War with DAESH/ISIS?

Are these the times when even the NYT promotes war? Yesterday, 12/7/15, in ‘Obama Says of Terrorist Threat: 'We Will Overcome It,’ the NYT reported on Obama’s oval office speech.

You’d think the “paper of record” would cover significant points put forward in the President’s address, but you’d be wrong. There was much about what Obama had done and was doing about Daesh*, aka Islamic State/ISIS/ISIL militarily, but no mention of his major, multilateral initiative with Russia, Iran, China, France and Saudi Arabia (number 4 of his points), in which tentative agreements have already been reached on a process to establish a cease-fire between ‘moderate’ opposition forces and the Syrian Government, with the further tentative agreement that the initial result would be an interim government. Without an agreement, no progress against Daesh is possible. Why? Arab Sunnis rebelling against both Iraqi and Syrian Shiite/Alawite dominated governments are not going to fight against Daesh, which is also Sunni Arab, though extremist thugs, until the conflict between the rest of the (Sunni) opposition is at least tentatively resolved.

Russia’s initial solution—backing Assad—won’t bring Sunnis to its side; it can drive them into the arms of Daesh.

American Republicans call for war with Daesh, inching towards US troops on the ground, but that’s precisely what Daesh wants. It would empower it to portray itself as Islam attacked by Infidels, which would make its current successful worldwide recruiting look pale by comparison.

Yes, it would lose on the battlefield, but we’ve been down that road too many times: The US lost no battles in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, but it effectively lost all three wars. Attacking Daesh directly would have the same result, but it could be global; the West, even Russia and China, could be under constant attack of the kind demonstrated in San Bernardino. We might call it Terror by Example, or Inspirational Terror, instead of a Terror Network.

Further, to demonize and alienate Muslims, as Trump and his ditto-heads advocate, would be counter-productive: it would prime Muslims all over the world, including those in the US (relatively well integrated and prosperous up until now) to be even more receptive to Daesh than its small thuggish fringe has been already.

*Daesh is the Arabic acronym for Islamic State in Syria and the Levant, but it sounds like the Arabic words for one who crushes something underfoot, or one who sows discord, hence it is intensely disliked by Daesh adherents. IS is not appropriate, since it is not a true state, only a conquest gang or a global mafia.

Islamic State and Attila

Our military used to think they were on football fields, on the ninth down… Now it's surgeons: battlefields are their operating rooms. They excise the cancer, i.e. the enemy.

But the world doesn't work like an operating room or a football field. You can't just remove some "cancer" without removing the cancer-causing agent. That brings us to the not-a-war against Islamic State.

There is a reason Islamic State has many supporters among Sunni tribes in northern Iraq. The US appeared to promise Sunni tribesmen access to government jobs and money in the fight against al Qaeda in Iraq, then arranged for a sectarian Shiite government to take over. The latter not only cut them off; it has discriminated against them, against all Sunnis (the dominant sect until the end of Saddam) and finds excuses to kill a good many, while arming their own Shiite extremists, organized in militias, who carried out organized killings of Sunnis during the civil war before the surge.

IS speaks for that disenfranchisement and humiliation. It offers pride and power, although it's mode of governing is even more brutal and repressive than Saddam ever dared. Much may be forgiven for a return of pride and power. Some may like the piousity, as well. IS is an even bloodier version of the Inquisition, the witch hangings in Salem, the massacres of Protestants by Catholics and vice-versa from the Reformation all the way up to Northern Ireland. But it's similar.

"Taking out" Islamic State is an absurd plan. Unless Sunnis in both Iraq and Syria are offered a significant part of the pie, of power, of respect, IS, or another iteration, will continue to have a popular appeal.

What is needed is extreme political reform in both Syria and Iraq.

But, in Syria, the government, Alawite/Shiite dominated, is more powerful, bloody and repressive than any reformist or secular rebellion. Only Sunni militants have been able to successfully challenge the Assad regime: IS controls about a third of Syria--and a third of Iraq.

IS dared the US to attack them, and like idiots, we took the dare. What they wanted most of all was to have the US as their enemy, so they could recruit fighters from as far away as Chicago, London, Paris, LA, as well as Karachi and Jeddah. And money, of course.

Cutting off IS's cash--one of Obama's strategies--makes much more sense. An arms embargo of the whole region (of our regional friends, too) makes more sense than shipping boatloads of new weapons. How do you think IS arms itself? Capture, or purchase. Both are easier if the region is awash in arms.

What should the US do once an arms embargo is in place? Ensure it's in force, as much as is possible without drastically increasing our patrols of the skies and seas of the region.

The problem of Sunni extremists will not go away if we "surgically remove" IS emplacements, or even whole units. It will only go away, in one form or another, when the need for a radical extremist movement is superseded by real reforms and Sunni access to power and resources.

Finally, by bombing the s**t out of them, we're bound to miss, or to take out the wrong target enough of the time that we increase the ranks of the radical Islamists, who, notice, invited the attacks in the first place.

You can't kill an idea with bombs, nor a movement, no matter how noxious it may be.

Chelsea Manning suggested we should wall IS within its current conquests, and let it fail of its own weight. She's right.

IS economics' reminds me of Attila the Hun, whose power and wealth came from loot, ransoms and selling slaves. His warriors could keep all they could carry, except for the captives, who were all Attila's: IS's warriors are paid high salaries paid for by their loot and black-market oil. The Hun's career was cut short (assassin or stroke, either was possible), but his predecessor, the Roman Empire of the period demonstrated what happens to a warrior economy when it loses old conquests, instead of winning new ones: loot, ransom, slaves, new lands dried up, no longer powering the empire; it shrank rapidly. It disappeared in the West, in 476. (See Attila As Told to His Scribes, a fictional autobiography)

That same dynamic could be speeded up to a year or two, if IS were contained, quarantined by the world. Some civilians might starve, but that would be better than dying from bombs. And IS's failure to bring the good life would demonstrate that it's vision was flawed, even to the young, disaffected Muslim men who make up its ranks, certainly to the civilians upon which it feeds.

In any case, the US and Obama should get over the idea that the US must control events in the Middle East. I'd let the people of the region kill each other until they settle down and see reason; eventually they will. Until they do, the whole region should be left alone.

In the meantime, we have work to do: conversion of our energy sources from outmoded oil, coal and gas to the new, exciting "alternative" energies, that will cost less, require less capital and will be renewable and non-polluting: wind, solar, tidal, geo-thermal, compost gas and algae for fuel.

We have to direct all our energy to reducing global warming as much as we can: IS is an unnecessary and dangerous distraction.

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.

America's Legacy in Iraq

So, we've removed all but 50,000 of our troops from Iraq. That's the good news. The bad news: it's not over. The American legacy in Iraq is a shaky Shiite government. Nothing is resolved.

About the only improvement over Saddam Hussein, is that there is no dictator enforcing arbitrary power. Instead, there are warring factions, a caretaker government because of the dissension, bombings--more Iraqis are being killed now, than were killed by, or under Saddam Hussein--corruption and war-profiteering, and still less than half the services, like electricity and water, available during Saddam's despotic rule. The US destroyed Iraq's utilities in the first phase of the war but it never adequately rebuilt them.

American servicemen and women served extraordinarily well, given the awful conditions. But we should also remember: Americans were ordered to kill civilians, encouraged to humiliate and torture Iraqi prisoners, and did both.

I was struck by the TV commentariat's treatment of President Obama's speech, either deriding his remarks on the economic effects of the war, or completely ignoring them. Yet we have squandered almost a trillion dollars, lost 4,400 American lives, ruined the lives of 100,000's more through injuries, especially psychological ones, killed 100,000's of Iraqis, displaced millions--and what have we bought for all this?

The American oil companies are in a minority among the firms who won contracts to "service" Iraqi oil fields, so Americans didn't even get the oil. We didn't create a functioning democracy; we didn't create a prosperous, safe Iraq. There is also no guarantee that the Iraqi government will be our friend. The political consequence of America's temporary dominance is the empowerment of the Shiite majority, but its leaders are very closely tied to our greatest competitor in the Mideast: Iran.

Further, in Iraq, majority rule does not mean democracy: it could mean majority tyranny. Iraq's leaders don't seem to understand that a minority should participate, and have rights. They didn't learn politics from Americans; they learned from the Baath Party, which dominated on behalf of the Sunnis, the minority favored by Saddam and Iraqi governments before him. The US invasion enabled a revolution favoring Iran's mullahs.

Obama restated his commitment to the Afghan war, but our effect upon Afghanistan, may be even worse than in Iraq. Afghanistan's government is more corrupt and dysfunctional; we can't avoid civilian casualties and resulting anger. We drive Afghans into the arms of the Taliban and strengthen al Qaeda--no matter how many leaders we kill with drones. Al Qaeda has already spread to Pakistan, a nuclear state, as well as Somalia and Yemen. US popular anger at all Muslims (expressed in the "ground zero mosque" controversy) will simply strengthen both even further.

Perhaps, Muslim extremists are comparable to Rome's barbarians, but we will bankrupt ourselves before they could ever take over--as the barbarians did in 476.