranian interests in Iraq, and Iran’s desire to be seen as orchestrating the efforts. Amerli was clearly a defeat for ISIS and a relief for the townspeople who had held off the group for six weeks. But it’s less clear what the alliance between U.S. airpower and Iranian-backed militias says about the vision guiding the mission in Iraq. Even leaving aside questions of a grand regional strategy for the Middle East—and how our track record suggests that U.S. led wars in Iraq can benefit Iran—its not clear how the precedent set in Amerli will serve the President’s more immediate goals for resolving the war in Iraq.
Juan Cole suspects Washington and Tehran are already coordinating their efforts to some extent:
US air strikes on ISIL in Iraq have alternated with Iranian air strikes on ISIL positions. It seems likely to me that the two air forces are coordinating in at least a minimal way, otherwise there would be a danger of them hitting each other rather than ISIL. … Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is alleged to have just authorized Iranian forces to coordinate with American ones. The denials from other Iranian politicians are likely merely camouflage for a policy that would dismay Iran hardliners.
But Keating doubts anyone will acknowledge that partnership:
There are obviously key points of conflict between Iran and the United States, not least of which is the country’s controversial nuclear program. A new round of talks about that issue are set to begin in New York this month. Any open acknowledgment of cooperation between the countries with regards to ISIS would likely make the U.S. Congress, hardliners in Tehran, and the Israeli government go absolutely berserk. But if the two nations continue to escalate the fight against a common enemy, it’s going to require some level of coordination. I don’t see Iran being formally invited into Obama’s “coalition of the willing.”
Nor is Russia likely to be a formal partner. But it too may become a de facto ally in the fight against ISIS. Ishaan Tharoor highlights how ISIS, which is believed to include some 200 Chechen fighters, is now lobbing threats at Putin as well:
Here’s a slightly new geopolitical wrinkle. Earlier this week, the Islamic State issued a video challenging a powerful global leader. But this time, it was not President Obama or one of his counterparts in Europe. It was Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the video, fighters pose atop Russian military equipment, including a fighter jet, captured from the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This is Agence France-Presse‘s transcription of what follows:
“This is a message to you, oh Vladimir Putin, these are the jets that you have sent to Bashar, we will send them to you, God willing, remember that,” said one fighter in Arabic, according to Russian-language captions provided in the video. “And we will liberate Chechnya and the entire Caucasus, God willing,” said the militant. “The Islamic State is and will be and it is expanding God willing.”
According to some sources (NYT), the Obama administration’s plan to stamp out ISIS is likely to last at least three years:
The first phase, an air campaign with nearly 145 airstrikes in the past month, is already underway to protect ethnic and religious minorities and American diplomatic, intelligence and military personnel, and their facilities, as well as to begin rolling back ISIS gains in northern and western Iraq. The next phase, which would begin sometime after Iraq forms a more inclusive government, scheduled this week, is expected to involve an intensified effort to train, advise or equip the Iraqi military, Kurdish fighters and possibly members of Sunni tribes. The final, toughest and most politically controversial phase of the operation — destroying the terrorist army in its sanctuary inside Syria — might not be completed until the next administration. Indeed, some Pentagon planners envision a military campaign lasting at least 36 months.
The president went on Meet the Press yesterday, where he intimated that going into Syria to fight ISIS is still very much on the table. To Max Fisher, this translates into good news for Assad whether Obama wants it to or not:
At this point … all of the US-supplied kalashnikovs and mortar rounds in the world are probably not going to be enough to help Syria’s moderate rebels take on both the Assad regime and ISIS at the same time, much less seize all that ISIS-held territory in eastern Syria. The possibility of US airstrikes against ISIS territory in Syria would make a difference, but far from a decisive one. The calculus of the war has to change, and that appears to mean that the United States will now form its own unspoken and unacknowledged agreement with the Assad regime: let’s put aside our differences, for now, and cooperate against ISIS, a mutual enemy we both hate more than each other. In its basic contours, it is almost identical to the tacit deal that the Assad regime made with ISIS against the moderate rebels.
But Ed Morrissey argues that ruling out boots on the ground, as Obama did yesterday, “tips our hand to ISIS and probably made them breathe a sigh of relief”:
The US can’t dislodge ISIS from the ground they firmly hold through bombings, because it would result in high numbers of civilian casualties. If Obama and whatever coalition he brings together can’t sustain boots on the ground, they won’t sustain that kind of collateral damage either, which means that ISIS’ leaders will only need to worry about assassinations via drones. Without boots on the ground, the US won’t be able to get reliable intel for that to make enough of an impact to drive ISIS back into the desert.
But the issue is more strategic than tactical, too. We will likely hear on Wednesday that only a united Iraq can defeat ISIS, but the Sunnis are not going to trust the Iranian-backed Shi’ites to share power again, and aren’t going to respond to American guarantees unless we put boots back on the ground. Given the choice between ISIS and the subjugation of their tribes by Iran, most of those tribal leaders will choose ISIS, which is the direct result of us abandoning them by leaving Iraq despite our earlier assurances that we could force Nouri al-Maliki to share power.
Meanwhile, Mark Thompson updates us on the weekend’s air strikes, some of which targeted Anbar province, expanding the campaign from northern to western Iraq. Juan Cole lists some other salient developments. One item on his list:
The mufti or chief legal adviser of Saudi Arabia on Islamic law (Sheikh Abd al-Aziz Al Sheikh) gave a fatwa or ruling on Sunday that ISIL is just a band of rebels and murderers who have blood in their hands. Those Western pundits demanding evidence that Muslims have condemned ISIL should take note. The mufti of a Wahhabi country has done so, showing that the Saudi elite has had a scare thrown into it, even if some Saudis secretly support ISIL.
Another bit of news Cole highlights:
The Arab League declared its enmity with the so-called “Islamic State.” All the governments are afraid of ISIL. Although Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Alaraby met with US Secretary of State John Kerry, however, it is not clear what exactly the body can do in any practical way for the war effort. The state best poised to intervene against ISIL, Jordan (which borders Iraq and has a good little military and intelligence capabilities) is at least in public begging off, for fear of ISIL reprisals in Amman.
Frank Rich takes on critics of Obama’s foreign policy regarding his approach to the Iraq/Syria conflict:
You will notice that the crowd of pundits and (mostly Republican) politicians insisting that Obama “do something” about these horrors never actually say what that “something” is. They offer no strategy of their own beyond an inchoate bellicosity expressed in constructions along the lines of “we must more forcefully do whatever it is that Obama is doing.” That’s becauseObama is already doing the things that can be done (and that some of his critics redundantly suggest): bombing ISIS positions wherever it is feasible; searching for allies to join action that might defeat them on the ground; trying to rally Europe to tighten the economic noose on Putin and Russia. There will surely be more actions to come when America’s ducks are in a row, and if the president were to delineate them, you can be certain he’d be condemned for tipping off our enemies in advance.
This is something I neglected to mention in yesterday’s post criticizing Shadi Hamid’s take on Obama’s “inflexibility” on Syria (Hamid has responded via Twitter, arguing mainly that the situations in Iraq and Libya were different enough from Syria that they don’t make the case against intervention). As Rich points out, Obama has already “flexed” considerably in the direction the pro-intervention crowd would prefer. I think Obama went into office hoping to soften the Bush Doctrine, fight transnational jihadism as a security challenge rather than a moral crusade, and make direct US military intervention in foreign conflicts the exception rather than the rule. He has scaled back those ambitions considerably, partly in light of events on the ground but also because the notion of America as the world cop still holds sway in Washington’s clique of foreign policy elites. I expect him to “flex” on intervention in Syria as well, but I read his reticence to commit to a specific course of action as a sign that he is doing due diligence in weighing his options, not brushing off the crisis altogether.
Unfortunately, one man’s deliberation is another man’s dithering, and the president’s caution is being spun as weakness, even though, as Dan Froomkin points out, there are scads of questions that we ought to be asking before launching a potentially lengthy military engagement but aren’t. War hawks would do well to remember how terrible we are at predicting the outcomes of such engagements: like the president himself, I’m skittish about going to war in Syria not because I disagree that ISIS is a blight on humanity, but rather because going to war has deadly, unpredictable consequences. A decision can be morally crystal clear at the moment and still cause great suffering down the line.
In one of his most insightful takes on Obama’s foreign policy, Max Fisher describes it as stemming from a broad, optimistic worldview that pays more heed to the long-term trend toward a safer and more stable world than to the bumps in the road that leads there. Fisher examines how this “professorial” approach is playing out in the Ukraine crisis:
This is a strategy that essentially abandons eastern Ukraine — and any other non-NATO eastern European country that Putin might choose to invade — to Russian aggression. Still, in the very long view, it is essentially correct: Russia’s foreign policy is dangerous today, but in the long-term it is self-defeating. On the scale of years or decades, Putin will leave Russia weaker, less powerful, and less of a threat; the US-led Western order will eventually prevail. “Eventually” does nothing to address Russian aggression now, but it will turn it back some day.
But Obama’s job is not to be an academic studying long-term trends in American foreign policy. His job is to make decisions — hard decisions — every single day for eight extremely difficult years. Parsing the arc of foreign-policy history has not given him the answers for the problems of this moment. He is steering a race car as if it were a cruise ship, and while history will likely thank him for keeping US foreign policy pointed in the right direction, it may not so easily forgive him for the damage taken along the way.
Which is why, I think, Obama is so reviled by his critics today. I doubt, though, whether history will really remember him so fondly, and whether we will ever learn from these crises. Because one can never prove or disprove a counterfactual, I fear that the argument over whether American intervention does or does not “work” will continue at least as long as the US remains the world’s sole superpower, and that the interventionists will win out most or all of the time.
In the case of Iraq and Syria, the emotional and moral arguments will probably win the day. Examining Obama and his critics through the lens of Walter Russell Mead’s taxonomy of American foreign policy traditions, Peter Beinart fears that “Jacksonian” jingoism is pushing us toward war for the wrong reasons, in the wake of the murders of James Foley and Steven Sotloff:
In narrow policy terms, the arguments for military intervention have not improved over the last two weeks. It’s still not clear if Iraq’s government is inclusive enough to take advantage of American attacks and wean Sunnis from ISIS. It’s even less clear if the U.S. can bomb ISIS in Syria without either empowering Assad or other Sunni jihadist rebel groups. But politically, that doesn’t matter. What’s causing this Jacksonian eruption is the sight of two terrified Americans, on their knees, about to be beheaded by masked fanatics. Few images could more powerfully stoke Jacksonian rage. The politicians denouncing Obama for lacking a “strategy” against ISIS may not have one either, but they have a gut-level revulsion that they can leverage for political gain. “Bomb the hell out of them!” exclaimed Illinois Senator Mark Kirk on Tuesday. “We ought to bomb them back to the Stone Age,” added Texas Senator Ted Cruz. These aren’t policy prescriptions. They are cries for revenge.
And it doesn’t help that many Americans don’t know where we’re dropping bombs but largely approve of doing so:
Less than a quarter of the public are aware that the US has recently launched strikes in Somalia, Pakistan or Yemen. 30% also say, incorrectly, that the US has recently conducted bombed Syria and only 32% of Americans know that the US has not in fact launched air or drone strikes in Syria. Most Americans support conducting air or drone strikes in Iraq (60%), Afghanistan (54%) and Syria (51%). They also tend to support the ongoing drone campaigns in Somalia (45%), Pakistan (45%) and Yemen (38%). They would also tend to approve (38%) rather than disapprove (33%) of conducting drone strikes in Iran. 29% of Americans say that they would approve of the US bombing Gaza and Ukraine.
At the NATO summit in Newport, Wales today, US officials announced that they had formed an international coalition to wage war on ISIS:
President Barack Obama sought to use a NATO summit in Wales to enlist allied support in a campaign to destroy the Islamist militants but as the summit drew to a close it remained unclear how many nations might join Washington in air strikes. Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told foreign and defense ministers from 10 nations at a hastily arranged meeting that there were many ways they could help, including training and equipping the Iraqis. … Hagel told ministers from Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark that they, with the United States, formed the core group for tackling the Sunni militant group.
In his press conference, Obama stressed that the coalition-building effort isn’t over and that John Kerry would continue to seek partnerships with other countries in combating the ISIS threat. He also stressed the importance of engaging Arab states, particularly those with Sunni majorities, in countering ISIS not only militarily, but also—or even primarily—politically. He rightly pointed out that any international effort will only succeed in the long term with the support of local actors in Iraq and Syria, and compared the coming effort to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS to the fight against al-Qaeda.
That fight looked very different under Bush and under Obama, so what that means is unclear. If I had to guess, I would say that he is signaling a plan to fight ISIS as he has fought other jihadist militant groups: i.e., primarily through targeted killings of its leadership from on high (cf. today’s announcement that Ahmed Abdi Godane, the leader of Somalia’s al-Shabaab, was killed in a US airstrike on Monday) and by degrading their capabilities until they are weak enough for local partners to finish them off. We could surely do this all by ourselves, but having an international coalition behind the effort enhances its legitimacy and reinforces the principle of multilateral responsibility for global security to which Obama clearly adheres.
Hayes Brown compares this coalition (which, again, won’t necessarily be limited to these ten countries) to the Multinational Force Bush formed to participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq:
Conservatives have already begun to pan the announcement of the core coalition, drawing unfavorable comparisons to 2003. … While there are clearly some overlaps between the two groups, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Italy, Denmark and Poland, the “core” group lined up against ISIS has a few advantages over those assembled in 2003. In 2003, Germany and France were both strongly opposed to action in Iraq, depriving the U.S. of key support in Europe. Adding in those countries gives the group the support of two of the most militarily powerful states in Europe. Canada’s support adds to the cohesion among the most capable members of NATO and Ottawa’s support will also translate over into the G-7. Most strikingly, the group announced on Friday includes Turkey, which not only neighbors Iraq but serves as a Muslim-majority country that can be put forward as a defense against claims that the campaign against ISIS isn’t yet another Western invasion of a Muslim country.
But Juan Cole doubts our NATO allies are very enthusiastic about this mission:
My reading of the reporting from Wales is that most NATO states have little intention of intervening directly in Iraq and most of them have no intention to get involved in Syria. The US and Britain (and, far from Europe, Australia) are the most likely to commit to the Iraq front. The NATO country closest to ISIL territory, Turkey, seems reluctant to get involved in directly fighting ISIL (and critics of the religious Right party, AKP, which is in power, suggest that behind the scenes President Tayyip Erdogan is supporting the hard core Muslim rebels in Syria. Despite all the vehement talk, the US likely will have few allies in the air in Iraq as President Obama seems to be stampeded (by the Washington hawks and fear of losing the midterms for looking weak) into a wide-ranging new Iraq war that seems likely to spill over into Syria. The biggest problem the US faces, however, is the lack of effective allies on the ground in Iraq.
Not at the moment, according to someone who ought to know:
The United States’ senior counterterrorism official said on Wednesday that there is “no credible information” that the militants of the Islamic State, who have reigned terror on Iraq and Syria, are planning to attack the U.S. homeland. Although the group could pose a threat to the United States if left unchecked, any plot it tried launching today would be “limited in scope” and “nothing like a 9/11-scale attack.” That assessment by National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen stands in sharp contrast to dire warnings from other top Obama administration officials, who depict the group formerly known as ISIS or ISIL as the greatest threat to America since al Qaeda before it struck U.S. soil on Sept. 11, 2001.
Zack Beauchamp downplays the threat posed by American jihadists who travel to Syria and Iraq, noting that few of them come home to plot attacks, and they are pretty easy to catch when they do:
“We’re going to know who these guys are, and we’re going to watch them closely as they transit home,” Will McCants, director of the Project on US Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution, told me. McCants admits that’s it’s hard to catch ISIS volunteers on their way to Syria or Iraq. However, it’s much, much easier to identify them on their way home.
“Once they’ve gone in,” McCants says, “US intelligence is going to find them.” Partly that’s because the US and other Western countries are obsessive about monitoring their borders and are keenly aware of this threat, but it’s also because jihadis love to talk on social media. “I’ve been told by people in US intel that publicly posted statements in Twitter are an absolute gold mine,” he says.
The Atlantic Ocean is the US’ friend here. Airports have the most “robust systems” for detecting returning fighters, according to McCants. It’s very hard to get back to the United States from Iraq or Syria without flying, and ISIS veterans who check in an airport will likely get detected pretty quickly. Once that happens, their numbers are small enough that US intelligence and law enforcement will be able to keep a very close eye on them.
John Cassidy, meanwhile, looks into where Western jihadists come from and what motivates them:
Shiraz Maher, a senior fellow at the I.C.S.R., divides the Western recruits into three types: adventure-seekers, idealists, and devoted jihadis. In each case, there is a common factor—the intoxicating appeal of radical Islam, with its promise of empowerment through a new beginning (and, in the case of ISIS, the establishment of a new state). As Maher pointed out last weekend in the Wall Street Journal, ISIS, through its strong social-media presence and, especially, its military success, has exerted a special attraction. “Other organizations didn’t have the same glamour,” Maher said. “And we’re dealing with young men. They want to be with a strong horse, with a winning team. At the moment, ISIS has momentum.”
Reversing ISIS’s gains could conceivably change all of this. And Maher, for one, doesn’t believe the situation to be hopeless. Until 2005, and the London subway bombings, he was himself a member of a radical Islamic group, Hizbut Tahrir, which operates inside of Britain and supports the formation of a global and puritanical Islamic state. Since the bombings, he and other moderate British Muslims have been campaigning against the jihadis, and the would-be jihadis, with some success. At one time, Maher told the Journal, Hizbut Tahrir rallies could draw twenty thousand supporters, but these days “they struggle to get one thousand.”
Will Saletan reacts to Steven Sotloff’s murder the same way I did yesterday, urging us to remember the people whose suffering Sotloff and James Foley gave their lives to bring to light. He rounds up some of the latest reports on ISIS’s many atrocities:
Start with Monday’s testimony before the U.N. Human Rights Council. The documented incidents include 1,700 captives executed in Tikrit, Iraq, and 650 in Mosul, Iraq. Some 1,000 Turkmen massacred, including 100 children. More than 2,000 women and children kidnapped. “Systematic hunting of members of ethnic and religious groups.” Women raped and sold. Young boys executed. Girls enslaved for sexual abuse. Children recruited as suicide bombers. More than 1 million refugees, half of them kids.
Then read the report Amnesty International issued Tuesday. Its title is “Ethnic Cleansing on Historic Scale: The Islamic State’s Systematic Targeting of Minorities in Northern Iraq.” The report details, with eyewitness testimony, several more ISIS atrocities in Iraq. At least 100 men and boys herded together and shot to death in Kocho. “Scores of men and boys” summarily executed in Qiniyeh. More than 50 men “rounded up and shot dead” near Jdali. Human Rights Watch also released a report on Tuesday. It offers new evidence about the massacre in Tikrit. “Information from a survivor and analysis of videos and satellite imagery has confirmed the existence of three more mass execution sites,” says the report. That brings the death toll to “between 560 and 770 men.” The captives were shot dead while lying in trenches with their hands bound.
Saletan argues that these evil acts compel America to step in and stop the Islamic State from killing thousands more. It’s hard to dispute that: surely someone has to stop them, and since we’ve already committed to doing so, yes, we must follow through on that commitment to prevent atrocities and protect the innocent. Still, we know that such interventions are slippery slopes, and I only hope that in trying to alleviate this unimaginable humanitarian crisis, we don’t end up prolonging or exacerbating it. It’s hard to see from the vantage of the present how things could get any worse, but then it always is.
President Obama’s statement yesterday that the US intends to “degrade and destroy” ISIS raised a few questions about just what he meant by that. Spencer Ackerman observes that the statement adds to the conflicting rhetoric coming from the administration:
Obama’s goals have caused confusion in recent weeks. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said in the short term Isis can be contained, while Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, said the group must be “crushed”. Each of those endpoints require different military approaches for achieving them. Degrading and destroying an adversary are also two different goals. Degradation is a line short of destruction, a difference Obama appeared to split by suggesting his desired end state is a neutralized, unthreatening Isis.
As Keating points out, if the goal is indeed to “destroy” ISIS, that strongly implies that our air war in Iraq will expand to Syria:
It seemed obvious that continued videotaped killings of U.S. citizens would provoke a more steadfast response than what we’ve seen so far. The goal of the U.S. operation has now expanded from averting a “potential act of genocide”—or recapturing control of a critical dam, or even propping up the Iraqi government—to eliminating ISIS as a force entirely. The thing is, Obama’s own military commanders say that destroying ISIS is impossible without strikes against its strongholds in Syria, a step this administration has been extremely reluctant to take. U.S. strikes on Syria probably aren’t imminent—for one thing,more intelligence gathering is probably needed before the military would take such a step—but eventual military action against ISIS on the other side of the border is starting to feel inevitable.
But Hassan Hassan calls that an opportunity, arguing that the US can leverage it to effect a solution to the Syrian civil war, provided we don’t sell out the opposition and work with the Assad regime:
Local communities and armed groups, even if many of them might be currently displaced, have a direct stake in fighting the Islamic State. However, there are already voices within the anti-jihadist opposition condemning the potential airstrikes against the Islamic State because the perception is that they will be coordinated with Assad. An activist who led a campaign against the jihadist group for months, for example, said he would join the Islamic State if intervention comes at the expense of the rebels. … If Washington plays its cards right, it can use the fight against the Islamic State to spur broader political change in Syria. There is already regional will to defeat the jihadists — American action has the power to unite disparate groups around a solution that could end the bloodshed. As Obama develops his strategy to combat the Islamic State, he would do well to keep that in mind.
That would be the ideal outcome, of course: it’s certainly preferable to the massive PR disaster of an alliance with Bashar al-Assad, and that might even be what Obama’s thinking as he looks to build a regional coalition to fight this war. I’m not as sanguine as Hassan that it will work, though, and I suspect the president himself is leery of “owning” the effort to resolve the Syrian crisis, lest it fail. Rand Paul, on the other hand, thinks an alliance with Damascus (and Tehran) is a no-brainer:
In addition to Iran and Syria, Paul said he believes “the Turks should be enjoined” in the fight. … Paul charged that the chain reaction of U.S. involvement in the Middle East is what, in part, led to the rise of ISIS: “I think part of the reason they’ve gotten so large is that we have armed Islamic allies of theirs, Islamic rebels, in Syria, to degrade Assad’s regime, and Assad, then, couldn’t take care of ISIS. Really, I think what we’ve done, the unintended consequences of being involved in the Syrian civil war, have been to encourage the growth of ISIS by supporting their allies… I think it’s our intervention that really held Assad at bay, and Assad would have wiped these people out long ago.”
But Larison rejects the premise that we should, or even can, fight this battle at all:
When people talk about “destroying ISIS,” they are setting a goal that doesn’t seem to be realistic at an acceptable cost, and their policy would require committing the U.S. to a war in Iraq and Syria that would almost certainly ensnare the U.S. in that country’s ongoing civil war for years to come. Opposing such a poorly thought-through and ill-defined policy doesn’t amount to pacifism, as [Richard] Epstein tendentiously claims, and one doesn’t need to be anything close to a pacifist to see the dangers of overreacting to potential threats with military action on a regular basis. ISIS and other groups like it thrive on such militarized overreaction, which is one reason why it is doubtful that such a group can ever be thoroughly “destroyed” without creating more like it in the process.
Waldman, meanwhile, monitors the outrage machine as it combs through Obama’s rhetoric for signs of weakness and perfidy:
[M]embers of the media (and conservatives, of course) were jumping all over Obama for another line: “We know that if we are joined by the international community, we can continue to shrink ISIL’s sphere of influence, its effectiveness, its military capability to the point where it is a manageable problem.” The sin here was apparently the word “manageable.” If Obama had said, “My plan is to go over there and punch Abu Bakr al-Baghadi in the face, whereupon all his followers will disappear in a puff of smoke and we’ll never have to worry about them again,” he would have been praised for being “tough.” But because he is acknowledging that dealing with ISIS is going to be a complex process that will play out over an extended period of time, Obama will get pilloried.
Obama’s rhetoric on ISIS is confused because his administration’s policy on ISIS is confused by internal contradictions. On the one hand, Obama really does have long term ambitions to destroy ISIS. On the other hand, he recognizes that this is impossible in the near term, and that the best the US can do is lay the groundwork for ISIS’ eventual collapse. This essential tension in American objectives explains why Obama’s rhetoric and actual policy on the group are so at odds.
Anyway, Goldblog argues, Obama is much more of a hawk than he gets credit for being:
It is important to remember that Obama is perhaps the greatest killer of terrorists in American history. … Obama has launched strikes against Islamist terror targets in several countries. He has devastated the leadership of core al Qaeda, and just this week — as Washington opinion-makers collectively decided that he was hopelessly weak on terror — the president launched a (quite possibly successful) strike in Somalia against the leader of al-Shabab, a terror group nearly as bloodthirsty as Islamic State. And here’s the important bit — at the same time the White House is the target of relentless complaints that it has not done enough to combat Islamic State, Obama is actually combating Islamic State, launching what appear to be, at this early stage, fairly effective strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq. The rhetoric is not inspiring, but the actions should count for something.
Shadi Hamid characterizes Obama’s foreign policy as reflecting a lack of faith in American power:
Obama, far from the prudent technocrat some assume him to be, is a believer in the limits not just of American power (which would be understandable) but American agency, colored by a lack of faith in America’s ability to play a constructive role where religious and ethnic divides are paramount. The president has been surprisingly dismissive of the growing number of former U.S. officials and Middle East and Syria experts who have criticized him for not intervening in Syria more than two and half years ago when less than ten thousand Syrians had died. That Obama appears unwilling to question his original assumptions, despite rapidly changing events on the ground, suggests an insularity and ideological rigidity that surpasses even the Bush administration.
The fact that Syria has gone to shit without American help doesn’t disprove the argument that US intervention wouldn’t solve Syria’s problems. Hamid’s logic here is telling: Obama thought it was a bad idea to intervene in Syria in 2012, and today he thinks it’s still a bad idea (and no evidence has emerged to demonstrate otherwise), therefore Obama is insular and ideologically rigid. After a series of disastrous exercises (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) brought about by an overabundance of faith in American power, where do interventionists like Hamid get off criticizing Obama’s lack of faith in this power as though it were some kind of nebbishy tic? Is that lack of faith not a rational response to repeated demonstrations that there are problems in the world that American power can’t solve? Having “faith” in a course of action that has been repeatedly been demonstrated not to work demonstrates not strength, resolve, or leadership, but rather a failure to see what is in front of one’s face. And lacking faith in it seems pretty smart to me.
Hamid, of course, is on the long list of Libyan war cheerleaders whom Freddie deBoer calls out, wondering when their mea culpas will emerge. I’m not on the public record regarding that intervention, but for what it’s worth, I had serious misgivings about it and wasn’t terribly surprised when it went awry, though I admit I was not sorry to see Qaddafi go and did argue with friends on the far left who believed (still do) that he was a great humanitarian rather than an eccentric narcissist who killed a lot of people and bought off a lot of other people with oil money.
But now, the American Power Caucus has turned its attention to Ukraine, where Walter Russell Mead claims (literally) that the only thing separating us from a “Mad Max world” is a good, old-fashioned US intervention:
America’s choices here (as in the Middle East) are few and they are ugly. We can back Ukraine with enough weapons, money, political will and if necessary air power and boots on the ground to tip the balance on the ground, or we can watch Russia conquer as much of the country as it wants. A Russian victory here won’t be the end; Putin is an empire builder and his goal is to restore the Kremlin power in all the former lands of the USSR, for starters. A Russian win in Ukraine will change the world. Putin’s flagrant violation of every standard of decency and restraint leaves the United States with the choice of confronting him or living in a Mad Max world ruled—if at all—by the law of the jungle.
But as Daniel Larison points out, arming Ukraine wouldn’t actually accomplish very much other than raising the death toll:
It’s telling that no one in favor of arming Ukraine believes that it would do anything more than drag out the conflict. That’s the best-case scenario. It is just as likely that Russia would respond to the arming of Ukraine by Western governments with a much larger attack that inflicts even greater damage on the country. Russia has consistently been willing to go much farther than the U.S. and its allies in terms of what it will risk over Ukraine, and we should assume that will also apply to its response to attempts by Western powers to arm Ukraine. At each stage of the Ukraine crisis, Western governments have pursued their policies there without considering how Russia would respond to them. This has repeatedly put Western governments in the absurd position of provoking reactions from Moscow that they should have expected but failed to anticipate.
For the past two weeks, the gruesome death of James Foley has returned to my mind over and over again. Now that Steven Sotloff has met the same fate, I, like many other Americans of conscience, am now haunted by two ghosts. It is well established that journalists, even those of us who do not work in the field, can get PTSD from the horrors we read about and the images we see day in and day out. I didn’t go looking for the videos of these brutal murders, because I don’t need to see someone get his head sawn off from front to back to be chilled by the thought of such an agonizing death. I’ve seen enough as it is. And as long as this war and others drag on, I know there are more horrors to come.
The impulse to make martyrs of our dead leads us to ascribe more importance to some murders than others. Yet Foley and Sotloff are but two among nearly 70 journalists killed while covering the conflict in Syria, hundreds who have been brutally murdered by ISIS jihadists in similarly gruesome fashion, and nearly 200,000 casualties of a civil war gone hopelessly off the rails. We feel for Foley and Sotloff in a way we do not feel for other victims of this compounded Syrian-Iraqi crisis because they look like us and speak our language, because many of us share their Irish and Jewish surnames, and because their grieving families remind us of our own in ways that ululating Iraqi widows don’t. There’s nothing wrong with that: in-group bias can’t be helped, and it doesn’t follow from this outpouring of grief that we do not care about the many others who have suffered so terribly in this war.
Still, as proponents of American leadership-by-war turn to these atrocities as casus belli for an engagement they already wanted, it bears remembering that the forgotten victims of this maelstrom of death are human, too, as Sotloff’s own reporting so eloquently brought out. The humane character of his approach to his job has come up in many of the eulogies written since yesterday. For example, Ishaan Tharoor highlights a story Sotloff wrote from the bread lines in Aleppo:
The piece was the product of a ten-day trip to Syria’s war-ravaged commercial capital at a time when Syria’s “moderate” rebels still appeared to lead the fight against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. It was published on Christmas Eve. In an e-mail sent to a Time editor alongside a link to the Foreign Policy article, Sotloff wrote that the “situation is nothing like the media dispatches from the West depict it,” alluding to the darker forces shaping the rebellion as well as the revolutionary fatigue of Aleppo’s beleaguered populace. “We are people not cattle,” an Aleppo resident told Sotloff, as the pair watched fights break out in a long line for rations of pita bread. “But this war is slowly killing our humanity without a shot ever being fired at us.”
Sotloff, and Foley too, went to Libya, Syria, and other dangerous locales not to cheer for more war or to agitate against it, and not to propagandize for any cause, but rather to bear honest and clear-eyed witness to the human tragedy unfolding beyond the abstracting lenses of policy and strategy through which politicians, elites, experts, the media and by extension the public, often view these “foreign” wars.
The best way to remember Steven Sotloff, then, is not only to remember Steven Sotloff.
The Dish 