Tag: Syria

Ahead of the president’s major address tonight, word has leaked that Obama is considering airstrikes in Syria as part of the military operation against ISIS:

President Obama is prepared to use U.S. military airstrikes in Syria as part of an expanded campaign to defeat the Islamic State and does not believe he needs formal congressional approval to take that action, according to people who have spoken with the president in recent days.  Obama discussed his plans at a dinner with a bipartisan group of foreign policy experts this week at the White House and made clear his belief that he has the authority to attack the militant Islamist group on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border to protect U.S national security, multiple people who participated in the discussion said. The move to attack in Syria would represent a remarkable escalation in strategy for Obama, who has sought during his presidency to reduce the U.S. military engagement in the Middle East.

I guess entering one failed state’s civil war wasn’t challenging enough! Let’s enter two while we’re at it. Exit strategy? Pshaw. That’ll be up to Obama’s successor. In a more granular must-read analysis of this clusterfuck, Marc Lynch stresses that while a strategy of airstrikes and supporting local ground forces may be able to help restore stability and sovereignty to Iraq, in Syria these options “offer no plausible path to political or strategic success”:

A strategy predicated on the existence of an effective moderate Syrian rebel force is doomed to fail. Instead, the focus should be on shaping the environment in ways which will encourage the emergence of a politically legitimate and more effectively unified opposition. The destructive and radicalizing effects of uncoordinated flows of aid to competing rebel groups from outside states and private actors have long been obvious. The emerging regional strategy offers perhaps the first opportunity to unify these efforts to build rather than divide the Syrian opposition. The new coalition should expand on efforts to shut off funding and support not only for ISIS but also for the other powerful Islamist trends within the Syrian rebellion.

This will take time. The immediate goal in Syria should be the securing of a strategic pause between the rebel forces and the regime in order to focus military efforts on ISIS.  Crucially, this strategic pause does not mean cooperation or alignment with Asad, or a retreat from the Geneva Accord principles of a political transition. It should be understood instead as buying the time to shape an environment in which such a transition could become plausible. … The longer-term goal should be to translate this anti-ISIS tacit accord into an effective agreement by the external backers of both Asad and the rebels on a de-escalation of the conflict.  Rather than a military drive on Damascus, the international community should support the delivery of serious humanitarian relief, security and governance to rebel controlled areas and refugees.

I simply do not believe we are capable of pulling anything like this off. Robert Hunter also complicates the question of whether getting rid of Assad should be among our objectives there:

We continue to talk about “arming moderates,” but no US leader has ever articulated what would come after Assad. There is a basic assumption that, when Assad is gone, all will be rosy. The opposite is more likely true. Added to the ongoing carnage would be the slaughter of the minority Alawites. The risks of a spreading Sunni-Shia civil war would increase dramatically, even more than now. The irony is that many who now worry about ISIS argue that it would not have progressed this far if we had only “armed the moderates” in Syria. But given what would have likely happened if they had succeeded, this argument is nonsense. Yet even now the administration, along with academic and congressional critics, fails to address the consequences of its own rhetoric about getting rid of Assad; that statement has become a mantra, disconnected from any serious process of thought or analysis.

Juan Cole lays out some of the inherent risks in a US military campaign against ISIS:

Obama appears to envisage arming and training the “moderates” of the Free Syrian Army, who have consistently been pushed to the margins by al-Qaeda offshoots and affiliates. Private billionaires in the Gulf will continue to support ISIL or its rival, Jabhat al-Nusra (the Succor Front, which has pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda). Strengthening yet another guerrilla group will, again, likely prolong the fighting. Moreover, in the past two years, Free Syrian Army moderate groups have gone radical and joined Nusrah or ISIL at an alarming rate. Defectors or defeated groups from the FSA will take their skills and arms with them into the al-Qaeda offshoots.

In Iraq, while giving the Kurds and the Iraqi army close air support against ISIL has already borne fruit when the local forces were defending their ethnic enclaves, it hasn’t helped either largely Kurdish forces or the (largely Shiite) Iraqi army take Sunni Arab territory. Several campaigns against Tikrit have failed. The only thing worse than this failure might be success. Success would mean smart phone video making its way to YouTube showing US bombing urban residential buildings full of Sunni Arab families in support for a motley crew of Kurdish (non-Arab) fighters and Shiite troops and militiamen. Helping such forces take Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, would make for a very bad image in the Sunni world.

But we never learn, do we? Robin Wright’s comparison of the best- and worst-case scenarios illustrates how tremendous those risks are:

For the United States, the best possible outcome would be for the militants to withdraw from their illusory state in Iraq to bases in Syria, where they might wither in the face of strengthened Syrian rebels; ideally, the rebels would also bring an end to the Assad regime in Damascus. Iraq and Syria, with their multicultural societies, would then have breathing room to incubate inclusive governments. That’s the goal, anyway. The worst outcome would be another open-ended, treasury-sapping, coffin-producing, and increasingly unpopular war that fails to erase ISIS or resurrect Iraq. It might even, in time, become a symbolic graveyard of American greatness—as it was for the French and the British. The Middle East has a proven record of sucking us in and spitting us out.

Maybe it will take another humiliating, devastating defeat in an unwinnable war to finally get Americans to understand the limits of their military power – and the increasing toxicity of the American brand.

Jack Goldstone pens an explainer on ISIS, including some suggestions for how it might be defeated. He argues that while US or NATO military reprisals may be necessary to “blunt its success and undermine the feeling of invincibility it has given to its converts”, there are much more daunting challenges beyond that:

Second, the civil institutions that provide a power-base for moderate political organizations and their leaders must be rebuilt and given credibility. In Syria, this cannot happen until the Assad regime falls; in Iraq this cannot happen until a post-Maliki government establishes its credibility and effectiveness. … Third, the ongoing Sunni-Shia conflict in the Middle East is fueling every sort of violent group: Hezbollah, Hamas, ISIS, and others. At some point, the global community will have to lean on Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to cease their proxy wars and come to an agreement similar to that of 1648 in Europe, which ended the Thirty Years War that capped over a century of religious conflicts: every country can control its religious policy within its own borders, but agrees to stop meddling in religious conflicts in other countries and to respect other countries’ full sovereignty. This may be a distant goal (it took nearly a century in Europe) but is vital if the region is ever to know stable peace.

Shane Harris wants Obama to get straight whether he plans to “degrade”, “defeat”, or “destroy” ISIS, the last of which Harris considers an impossible goal:

Even if a combined military-political campaign were successful against the Islamic State, history shows that destroying fundamentalist organizations and terrorist networks is exceptionally difficult. Although Obama claims that the United States has “systematically dismantled” al Qaeda in the tribal regions of Pakistan, counterterrorism experts debate whether that’s true, pointing to the fact that Zawahiri is still alive and giving direction to fighters, as well as forming new al Qaeda affiliates, most recently in India. And nearly 13 years after the 9/11 attacks, a sustained military campaign against the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan has failed to destroy the organization. Israel, for its part, has been unable to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah despite the country’s physical proximity to the decades-old militant groups and its ability to deploy one of the most formidable military and intelligence forces on the planet to the fight. The lesson is clear: Terrorist networks are persistent, and they return to their favored targets again and again.

Remarking on the internal illogic of the case for war, Justin Logan doesn’t see how even a successful military operation will solve any of the underlying problems:

The very same political forces that led to a Sunni insurgency during the aughts have contributed to the rise of ISIS. If those politics don’t change—and I see little reason to believe we can make that happen—then you may make gains against ISIS, but the underlying political disease that’s causing the problem remains untreated, and possibly untreatable. In other words, even if the Islamic State is destroyed, there will be an array of other spoilers endangering a thriving Kurdish minority and a stable, successful Iraqi government that integrates the country’s Sunni minority. In fact, these other problems preexisted and helped lead to the successes of the Islamic State. Are we just supposed to cross that bridge when we get to it?

Michael Brendan Dougherty serves up some sharp criticism, lamenting America’s inability to say “no” to lengthy, expensive experiments at fixing other countries’ security problems:

A three-year commitment is merely a hope that drones and bombs plus time equals a stability that is peaceful enough and liberal enough to make our quarter-century of involvement not look like a total waste. But it dumps all the responsibility for solving Iraq on the United States, and makes us yet again a convenient scapegoat for the whole region’s failure. …

This is all part of a broader pattern of the U.S. making too many promises. We’ve promised Japan and the entirety of Southeast Asia to manage China’s rise peacefully. Even as our NATO allies halved their share of military spending since the end of the Cold War, we’ve extended a security guarantee that a Russian advance on Estonia will be treated no differently from a land invasion of the United States. It’s a promise so risible it practically dares a Russian challenge. In fighting ISIS and propping up Iraq, the president is promising to finally make good on America’s constant failure to manage a millennia of hatreds and radical schools of thought, the politics of about six regional powers, and centuries of imperial hubris.

Lastly, George Packer compares Obama’s current situation to that of Gerald Ford after the fall of Saigon:

[Tonight] is a speech that Obama, even more than Ford, never wanted to give. He ran for reëlection, in part, on having fulfilled a promise to end the war in Iraq—always the previous Administration’s war. His eagerness to be rid of the albatross of Iraq played no small part in clearing the way for ISIS to take a third of the country, including Mosul, and to threaten Baghdad and Erbil.

All the more reason to give the President credit (though his political enemies never will) for his willingness, however reluctant, to turn around and face the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq and Syria. Wednesday’s speech will no doubt nod toward staying out (no boots on the ground, no new “American war”), even as it makes the case for going back in (air strikes, international coalitions, the moral and strategic imperative to defeat ISIS). This is the sort of balancing act that Obama speeches specialize in. But he also needs to tell the country bluntly that there will almost certainly be more American casualties, and that the struggle against ISIS—against radical Islam generally, but especially in this case—will be difficult, with no quick military solution and no end in sight. Otherwise, he’ll have brought the public and Congress on board without levelling with them, a pattern set in Vietnam and repeated in Iraq, with unhappy consequences.

The only way to air this debate properly is a full and robust vote in the Senate, preceding a formal declaration of war. That’s what the Constitution demands. And given the emotional rush to war in the country and Washington, you begin to see the wisdom of the Founders’ judgment.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about Iraq in the Brady Briefing room of the White House on June 19, 2014 in Washington, DC. Obama spoke about the deteriorating situation as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants move toward Baghdad after taking control over northern Iraqi cities. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Greenwald is shocked but not surprised at how the notions that ISIS is a grave national security threat and “of course we’re going to war with them” have both become conventional wisdom:

If the goal of terrorist groups is to sow irrational terror, has anything since the 9/11 attack been more successful than those two journalist beheading videos? It’s almost certainly the case that as recently as six months ago, only a minute percentage of the American public (and probably the U.S. media) had even heard of ISIS. Now, two brutal beheadings later, they are convinced that they are lurking in their neighborhoods, that they are a Grave and Unprecedented Threat (worse than al Qaeda!), and that military action against them is needed. It’s as though ISIS and the U.S. media and political class worked in perfect unison to achieve the same goal here when it comes to American public opinion: fully terrorize them.

Larison fumes over the war’s rapidly expanding objectives:

It hasn’t taken very long for last month’s “limited” intervention in Iraq to expand far beyond anything that the administration originally described to the public.

Administration officials were denying that they planned for a “sustained” campaign just a few weeks ago, and now they’re saying the opposite. Obama said that he wouldn’t “allow” the U.S. to be dragged into a new war, and he is now setting out to take the U.S. into that war. What we’re seeing now is not so much mission creep as mission gallop, and it all seems to be happening without any serious consideration of the costs or the potential dangers of such an expansive campaign.

Even if the U.S. does not eventually commit large numbers of ground troops to this campaign, the U.S. will be at war in two countries where it does not need to be fighting. This is every bit as much a war of choice as the earlier wars in Iraq and Libya, and it hasn’t been thought through any better than those were.

Christopher Dickey thinks the ISIS threat is being overhyped, though he worries about lone ISIS-inspired nut-jobs like Mehdi Nemmouche, who killed four people in an attack on a Jewish museum in Brussels in May:

Veteran terrorism expert Brian Jenkins notes the alarmism in Washington has reached such proportions, there’s a kind of “shock and awe in reverse.” Thus, as Jenkins writes, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel proclaims ISIS is an “imminent threat to every interest we have.”  A congressional staffer argues that it is “highly probable ISIS will…obtain nuclear, chemical, biological or other weapons of mass death…to use in attacks against New York [or] Washington.” Texas Governor Rick Perry claims there is a “very real possibility” that ISIS forces may have crossed the U.S.-Mexican border. Senator James Inhofe asserted, “We are in the most dangerous position we’ve ever been in as a nation,” and retired Marine four-star Gen. John Allen goes so far as to say, “World War III is at hand.”

All this plays to the advantage of the self-proclaimed Caliph Ibrahim, formerly known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whose ragtag army conquered a huge swathe of Iraq mainly by filling the vacuum left by incompetent Iraqi government military commanders. The conquest—and the reaction to it—have given him an aura of invincibility that holy-warrior wannabes find quite thrilling.

I actually hadn’t absorbed the sheer hysteria in Washington after the beheadings-bait. It’s truly shocking – and utterly insane. My earlier thoughts here.

Josh Rogin observes that the president isn’t showing much interest in getting Congress’s permission to go to war with ISIS:

The president and his staff have made clear that they don’t feel they need congressional authorization to go after ISIS, but leaders in both parties disagree, and a long list of congressional figures believes the president must come to Congress for explicit authorization within 60 days of when he began striking ISIS in Iraq, on August 8.

But some of the hawks in Congress aren’t eager for a vote, Tim Mak finds:

Hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) offered the frank assessment Monday that a congressional vote could hinder presidential power at a time when Obama most needs it to counter ISIS, putting him on the same page as senior Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), both of whom indicated an interest in deferring to the president on war strategy. The Daily Beast asked Graham if the absence of a vote reflected congressional acquiescence to the president’s will on war strategy. A vote would be nice, he said, but bringing the issue to Congress could mean all sorts of measures that blunt the president’s response. “What if [Obama] comes here and [Congress] can’t pass it? That would be a disaster. And what if you put so many conditions on it that it makes any military operations ineffective? That’s what I worry about,” the senator said. “I think the president has an abundant amount of authority to conduct operations. It would be good to have Congress on board… if Congress doesn’t like what he’s doing, we can cut the money off.”

Still, some Senators are rightly insisting that the new war come to a vote:

On Monday, Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) introduced resolutions to authorize military action in Syria, as did Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.). Speaking on the Senate floor, Nelson said he believes Obama already has authority to act, “but there are some who disagree, so rather than quibble about legalities, I have filed this legislation.” Inhofe said that an authorization vote would attract widespread, bipartisan support “because people realize — even [Defense Secretary Chuck] Hagel and others have made the statement — that the threat facing us is unprecedented.”

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.