Reluctant Leader, Reluctant Followers

I mean members of Obama's new coalition, supposedly not followers. But the US has to be the leader, Obama declares. Apparently, Obama's team, including Secretary Kerry, didn't get such firm commitments that regional nations could be called allies. Perhaps 'followers' is the more appropriate term: according to an NYT article (9/12), the only enthusiastic supporters of Obama's plan are the 'moderate' Syrian rebel groups, who hope to gain a windfall of arms. Even they complain, however, that it's too little and too late; IS buys their weapons and pays themselves handsome salaries, while the moderates nearly starve. IS extorts its new subjects, taxes them, loots the region and sells Iraqi oil on the black market: it has money.

The Syrian government would like to sign on against IS, and only asks that the US coordinate with it in its attacks in their country. Of course, the US avoids Assad like the plague: "he lost legitimacy a long time ago," Obama said.

But Egypt, Jordan and even Saudi Arabia appear to be only formally going along, without making any commitments. Iran, as the opponent of The Great Satan, is not invited, (it claims it was and turned the Great Satan down), but is fighting against IS, itself. Iraq's government is still not governing a critical part of the country and its population--the north, west and the Sunnis, respectively. Even if the new PM proves more ecumenical, able to unify the country, that could take years: the government the US put in place did a lot of damage to Iraq's nationhood.

Will Obama's campaign, allied with ghost coalition members, be like the wars in Somalia and Yemen, mentioned by Obama in passing? He didn't mention the Pakistan drone war, which, though larger, is still probably too small in scale to compare with what he's proposing: an assault on IS using our sophisticated air offense against the army of a movement, in both Iraq and Syria. However, many of his actual targets may turn out to be wedding parties or boys playing Cricket. What has been the result of our drone wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan? We've made enemies. We may have decapitated al Qaeda, yet it's still in operation. For every family of civilians, or children, mothers and fathers our drones summarily execute, we create recruits for even more violent and radical "Islamists."

I can guarantee that the IS is not so stupid as to mass its troops and artillery in places the US could target without killing civilians. However, we already claim there are miniscule numbers of civilian deaths and injuries in Somalia and Yemen. That's because when the US attacks, mysteriously, all dead males between the ages of 15 and 50 become 'militants.' Women of fighting age may be counted, too. Wave the wand: civilian deaths gone, except for a niggling asterisk: those little bodies, or the gray haired ones.

Obama may have really done it this time: committed himself to a 'police action' that no one else is any more enthusiastically for than he is: the reluctant leading the reluctant and wary.

The problems with his proposal: it disregards the real facts on the ground. Our opponents in the Syrian civil war, Assad and Iran, are fighting IS; our natural allies, the moderate rebels, are dispirited and outgunned; Iraq is still a mess. Our other expected allies are more concerned with the Palestinian or other more local problems, or are divided, as are the Persian Gulf monarchies: Qatar, for example, has been funding IS; Saudi Arabia is wary of IS and the US. Worst of all, Turkey will not participate for two reasons: fear of Kurdish groups fighting Syria would strengthen the Kurdish rebellion against Turkey. They are also constrained by the 49 Turkish hostages held by IS.

After all the US's invasions, surges, bombing campaigns, drone wars and advisory missions in the region, there may be a growing sense among the supposed beneficiaries, that the US makes things worse, not better. Further, when America leads in the Mideast, that means that regional powers do not. Now, they are like the boy who doesn't want to go to wherever his parents want him to, and he has to be dragged along by his father.

The region's powers will have to solve this puzzle on their own. They may not, but face it: we can't solve it for them. Right now, Obama looks like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.

Consequences for the Middle East of Obama's plan: there will be more inconclusive violence, more recruits for bitter-enders and more destabilization. Consequences for the United States: the President does and will look inconsistent and ineffective, and nothing will get done in the next two years, because Republicans will try to override or repeal Obama's programs, especially if they win a majority in the Senate as well as the House. That's more likely if this campaign is a disaster. Then, only Presidential vetoes will stand in their way.

The only action by the US that might contribute to stopping IS would be to negotiate a regional arms embargo, to dry up the flow of weapons, especially to IS. But who makes money on that?

There! The US Navy has its mission: enforce the embargo on the seas; so does the Air Force; that would at least be some business for our fearsome arms. Maybe the Air Force would even get another reason to bomb people: they're the scum who are smuggling in arms to kill more people.

The President Decided

The President has decided: given American foreign policy up to now, he couldn't have decided otherwise, because America Leads the Mideast….towards "order."

Oh, it could be worse. If McCain were President, and he always wishes he were, we'd be flying in troops by the thousands and bombing the hell outta the whole Syria-Iraq borderlands.

But order means we're going to bomb the hell outta some of them, and call it a "counter-terrorist" action, not a war. A war would come under the War Powers Act, requiring Congressional approval. Also, Obama wants to be against war, even if he starts one.

Obama asks for some kind of support from Congress; Republicans don't want to stop him, or condemn him; some even may be coming around to support the action. However, one Republican Congressman remarked: they'd applaud if things go well, and say "you should have acted much earlier," if the action fails. Earlier means when they were urging Obama to bomb Syria for its chemical weapons. Most Republicans have wanted every war since WWII, even when there were Democratic Presidents benefiting from wars at the polls.

Wait a minute! Could Obama be doing something similar? ISIL is a horror, but perhaps a convenient horror. Until this crisis, Obama was "embattled" and increasingly unpopular, so much so, that many Democratic candidates welcomed his efforts to raise money for them, but avoided joint appearances.

On the other hand, Obama's proposal embodies the success of ISIL propaganda and strategy. ISIL staged the beheadings of American journalists to accomplish two goals: bolster their image of ruthlessness to recruit western extremists, and goad the US into acting against them, to broaden their anti-western appeal. Baghdadi, after all, speaks of the Califate, meaning world rule, not just swathes of two war-torn nations.

Obama's "decisive action" will rally the troops and neutralize the opposition. Given the tilt towards war in all the "major" media, ISIL is a convenient pretext.

Obama's "decisive action:" means bombing, degrading and destroying ISIL. Sounds like what we did to al Qaeda. Now, the US is leading a regional coalition, to stop ISIL: stopping the flow of money, for example from Saudi Arabia; regaining control of borders, launching incursions from them, and supporting "moderate" militias and the Iraqi army. The US commitment is leadership, air war attack force, training, materiel and Intel.

We started out in Vietnam with less, and we've already been in Iraq two times before. We could be sucked back into the mire of the Middle East, not only in Iraq, but now in Syria, as well.

On the other hand, Obama may get lucky. ISIL is a freak opponent that seems to appeal to the most crazed, even of some American youth, but is hated by the people they've conquered. Hundreds to thousands are slaughtered, many randomly, at first. Then the survivors undergo looting, high taxes and a repressive social order, brutally enforced.

Why does ISIL exist? Because the US and allies were arming Syrian insurgents, and ISIL was adept at getting enough arms to capture more from their competitors in the Syrian civil war, while supposedly fighting to overthrow Assad. They then expanded in eastern Syria, controlling whole provinces, driving out more secular and moderate rebels.

Then, with superior tactics and morale, they took Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, and captured the huge amount of weaponry we had bestowed on the dispirited Iraqi army. Since embittered ex-military (from Saddam's disbanded army) joined ISIL in droves, it had the technical skills to turn those sophisticated weapons south, and expand their domain of control dramatically and suddenly. Massacres, mass rapes and even attempted genocide followed. ISIL's leader openly threatened to annihilate the Tacridis; Shiites were given a choice: convert instantly to Sunni Islam, or die an infidel.

Brute force works for a while, and forced conversions are a tradition in the Mideast going back millennia. However, they aren't a way to gain popular support, nor are the massacres and repression.

ISIL is a mile high and an inch deep.

There is no reason why the US has to step in. The groups and nations of the region are going to have to work it out. The sooner there is no Uncle Sam leading, they'd have to learn to cooperate, and would be forced to see their own mutual interests. Or kill each other: yes, all out Shiite-Sunni war would dwarf all the current conflagrations.

But the US has almost always made things worse since Vietnam, whenever it intervenes, in the region, or elsewhere. The current proposal is even more flawed than usual: if we destroy ISIL, Assad's forces can fill the vacuum. If we don't, we'll probably rally Sunnis to ISIL's side. US enemies will win, either way. What then? War to accomplish "regime change" in Syria, and maybe Iraq, again?

No action except an arms embargo of the whole region makes much sense. ISIL is (our friend) Iraq's enemy and (our enemy) Syria's enemy. It gains its appeal from the ill-treatment of Sunni Muslims by both governments. Until people in the region learn to live together, instead of killing each other, ISIL, or its successors, may be a problem no outside power can solve.

A Free-market Solution to Mideast Crises

American interventions in the Mideast have been little short of disastrous: starting with the CIA coup in Iran in 1953, which led to the Islamic Revolution and the current Islamic state. Further, Iraq had a relatively stable, if murderous, regime that provided drinking water and predictable electric power, roads, security, jobs. and kept out Islamic extremists. The current regime may be more democratic, but chaos rules and Saddam's amenities, mentioned above, are no longer predictable, or even possible.

The conflicts in Syria and Iraq, where Islamic State momentarily controls swathes of both, are part of a larger Middle Eastern conflict: between Sunni and Shia. While the main Shia state is not Arab, Iraq, with a Shiite majority is Arab, as are Shiite majorities or large minorities in many Arab countries. The conflict is not between Persians and Arabs; it's far broader than that. In Iraq, it's between a once-dominant Sunni minority and a now dominant Shia majority; in Syria a Shiite-allied minority rules and a Sunni majority rebels--militarily dominated by Sunni extremists. Sunni Arabia opposes Shiite Iran. Both have many clients: Hezbollah, the PLO, al Qaeda, IS….

The conflict's closest historical analogue is hardly encouraging: Protestant versus Catholic in Europe's Hundred Years War.

One thing this conflict is Not: central to American interests.

Either will sell us oil; they need the money. Oil is sold at international prices and the US is now producing more of its own than is good for the planet: we need less Arab oil, anyway.

The current success of IS, or ISIS, is due to the colossal blunder of the US in going into Iraq in the first place, then strewing its modern weapons all over it. We assumed, wrongly, that the established government would be able to hold onto them. We made the same mistake in Vietnam, where American arms found their way to the Viet Cong. But IS is not another Nazi Germany, nor the Viet Cong, however much it might want to be--albeit with Muslim symbolism. Germany was an advanced industrial state: the Viet Cong had a government sponsor: North Vietnam. Those governments were well established, and Germany had the know-how to rebuild a defense industry. IS has none of these things. It lucked out when the Iraqi army turned tail, and dropped all the American high tech weaponry we'd given them.

IS may be able to terrorize millions for a short while, but how can it supply its army with modern arms and ammunition? It can't produce them. It can buy some on the Black Market, financed by oil and looting, but that can become prohibitively expensive, especially if the US did something uncharacteristically intelligent like embargo arms sales.

IS is against the interests of almost every established Muslim state, secular or non, Sunni or Shiite. Do Arabs want to live under the IS regime, where executions are daily, taxes are high, and codes of conduct are stifling. Some think they do--until they experience it. IS's power is ephemeral, unless the US gives it credibility by making their movement the equivalent of Nazi Germany, against which a mighty alliance (led by the US), would march into battle--strewing expensive weapons. IS tries to incite intervention with its videoed beheadings; it's their resupply and recruitment strategy.

We'd be intervening on the side of Shiites, when Sunnis are rising against the murderous Syrian Assad regime, and against blatant discrimination by the Iraqi Shiite government we installed. Shiite Iran is stable, has democratic elements, but is hostile to the US. Sunni Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf kingdoms are hardly democratic. Egypt, our most important Sunni client, is a brutal, repressive military regime. All these Sunni states are supposedly US friends.

So, why intervene on either side, especially when this conflict has been going on since Mohammed's death in 632 and the ensuing battle for succession?

I have a better solution: don't take sides and don't intervene. Sell arms only to stable states, profit from the regional conflict, but don't try to control it: the US can't, and shouldn't try. Defense industries could make money from it, however, without costing US lives or increased US debts.