On September 10, getting a jump on the unlucky 13th anniversary of Al-Qaida's planes attacks, President Obama laid out his plans for the fourth US invasion and assault on Iraq:
Barack Obama became the fourth consecutive American president to deliver a prime time speech to the nation about Iraq on Wednesday, vowing to wage "a steady, relentless effort" to wipe out ISIS, the Sunni militant group in Iraq and Syria which recently beheaded two American journalists.
"Our objective is clear: we will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy," Obama said.
The president was quick to emphasize that this won't be a war like Iraq or Afghanistan, instead likening it to U.S. engagement in Yemen and Somalia. He said it "will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil," and will instead involve "using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground" to attack ISIS (also called ISIL).
"If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region -- including to the United States," Obama said. He stressed that the strategy will be conducted with global allies, saying the four elements of his plan are air strikes, support for rebel forces on the ground, counter-terrorism and intelligence and humanitarian assistance to civilians.
[Some quick notes: the second invasion of Iraq was under Clinton, when US forces drove Saddam Hussein's forces out of the Kurdish enclave; that was done without a military engagement, although Clinton also conducted a sporadic air war against Iraq over much of his two terms, a practice Bush continued upon taking office in 2001. US troops first entered Somalia in 1992, so how is that working? The first person Obama ordered killed was a Somali pirate in 2009. The US killed a leader of Al-Shabab there as recently as Sept. 2. The US started using drones over Yemen to assassinate alleged terrorists in 2002, so that, too, is at best a slowly evolving "success" story.]
As usual, Obama managed to offend everyone with his position -- the hawks for not acting sooner and more recklessly; the rest of us for throwing us back into another pointless, hopeless war. For a guy who claims his first principle of foreign policy is "don't do stupid shit," Obama just blew it. As near as I can tell, he did this for three reasons:
When US troops finally left Iraq, due to the Iraqi government's refusal to sign a "status of forces agreement" that would give US troops immunity to commit crimes against Iraqis (as they had been doing since 2003), Obama chose to celebrate the occasion as a great American success story, and as such he became party to a war that he had campaigned against. So when the success story unraveled and Iraq sank back into a civil war that the US had started by turning Shiite death squads against Sunnis, Obama felt obligated to repair the damage, even where Bush and 160,000 US troops had failed. (Obama made a similar gaffe when he touted a false recovery from the Bush recession, leading people to think he was responsible for the whole crash.) The net effect is that Obama is willing to destroy his own reputation in order to salvage Bush's. That sure isn't the "change" millions of people voted for Obama to bring about.
Obama is a pushover, and he let himself get snowed here. A lot of people have been pushing for war against ISIS lately, and they've painted the group as unspeakably evil, pulling out every cliché and playing on every prejudice that has ever been used to sell Americans on a war in the Middle East. Granted, most of the people who've been agitating for war against ISIS were already trying to push the US into war in Syria against ISIS' primary enemy, the Assad regime. Many of them belong to the "real men go to Tehran" faction that wanted to extend the 2003 invasion of Iraq to overthrow the governments of Iran and Syria. But all the publicity of ISIS' beheadings and massacres has gripped people initially inclined against escalating a war, even, some would say, the Pope (but see this for a more nuanced reading). For someone like Obama, who periodically feels the need to prove he's no pacifist, the chance to vanquish a foe as abhorent as ISIS was irresistible.
Finally, Obama has outsmarted himself, thinking his peculiar combination of aggression (bombing, special forces) and restraint (no regular combat troops) will work magic while avoiding the risks, the abuse and blowback that inevitably follows American troops all around the world. The fact remains that no matter how light or heavy you go in, bombing will inevitably kill the wrong people, intelligence will inevitably be incomplete or faulty, and the proxy forces that the plan so relies on will have their own agendas, ones that will become more rigid with the commitment of American support.
Perhaps the worst thing about Obama's speech and the policies he previously put into place is the open-ended commitment he's made to the very same Iraqi political leaders whose misbehavior made ISIS appear to many Iraqis (Sunnis, anyway) to be the lesser evil. Now they know that when they fuck up again the Americans will have to stick with them, because the US can never afford to lose face. (On the other hand, maybe they should review the story of Ngo Dinh Diem.) But nearly every aspect of the speech/plan is flawed. ISIS came into existence in the crucible of Syria's civil war, and some group like it will inevitably reappear as long as the civil war goes on, so it will prove impossible to stop ISIS without also ending Syria's civil war. Chances of that are thin as Obama has sided with the rebels against Assad, not realizing that the most prominent rebel group is ISIS, and that the US-favored "moderates" are firmly aligned with ISIS. The situation in Iraq is no simpler, with the US fighting in favor of the central government against ISIS but also siding with Kurdish separatists against the central government. The desire to work through proxies adds complexity, but perhaps not quite the mess of a full-blown invasion and its inevitably messy occupation. Plus you have the problem of managing domestic expectations. Obama came out with a clever limited intervention plan in the much simpler context of Libya and, well, look at how that blew up. Obama put a lot of emphasis on the counterinsurgency doctrine Gen. McChrystall tried to implement in Afghanistan, and failed totally at. American soldiers are peculiarly inept at fighting Muslims, yet the are held on such high pedestals by politicians like Obama that their repeated failures are overlooked. Similarly, the diplomatic alliances the US will surely need are often unapproachable due to other conflicts -- Iran and Russia are the major cases, but the traditional wink-and-nod green light for Saudia Arabia to finance groups like ISIS also comes into play.
And one should probe deeper, although there is little chance that Obama will. Nothing is so opaque to those who believe that "America is a light unto the nations" as the actual past behavior of the US. Since the 1970s the US has financed Jihadis, and has encouraged the Saudis and others to actively proselytize their fundamentalist brand of Islam, even as it has turned back against us. Similarly, America's Cold War ideology, still very much institutionalized, keeps us from working in any meaningful way to with liberal, socialist, or any kind of progressive movements in the Middle East.
The US government is similarly ignorant about ISIS, as are the American people -- even more so as they only enter the equation as targets for propaganda, where ISIS is made to look at evil as possible while the good intentions and great deeds of the US are never subject to scrutiny. We are, after all, the leader of the free world, as such obliged to act to defend civilization, something no one else has the resources or moral character to do. And so on, blah, blah, blah. To be sure, part of the problem here is that ISIS hasn't been running the sort of media relations program that, say, the Israelis mount when they go on a five-week killing binge like they did this summer in Gaza. Rather, ISIS has contemptuously killed journalists who might have helped them get their story out. They must, after all, have stories: even the Taliban, who weren't much better at PR, could go around the room and recount the lost limbs and eyes that scarred nearly every one of their commanders. Like the Taliban, ISIS sprung from the killing fields of despotic regimes and foreign occupiers.
I'm not aware of any journalist who has gotten close enough to ISIS to present their side of the story, although Nir Rosen's In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (2006) and Dahr Jamail's Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (2007) got relatively close to earlier generations of anti-US resistance fighters in Iraq. The journalist who has written the most about ISIS is Patrick Cockburn, who wrote The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (2006), and who has a new book on ISIS: The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising. For a sampling of his recent writings on ISIS, see:
Some quotes from Cockburn's Sept. 9 piece:
The US and its allies face a huge dilemma which is largely of their own making. Since 2011 Washington's policy, closely followed by the UK, has been to replace President Bashar al-Assad, but among his opponents Isis is now dominant. Actions by the US and its regional Sunni allies led by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Turkey, which were aimed at weakening Mr Assad, have in practice helped Isis. [ . . . ]
So far it looks as if Mr Obama will dodge the main problem facing his campaign against Isis. He will not want to carry out a U-turn in US policy by allying himself with President Assad, though the Damascus government is the main armed opposition to Isis in Syria. He will instead step up a pretense that there is a potent "moderate" armed opposition in Syria, capable of fighting both Isis and the Syrian government at once. Unfortunately, this force scarcely exists in any strength and the most important rebel movements opposed to Isis are themselves jihadis such as Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and the Islamic Front. Their violent sectarianism is not very different to that of Isis.
Lacking a moderate military opposition to support as an alternative to Isis and the Assad government, the US has moved to raise such a force under its own control. The Free Syrian Army (FSA), once lauded in Western capitals as the likely military victors over Mr Assad, largely collapsed at the end of 2013. The FSA military leader, General Abdul-Ilah al Bashir, who defected from the Syrian government side in 2012, said in an interview with the McClatchy news agency last week that the CIA had taken over direction of this new moderate force. He said that "the leadership of the FSA is American," adding that since last December US supplies of equipment have bypassed the FSA leadership in Turkey and been sent directly to up to 14 commanders in northern Syria and 60 smaller groups in the south of the country. Gen Bashir said that all these FSA groups reported directly to the CIA. Other FSA commanders confirmed that the US is equipping them with training and weapons including TOW anti-tank missiles.
It appears that, if the US does launch air strikes in Syria, they will be nominally in support of the FSA which is firmly under US control. The US is probably nervous of allowing weapons to be supplied to supposed moderates by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies which end up in the hands of Isis. The London-based small arms research organisation Conflict Armament Research said in a report this week that anti-tank rockets used by Isis in Syria were "identical to M79 rockets transferred by Saudi Arabia to forces operating under the Free Syrian Army umbrella in 2013."
In Syria and in Iraq Mr Obama is finding that his policy of operating through local partners, whose real aims may differ markedly from his own, is full of perils.
Some more links on Iraq, Syria, and ISIS:
Tony Karon: Obama promises a long and limited war on Islamic State:
The IS thrives as a result of the alienation of Sunni citizenry by Syrian and Iraqi regimes and the breakdown of the central state in both countries. The Islamic State has taken advantage of the enduring hostility to U.S. intervention in the region -- and also of Washington's subsequent retreat and passivity. It trades off Iran's sectarian support for allied Shia militias, Gulf Arab support for equally sectarian Sunni militias and Turkish hostility to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which translates into an open border for thousands of international volunteers to cross and join the IS. The gradual collapse of the nation-state itself in Syria and Iraq has allowed the IS to break away from the transnational conspiracy strategy of its Al-Qaeda precursor to raise its black flag in a growing power vacuum that covers huge swathes of territory.
Phyllis Bennis: The Speech on Diplomacy That Obama Should Have Given Last Night:
What's missing is a real focus, a real explanation to people in this country and to people and governments in the Middle East and around the world, on just what a political solution to the ISIS crisis would really require and what kind of diplomacy will be needed to get there.
President Obama should have spent his fifteen minutes of prime time tonight talking about diplomacy. Instead of a four-part mostly military plan, he should have outlined four key diplomatic moves.
First, recognize what it will take to change the political dynamics of sectarianism in Iraq. [ . . . ]
Second, instead of a Coalition of the Killing, President Obama should have announced a new broad coalition with a political and diplomatic, not military, mandate. It should aim to use diplomatic power and financial pressures, not military strikes, to undermine ISIS power. [ . . . ]
Third, the Obama administration should, perhaps this month while Washington holds the presidency of the UN Security Council, push to restart serious international negotiations on ending the complex set of multi-faceted wars in Syria. [ . . . ]
Finally, an arms embargo on all sides should be on the long-term agenda.
Without political agreement, there is no solution. All you can do with military power is try to shift the power relationships between the sides -- in the hope of getting a more favorable agreement. But if all you have are military goals, they are pointless. And the value of shifting those power relationships goes down if you're willing to consider an equitable agreement. No side can legitimately ask for more.
Paul Woodward: Is ISIS a terminal disease?:
President Obama might have been slow to come up with a strategy for defeating ISIS but he seems to have been much more resolute in his choice of metaphor for describing the enemy.
After James Foley was murdered, Obama said, "there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer so it does not spread." A few days later he said: "Rooting out a cancer like [ISIS] won't be easy and it won't be quick." Again, last night he said: "it will take time to eradicate a cancer like ISIL."
Woodward offers three reasons why he thinks Obama like the cancer metaphor, concluding:
Obama's political goal appears to be to secure support for an open-ended relatively low-key military operation that will be of such little concern to most Americans that it can continue for years without any real accountability.
I'm less impressed by his "reasons" -- what struck me more from the quotes is (1) the assumption that it is his (or "our") body that has been struck by the cancer, and that therefore the US is entitled to treat it; and (2) how reducing the acts of people to the level of a disease sanitizes our process of killing those people.
John Cassidy: Obama's Strange Bedfellows: The Right Liked His Speech: Quotes from Rush Limbaugh, John Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer, and Larry Kudlow applauding Obama's speech. (Podhoretz called it "the most Republican speech Barack Obama has ever given.") However, afterwards, the right started looking for high ground further to the right:
If a vote takes place in Congress -- and, at this stage, it's unclear whether that will happen -- most G.O.P. members will likely express support for unleashing the U.S. military on the jihadis. (Opposing the President "would be a huge mistake," Kudlow warned.) The pressure from the right will be aimed at expanding Obama's war, not stopping it. More bombing; more U.S. service members involved; more everything. That will be the line.
It's already being laid down, in fact. "Air strikes alone will not accomplish what we're trying to accomplish," House Speaker John Boehner said on Thursday. "Somebody's boots have to be on the ground." Some of Boehner's foot soldiers went further -- quite a bit further. "This is a stalemate strategy," said John Fleming, a Louisiana congressman who serves on the House Armed Services Committee. "I think that we would want to see an all-out war, shock and awe. We put troops on the ground, we put all of our assets there after properly prepping the battlefield, and in a matter of a few weeks we take these guys out."
Of course, when you're the greatest power the world has ever known, all it should take is a few weeks.
Andrew J Bacevich: Obama is picking his targets in Iraq and Syria while missing the point: Starts off by trying to out-think David Brooks, offering that "the core problem" of the era is "a global conflict pitting tradition against modernity." That conflict exists, of course, but Jihadists aren't militant defenders of tradition. They belong to a more specific reaction, one in response to imperialist exploitation working through the corrupt elites of many Muslim countries, not against modernity's individualistic ethos. Still, the following point is well taken:
Destroying what Obama calls the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant won't create an effective and legitimate Iraqi state. It won't restore the possibility of a democratic Egypt. It won't dissuade Saudi Arabia from funding jihadists. It won't pull Libya back from the brink of anarchy. It won't end the Syrian civil war. It won't bring peace and harmony to Somalia and Yemen. It won't persuade the Taliban to lay down their arms in Afghanistan. It won't end the perpetual crisis of Pakistan. It certainly won't resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
All the military power in the world won't solve those problems. Obama knows that. Yet he is allowing himself to be drawn back into the very war that he once correctly denounced as stupid and unnecessary -- mostly because he and his advisers don't know what else to do. Bombing has become his administration's default option.
Rudderless and without a compass, the American ship of state continues to drift, guns blazing.
Fred Hof: We Can't Destroy ISIS Without Destroying Bashar al Assad First: Hof worked for the Obama administration 2009-12 and has not rotated to a Middle East policy think tank, so I count him as untrustworthy, but his main point strikes me as true:
The Islamic State -- just like its parent, Al Qaeda in Iraq -- cannot be killed unless the causes of state failure in Syria and Iraq are addressed and rectified. Although such a task cannot be the exclusive or even principal responsibility of the American taxpayer, the president's strategy, its implementation, and its outcome will be incomplete if it remains solely one of counter-terrorism.
The essential problem that has permitted the Islamic State to roam freely in parts of Iraq and Syria amounting in size to New England is state failure in both places. Redressing this failure is far beyond the unilateral capacity of the United States, as occupation in Iraq and ongoing operations in Afghanistan demonstrate. Still the fact remains that until Syria and Iraq move from state failure to political legitimacy -- to systems reflecting public consensus about the rules of the political game -- the Islamic State will remain undead no matter how many of its kings, queens, bishops, rooks, and pawns are swept from the table. And yet a strategy that does not address how America and its partners can influence the endgame -- keeping the Islamic State in its grave -- is simply incomplete.
Hof refuses to consider the possibility that in order to kill ISIS the US could change sides and support Assad, possibly under some face-saving deal that would cut the "moderate" rebels some slack, maybe promising some democratic reforms to isolate ISIS. He basically wants to run the entire US Army through Damascus ("Airstrikes will not suffice . . . A ground element is essential, as it has been in Iraq.") What he doesn't explain is how, once Assad has been swept away, the US establishes a government in Syria that is broadly accepted by the bitterly-divided Syrian people as legitimate -- one cannot, for instance, point to US efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Somalia as providing any comfort or confidence.
US Pins Hope on Syrian Rebels With Loyalties All Over the Map:
After more than three years of civil war, there are hundreds of militias fighting President Bashar al-Assad -- and one another. Among them, even the more secular forces have turned to Islamists for support and weapons over the years, and the remaining moderate rebels often fight alongside extremists like the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria.
"You are not going to find this neat, clean, secular rebel group that respects human rights and that is waiting and ready because they don't exist," said Aron Lund, a Syria analyst who edits the Syria in Crisis blog for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It is a very dirty war and you have to deal with what is on offer." [ . . . ]
The Obama administration's plans to arm Syrian rebels have been troubled by false starts since April 2013, when Mr. Obama first authorized the C.I.A. to begin a secret training mission in Jordan.
Months after the authorization, the White House still had not delivered details to Congress about the C.I.A.'s plans, and it was not until September 2013 that the first American-trained rebels returned to Syria from Jordan.
To date, the C.I.A. mission in Jordan has trained 2,000 to 3,000 Syrian rebels, according to American and Arab officials.
To expand the training, Mr. Obama announced a plan in June to spend up to $500 million for scores of American Special Forces troops to train up to 3,000 rebels over the next year. But the proposal languished on Capitol Hill as lawmakers complained that the plans lacked specific details. A revised plan now calls for as many as twice that number of fighters, analysts said.
Even if Congress approves the Pentagon plan, as now appears likely after Mr. Obama's speech on Wednesday, military planners said it would be months before the fighters, to be trained at a base in Saudi Arabia, would be battle-ready.
Fatigue from three years of war has left most of those forces exhausted and short of resources. Since pushing ISIS from parts of northern Syria early this year, Syria's rebels have few military advances to point to and in many areas have lost ground, to Mr. Assad's forces and to ISIS. But in many places they remain busy fighting Mr. Assad and are not eager to redirect their energies to ISIS -- even while many say they hate the group.
Rami G Khouri: Why Obama Has Picked the Worst Allies for His War on ISIS: Khouri thinks that the Arab states that Obama is trying to line up for the war against ISIS may be effective in the short-term but will only make Jihadism more prevalent in the future.
The combination of foreign-led military power and local Arab government partners that must anchor a successful attack to vanquish the Islamic State is the precise combination of forces that originally midwifed the birth of Al-Qaeda in the 1980s and later spawned its derivative -- the Islamic State -- today. [ . . . ]
The jails of Sunni-majority Arab regimes represent an important aspect of the mistreatment and humiliation that many prisoners experienced, especially those jailed for their political views rather than crimes. Their jail experiences ultimately convinced them to fight to topple their regimes as part of Al-Qaeda's aim to purify Islamic lands from apostate and corrupt leaderships.
The fact that tens of thousands of Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, Sudanese and other Arabs are in jail today on often questionable charges -- including many in Gulf Cooperation Council states who are jailed simply for tweeting critical remarks about their governments -- suggests that Arab autocracy continues to define and plague the region as a driver of homegrown Arab radicalism and terrorism.
Moon of Alabama: The Caliphate's Anti-Imperial/Imperial Dualism: Asserts: "The Caliphate is based on original Wahhabi ideas which were in their essence also anti-colonial and at first directed against the Ottoman rulers." Those anti-imperial ideas also work against the US, but the juicier target is the Saudi royal family, which made the original pact with Abd al-Wahhab and, in their general subverience to the UK and US may be seen as not holding up their end of the deal. Much of this has to do with the way the Saudis distribute dividends on their oil. A small fraction of the money goes through the state to build a social welfare network which keeps the peace by making Saudi citizens wards of the state and elevating them above migrant workers who do the real work and are kept on very short leashes. But most of the money goes to the numerous princes of the royal family, who are much like the pampered scions of rich estates all over the world: spoiled, sheltered, conceited, given to flights of grandeur and folly. American bankers love these Saudi princes -- some are serious, but most are easy marks. The princes themselves are schizo: blessed with wealth they never earned, some turn into notorious playboys, some turn pious and shameful. The latter, plus some wealthy scions of non-royal families like Osama Bin Laden and their cohort in the Persian Gulf monarchies, are the ones who finance jihadists, who hire poor, disaffected Muslims to die for God, to expiate the sins of the Saudis. Of course, when the Americans come calling, the top Saudis are quick to condemn the traitors in their ranks, but they are less eager to cut them out because deep down they are trapped in their piety. The caliphate is a deep idea dating back to Muhammad himself -- indeed, the Turks wouldn't have made a mockery of it had it not worked -- so it's no surprise that its first appearance of reality should be so dramatic.
The new Caliphate followers are copies of the original Wahhabis who do not recognize nation states as those were dictated by the colonial "western" overlords after the end of the Ottoman empire. They do not recognize rulers that deviate, like the Saudi kings do, from the original ideas and subordinate themselves to "western" empires. It is their aim to replace them. As there are many people in Saudi Arabia educated in Wahhabi theology and not particular pleased with their current rulers the possibility of a Caliphate rush to conquer Saudi Arabia and to overthrow the Ibn Saud family is real.
In that aspect the Caliphate is anti-colonial and anti-imperial. That is part of what attracts its followers. At the same time the Caliphate project is also imperial in that it wants to conquer more land and wants to convert more people to its flavor of faith.
Both of these aspects make it a competitor and a danger to imperial U.S. rule-by-proxy in the Middle East. That is, I believe, why the U.S. finally decided to fight it. To lose Saudi Arabia to the Caliphate, which seems to be a real possibility, would be a devastating defeat.
The author cites two pieces by Alastair Crooke that are worth checking out: You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, and Middle East Time Bomb: The Real Aim of ISIS Is to Replace the Saud Family as the New Emirs of Arabia. A lot of interesting material in those two pieces. (One thing I didn't realize was that King Abdullah has made a number of reforms liberalizing Islamic law in Saudi Arabia: recognizing legal doctrines other than the Salafist, and Shiites to consult their own legal scholars. All this, of course, exacerbates the split with hardcore Wahhabists.)
He also cites a "twitter story": Billmon on Doublethink in U.S. Foreign Policy. Punch line:
Whether U.S. diplos still believe their liberal international bullshit isn't a particularly important question but it is interesting. I tend to think that they do: Both as classic Orwellian doublethink, a product of social conditioning, and on time-honored principle that a salesman has to believe in his/her product, no matter how fantastical. "Goes with the territory."
Richard Phillips/Stephan Richter: The dumbest US foreign policy question asked this century: Who "lost" Syria?
And this begs the question: What are U.S. politicians saying when they say they want to save Syria?
The answer to this can only be found in American hubris. Syria is not America's to save. The reality is that only Syrians can save Syria -- just as it is only Iraqis who can save Iraq and only Afghans who can save Afghanistan.
Seeking an answer to the question "Who lost Syria?" is a foolhardy quest on the part of U.S. politicians. Rather than a serious question, it is just another manifestation of Washington's favorite political sport -- blamesmanship.
Davis Merritt: Americans not ready for the truth about ISIS: Former Wichita Eagle editor, usually a level-headed thinker, gets all wrapped up in the futility of wars in the Middle East:
The religious extremism that defines the Middle East has been going on for more than a thousand years. The West has been involved for more than 900 of those years. From Pope Urban's first crusade in 1095 to President George W. Bush's ignorantly declared "crusade" amid the rubble of the World Trade Center, extremists on both sides have periodically fanned the flames.
No American president can erase that history nor diminish its allure to radical Islamists who want to write the next chapter in our blood. Anyone who believes a few months of bombing can eradicate this latest iteration of religious intolerance is living a fantasy.
Our 21st-century mindset doesn't tolerate lengthy wars; the half-life of our resolve is about 18 months. So the president best avoid the word "war," which implies beginning and ending points.
Unfortunately, neither can he say the truth: This is going to be life in our world; learn to live with it.
A year ago Americans so overwhelmingly rejected Obama's proposal to bomb Syria for using chemical weapons, recognizing that it wouldn't solve anything and wouldn't even make a dent given all the other acts of war. Indeed, it seemed probable that Congress (for once listening to the American people) would have voted authorization for bombing down. Now, supposedly an air war against ISIS enjoys popular support, with Congress gung ho not only to authorize strikes but to appropriate billions of dollars to train American proxies to fight the ground war. This turnaround depends on being able to identify ISIS as uniquely evil and dangerous, and while flashy stories of beheadings and mass killings help, I suspect the main cause is deep-seated islamophobia triggered by the prospect of resurrecting the caliphate. Last year Syria was viewed as just another internecine sectarian conflict between people we don't know or care about thousands of miles away. The caliphate, on the other hand, would be a symbol of growing Islamic power, an alarming shift in the world order, and that's what starts dredging up reassuring memories of Pope Urban -- even though most people who know the history of the Crusades regard them as an embarrassing blight on European civilization. Merritt accepts such wars because, regarding "religious extremism" as timeless, as if the fight today is about an ancient character trait, and not about anything more tangible -- like oil, or the ability of US bankers to fleece Saudi princes, or the international market for arms, or the constant jockeying of regional powers and their never-very-dependable proxy groups. Those are all things that, pace Merritt, we really shouldn't have to live with.
Paul Woodward: Most Americans support war against ISIS but lack confidence it will achieve its goal: A NBC News poll says that "62 percent of voters say they support Obama's decision to take action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, while 22 percent oppose it." But also that "a combined 68 percent of Americans say they have 'very little' or 'just some' confidence that Obama's goals of degrading and eliminating the threat posed by ISIS will be achieved." Woodward dissects these numbers. Among other points:
"Do you think President Obama presented a credible strategy for destroying ISIS?" If the answer's "no" and this is why you lack confidence in this war, then I'd take that as a fairly good indication that you are following this story reasonably closely.
Of course the most obvious reason why Americans would be skeptical about the chances of success for a war against ISIS is the fact that after sinking trillions of dollars into wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terrorism, al Qaeda still exists.
As has happened so many times before, Obama formulates his policies in reaction to banal, superficial, political imperatives whose primary purpose is to fend off critics.
On Thursday he presented his strategy for destroying ISIS because only days before he got slammed for admitting he didn't have a strategy.
After he made various comments suggesting that he only aimed to contain ISIS and was thus criticized for underestimating the threat it poses and for being too timid in his response, he answered critics by saying that his aim was to destroy ISIS.
After it was pointed out that fighting ISIS in Iraq would accomplish little if it could continue to consolidate its strength in Syria, Obama said the fight would be taken to Syria.
Each of his steps is reactive and political -- as though the primary task at hand was to deflect criticism.
Probably more stuff to write about, but that's enough for now. I'd be happy to return to writing about inequality, which is really the big chronic issue of our era. Or maybe that old standby, the stupidity of conservative Republicans (here's a Ted Cruz example; and here's Steve Fraser: The Return of the Titans, on the Kochs and their ilk). Or global warming even, but the last couple months have been overwhelmed by war news, and the one person who could do something sensible and constructive to defuse conflicts and resolve problems has repeatedly, almost obsessively managed to make them worse. That person is US President Barack W. Obama. Yes, he's finally sunk that low.