Taking the side of the Sunni has not worked out well for us.

At Asia Times, Angelo Codevilla analyzes US policy in the Middle East.

Today, as Daesh/ISIS — a sub-sect of Sunni Islam — murders and encourages murdering Americans, our foreign policy establishment argues that doubling down on efforts to “gain the confidence” of Sunni states, potentates, and peoples will lead them to turn against the jihadis among themselves and to fight Daesh with “boots on the ground.”

For more than a quarter century, as Americans have suffered trouble from the Muslim world’s Sunni and Shia components and as the perennial quarrel between them has intensified, the US government has taken the side of the Sunni. This has not worked out well for us. It is past time for our government to sort out our own business, and to mind it aggressively.

To understand why hopes for help from the Sunni side are forlorn, we must be clear that jihadism in general and Daesh in particular are logical outgrowths of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s (and the Gulf monarchies’) official religion, about how they fit in the broader conflict between Sunni and Shia, as well as about how the US occupation of Iraq exposed America to the vagaries of intra-Muslim conflicts.

...US foreign policy in the Middle East had moved to the Sunni side in 1979 after the Shia Islamic Republic’s overthrow of Iran’s secular Shah. For the previous quarter century, the Shah’s Iran had taken care of US interests in the region while muting its Persian Shia people’s perennial tensions with the Sunni Arab world.

But Iran’s Islamic Republic has been as aggressively Shia and Persian as it has been anti-American. Fatefully, rather than answering in kind the Islamic Republic’s warfare on America, all presidents since Jimmy Carter have searched the Sunni Arab world for counterweights to Iran, as well as for the kind of support that the Shah had given us.

This attempt to outsource America’s security concerns by entering into the Sunni-Shia conflict on the Sunni side has been counterproductive because the Sunni, 85% of the Muslim world, are also the nursery of its most contagious plagues — the Wahhabi sect and the Muslim Brotherhood. Above all, it has been disastrous because it has led the US government to lose sight of our own interests by confusing them with those of Sunni states and potentates.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are places where royal families and their huge retinues live sybaritic lives, where work — high and low — is done by foreigners who are despised for doing it, where expensively equipped armed forces are fit only for inter-dynastic strife and civil repression, and where foreign policy consists of paying for protection.

Even as the Saudi government was urging the US government to persist in the occupation and to make its policies Sunni-friendlier, a substantial portion the Saudi regime was financing Iraq’s Sunni anti American warriors. Just as significant for the future, Saudi Arabia’s and the Gulf monarchies’ religious establishments were preaching jihad against the Americans, which convinced countless jihadis to go to Iraq.

Thus, between mid 2003 and mid 2006, American troops in Iraq were being shot and bombed by a Sunni combination that included remnants of Saddam’s security services, ordinary local Sunni, and foreign jihadis.

The wonder of it all is that the US ruling class managed to digest this reality into the abstract narrative on which American politics ruminated and on the basis of which it doomed thousands of Americans to death and maiming in replenished minefields: namely that the Iraqis doing the bombing were fighting not for local dominance or sectarian animus but against the American way of life; that securing peace for America required creating a “united democratic Iraq,” that doing this, required “getting the Sunni to buy into” the idea; and that this required further limiting the claims of Iraq’s majority Shia while doing even more to entice the Sunni who were shooting and bombing both Americans and Shia.

This is the delusion that establishment Republican organs — the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, etc. — still excrete.

Read more here.

Siding withthe Shiites: Obama's catastrophic error

Mona Charen writes at National Review,

Perhaps President Bush was wrong to topple Saddam Hussein. I don’t think the verdict is clear. But excepting the original decision to invade, Mr. Bush’s errors were recognized and corrected before he left office. Barack Obama’s mistakes, by contrast, have been far more consequential and far more threatening to world order and American security than George W. Bush’s were. There is zero evidence that Mr. Obama even recognizes them, let alone that he plans to correct them. Nor have the Democratic candidates been asked about them.

The Iraq that President Obama inherited was, by his own reckoning, “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.” Obama used those words when announcing the complete American withdrawal of forces in 2011. He went on to say that Iraq had “a representative government that was elected by its people.”

Not quite. There was a free and fair election in 2010, in which a moderate Sunni alliance led by a secular Shiite received a plurality. But the loser, Nouri al-Maliki, hijacked the election and took power. President Obama looked the other way, perhaps because he wasn’t interested in Iraq’s fate, or more likely because Maliki was Tehran’s man, and President Obama has consistently leaned toward Iran’s interests in the Middle East.

...What came next was even worse. Acquiescing in the stolen election, Obama then backed Maliki even as Maliki brutalized Iraq’s Sunni minority. Jobs and salaries promised to Sunni groups who had cooperated against al-Qaeda when Bush was in office were never paid by Maliki. Dozens of Sunni leaders, many of them moderates, were driven from office, others were arrested, and some, including the staff of Iraq’s vice president, were tortured. Shiite militias were permitted free rein in Sunni regions of Iraq, committing rapes, murders, and arson. As one Sunni activist told the New York Times, he didn’t like ISIS, but “ISIS will be the only Sunni militia who can fight against the Shiites.”

...All the while, President Obama could not bestir himself to utter a word of condemnation or warning to Maliki. On the contrary, he praised “Prime Minister Maliki’s commitment to . . . ensuring a strong, prosperous, inclusive, and democratic Iraq.”

Nor would Mr. Obama consider steps that would unseat Syria’s Bashar Assad — again, probably because Assad is Tehran’s man. And so ISIS has metastasized — a direct outgrowth of Obama’s decisions.

The Sunnis are key to defeating ISIS. They cooperated with the U.S. under President Bush. It was called the Sunni Awakening. Now they can read the signs — America is siding with the Shiites in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. That blunder has fed and nurtured ISIS to become something al-Qaeda could only dream about. If it weren’t for the Iran nuclear deal, we’d say it was Obama’s most catastrophic error.

Read more here.

Why is Putin in the Middle East? The enemy of your enemy can also be your enemy!

Russian leader Vladimir Putin and President Obama in Antalya, Turkey, Nov. 16. Photo: pool/Reuters

Remember Garry Kasparov, the brilliant Russian chess player? Wikipedia tells us,

Kasparov announced his retirement from professional chess on 10 March 2005, after which he devoted his time to politics and writing. He formed the United Civil Front movement, and joined as a member of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration and policies of Vladimir Putin.

Kasparov has written an important article today in The Wall Street Journal in which he asserts,

The U.S. and its allies can defeat ISIS. Joining with Putin, Assad and Iran’s regime would be immoral.

Three days after coordinated terror attacks in Paris killed at least 129 people and put the lie to President Obama’s recent claim that Islamic State was “contained,” Mr. Obama took to the podium on Monday. Speaking from Antalya, Turkey, where he was attending a G-20 meeting, he threw the full weight of his rhetoric behind solidarity with France and behind the French military response against Islamic State, or ISIS. But he offered no policy changes. In other words, once again America is leading from behind.

Mr. Obama’s remarks in Turkey came after he sat down for an impromptu discussion with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who has shipped troops and military hardware to Syria to prop up the Bashar Assad regime and to produce desperately needed new war propaganda back home. A suggestion gaining currency in recent days—encouraged by the Putin-Obama photo op—that the U.S. and NATO cooperate with Mr. Putin against ISIS is ludicrous on many levels. The most obvious one being that Russian forces aren’t in Syria to fight ISIS.

Even after the death of 224 people—most of them Russian tourists—in the Oct. 31 Metrojet crash in Egypt that was almost certainly an ISIS terror bombing, Mr. Putin remains focused on his goals. He is in Syria to help Iran and Mr. Assad destroy any legitimate alternatives to the status quo. What is that status quo? The Assad regime and its Iranian backers controlling the region by force.

The Kremlin also wants to maintain a stream of Syrian refugees pouring into Europe. The migrant crisis is useful to Mr. Putin in two ways. It distracts European attention from his continuing military campaign against Ukraine. And the flood of refugees will enhance the fortunes of far-right European parties that openly embrace Mr. Putin, increasing pressure on the European Union to lift sanctions against Russia. If one of the terrorists in the Paris attack slipped into Europe with Syrian refugees, so much the better.

President Obama and other Western leaders desperate to resolve the conflict in Syria should keep in mind that the enemy of your enemy can also be your enemy. For the U.S. and the West, allying with Iran, Mr. Putin’s Russia and the Assad regime would be morally repugnant, strategically disastrous and entirely unnecessary. The immorality of such an alliance is self-evident: The U.S. officially designates Iran and Syria as state sponsors of terror.

The argument in favor of such an alliance cites the World War II precedent that the Allies joined Stalin to defeat Hitler. The comparison is inapt. First, NATO doesn’t need the help of Mr. Putin or Iran to defeat ISIS; NATO simply needs the resolve to do it. Second, such an alliance would only undermine the effort. Seeing the U.S. working with Mr. Assad and the Shiites of Iran—who essentially control Baghdad, too—would further convince the region’s Sunnis that they have no choice but to turn to ISIS for protection.

Americans above all should realize the importance of the Sunnis. The 2007 U.S. military surge in Iraq was so successful because it included the protection and recruitment of Sunni tribes to fight Sunni extremists. The Obama administration’s hasty exit from Iraq left the Sunnis at the mercy of a hostile Shiite government in Baghdad. Conditions were made ripe for the rise of Islamic State.

Even with France’s stepped-up bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria, and U.S. vows to intensify its own bombing effort, the fact remains: You can’t win hearts and minds from 30,000 feet. The problem with an air-power-only offensive is not only that you don’t always kill the right people, but that you can’t protect anyone. The people of Syria and Iraq need the protection and stability that will starve ISIS of its main source of recruits. No bombs, whether American or French, can provide that. Airstrikes will inspire as many ISIS volunteers as they kill, while also creating countless new refugees. Destroying infrastructure makes the refugees’ eventual return less likely.

“Boots on the ground” is the phrase that must never be mentioned, but mention it we must. Anything less than a major U.S. and NATO-led ground offensive against ISIS will be a guarantee of continued failure and more terror attacks in the West. It is immoral to continue putting civilians—Syrian and Western alike—instead of soldiers on the front line against terrorists.

Pacifying the region and protecting its people from the predation of terrorists and brutal dictatorships is the only path left. It is also the only way to ever repatriate the millions of refugees the Syrian civil war has created. We must support these people now, not watch from afar as they are slaughtered and enslaved, paying attention only when the horror makes its way into our capitals. Our fate is tied to theirs.

Heartfelt expressions of solidarity and candlelight vigils for the victims won’t stop ISIS unless that goodwill is turned to action. Playing defense is hopeless. The world today is too small, the threats too big. The only solution is to fight the problem at its source. You cannot have liberté, égalité, fraternité without sécurité.

h/t American Power

Divide and conquer

Walter Russell Meade writes in The American Interest about how ISIS thrives on ethnic strife. Now Sunnis and Shiites in Saudi Arabia are squaring off against each other. Read about it here.

Obliterate them!

Roger L. Simon does have a strategy for dealing with the Islamic State: obliterate it! And while we are at it, also obliterate

Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, al Nusra, and on and on. Sunnis and Shiites? Don't take sides. Let them obliterate each other.

And most importantly of all, we should reinstate the economic boycott of Iran even more tightly than it was before while informing the bloody mullahs and the Iranian people that we support regime change now, not pussy-foot around about it as Obama did when the students were marching in the streets of Tehran (the most morally reprehensible behavior by an American president in my lifetime). We can’t allow the mullahs to profit from our dismantling of ISIS. And if they don’t get the message, use lethal force

Read more here.

McCarthy: Our enemies have a strategic vision for a global conflict, but we don’t.

I keep reading ISIS referred to as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Andy McCarthy clarifies:

The acronym is derived from the jihadists’ self-proclaimed name: the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Al-Sham refers to “greater Syria” or the Levant, encompassing the neighboring territories of Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Cyprus, and Southern Turkey.

Jihadists, you see, do not recognize or much care about national boundaries drawn by Western powers. In the world, as they see it, they are pitted against everyone else — Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb: All must choose the realm of Islam or the realm of war. Significantly, al-Qaeda was not the first to revive this ancient Islamic-supremacist perspective. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the creator of Iran’s revolutionary sharia state, famously proclaimed:

We do not worship Iran. We worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [i.e., Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.

Because of the president’s delusional theory that the Muslim Brotherhood are “moderates” we can ally with, he quietly colluded with Qatar and the Saudis to arm and train the Syrian “rebels.” It blew up on him because the “moderates” are not moderate. The Brothers concur in al-Qaeda’s sharia goals and readily resort to terrorism if that is what is necessary to achieve them. So arming the rebels, as Obama helped do, necessarily meant arming anti-American jihadists. This has proved embarrassing, so what Obama has done, at least so far, is refrain from giving the “rebels” decisive aid — the kind he gave the “rebels” in Libya, to disastrous effect in Benghazi. That is hardly an aid vacuum.

As I argued throughout the Bush years, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has always been Iran’s guy, and under his regime, Iran’s tentacles were allowed to spread throughout post-Saddam Iraq — the State Department and the Iraq Study Group sharing the loopy conceit that Iran had an interest in a stable Iraq even as Iran was fueling both sides of Iraq’s civil war, supplying Sunni terrorists with IEDs, and running Shiite terror cells against our troops.

The biggest challenge, however, is the one to which Washington has been willfully blind for a generation: Islam, and in particular the supremacist interpretation of it that rules the Middle East. Its absence from the debate is the vacuum at the center of the vacuum claptrap.

Iraqis despise Americans. Their sharia jurists, Sunni and Shiite, called for violent jihad to drive the “occupiers” out, and Iraqis thus overwhelmingly demanded that our forces leave the country. Under pressure from his Iranian overseers, Maliki drove a hard bargain with Bush, insisting on an American withdrawal and refusing to grant our troops immunity from prosecution by Iraqi courts. Running out of time, Bush acceded to the demands that our forces be dramatically reduced by 2009 and fully evacuated by 2011. In so doing, he agreed to exactly what he had always rightly regarded as folly: hard withdrawal dates that would inevitably encourage jihadists to bide their time and reemerge as we vacated.

The principal challenge confronting the United States in the Middle East is Islam. As taught there, it inspires intense hatred of us from both sides of the Sunni–Shiite divide. President Bush could not make it go away by pretending it was a “false” Islam, and President Obama has made it worse by pretending we can ally with it. But neither of them caused the problem. We will never have a rational foreign policy until we fill that vacuum in our understanding.

Please read more here.

The geopolitics of the Syrian civil war

Tomorrow in the Swiss town of Montreux international diplomats will meet to discuss ending the three year civil war in Syria. The meeting almost didn't happened, because the Syrian rebels objected to the UN inviting Iran to be a participant. Reva Bhalla writes at Stratfor that

there is little incentive for the regime, heavily backed by Iran and Russia, to concede power to its sectarian rivals at the behest of Washington, especially when the United States is already negotiating with Iran.

Moreover, Bhalla writes that

Unlike the Nile Valley, Syria's geography lacks a strong, natural binding element to overcome its internal fissures. An aspiring Syrian state not only needs a coastline to participate in sea trade and guard against sea powers, but also a cohesive hinterland to provide food and security. Syria's rugged geography and patchwork of minority sects have generally been a major hindrance to this imperative.

The demographics of this land have fluctuated greatly, depending on the prevailing power of the time. Christians, mostly Eastern Orthodox, formed the majority in Byzantine Syria. The Muslim conquests that followed led to a more diverse blend of religious sects, including a substantial Shiite population. Over time, a series of Sunni dynasties emanating from Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley and Asia Minor made Syria the Sunni-majority region that it is today. While Sunnis came to heavily populate the Arabian Desert and the saddle of land stretching from Damascus to Aleppo, the more protective coastal mountains were meanwhile peppered with a mosaic of minorities. The typically cult-like minorities forged fickle alliances and were always on the lookout for a more distant sea power they could align with to balance against the dominant Sunni forces of the hinterland.

The fate of Lebanon and Syria remain deeply intertwined. In the mid-19th century, a bloody civil war between Druze and Maronites in the densely populated coastal mountains rapidly spread from Mount Lebanon to Damascus. This time around, the current is flowing in reverse, with the civil war in Syria now flooding Lebanon. As the Alawites continue to gain ground in Syria with aid from Iran and Hezbollah, a shadowy amalgam of Sunni jihadists backed by Saudi Arabia will become more active in Lebanon, leading to a steady stream of Sunni-Shiite attacks that will keep Mount Lebanon on edge.

The United States may be leading the ill-fated peace conference to reconstruct Syria, but it doesn't really have any strong interests there. The depravity of the civil war itself compels the United States to show that it is doing something constructive, but Washington's core interest for the region at the moment is to preserve and advance a negotiation with Iran. This goal sits at odds with a publicly stated U.S. goal to ensure al Assad is not part of a Syrian transition, and this point may well be one of many pieces in the developing bargain between Washington and Tehran. However, al Assad holds greater leverage so long as his main patron is in talks with the United States, the only sea power currently capable of projecting significant force in the eastern Mediterranean.

Egypt, the Nile Valley power to the south, is wholly ensnared in its own internal problems. So is Turkey, the main power to the north, which is now gripped in a public and vicious power struggle that leaves little room for Turkish adventurism in the Arab world. That leaves Saudi Arabia and Iran as the main regional powers able to directly manipulate the Syrian sectarian battleground. Iran, along with Russia, which shares an interest in preserving relations with the Alawites and thus its access to the Mediterranean, will hold the upper hand in this conflict, but the desert wasteland linking Syria to Mesopotamia is filled with bands of Sunni militants eager for Saudi backing to tie down their sectarian rivals.

And so the fighting will go on. Neither side of the sectarian divide is capable of overwhelming the other on the battlefield and both have regional backers that will fuel the fight. Iran will try to use its relative advantage to draw the Saudi royals into a negotiation, but a deeply unnerved Saudi Arabia will continue to resist as long as Sunni rebels still have enough fight in them to keep going. Fighters on the ground will regularly manipulate appeals for cease-fires spearheaded by largely disinterested outsiders, all while the war spreads deeper into Lebanon. The Syrian state will neither fragment and formalize into sectarian statelets nor reunify into a single nation under a political settlement imposed by a conference in Geneva. A mosaic of clan loyalties and the imperative to keep Damascus linked to its coastline and economic heartland -- no matter what type of regime is in power in Syria -- will hold this seething borderland together, however tenuously.

Sunnis versus Shiites

Saudia Arabia is sending $3 billion to Lebanon to bolster the government's military. Iran funds Hezbollah, presently the most viable military group in Lebanon. Hezbollah is Shiite Muslim, Saudi Arabia is Sunni Muslim.