This is total nonsense. Someone is bankrolling the guns, training
the kids and egging them on for their own agenda and it all has
nothing to do with local wishes. The USA has no standing whatsoever
because they abandoned any such a year ago. Turkey is invisible,
Iran is likely bankrolloing the present eruption and the Syrian
government is locked in a fight to the death. The kurds are
attempting to defend their borders.
USA withdrawal has allowed real anarchy to arise. That was blunder #
2 after blunder #1 in which the Iraqi army was dismissed. These boys
are blindingly stupid.
Right now we need an army of occupation followed by an International
border commission that includes all interested parties. The army of
occupation could be asembled from militias particularly and overseen
by a USA – NATO force in place.
Attempting to govern a sack of angry cats is simply foolish and that
is what historical arrangements provide. These must change and
change quickly.
Six Steps Short of
War to Beat ISIS
Weakening ISIS
requires eroding the support it relies on from tribal leaders,
military figures, and ordinary Iraqi Sunnis. Here's how to do it
without bombs.
by
Phyllis Bennis
How is it possible
that we forgotten the failures of the U.S. wars in the Middle East
over these many years? (Map: affairstoday.co.uk)
President Obama is
right: There is no military solution.
Military actions will
not set the stage for political solutions; they will prevent those
solutions from taking hold.
Escalating military
actions against this violent extremist organization is not going to
work.
The bottom line is
there is no immediate action that will make ISIS disappear, even if
U.S. airstrikes manage to get the right target somewhere and take out
an APC or a truckload of guys with RPGs or whatever.
You can't destroy an
ideology — or even an organization —through bombing (look at the
efforts to do so with Al Qaeda . . . lots of members killed in
Afghanistan, but the organization took root in a bunch of other
countries).
Arming the so-called
“moderate” opposition in Syria doesn’t mean supporting the good
guys. It means sending arms to the Free Syrian Army which, according
to the New York Times, “went on to behead six ISIS fighters…and
then posted the photographs on Facebook.”
A military strike
might bring some immediate satisfaction, but we all know revenge is a
bad basis for foreign policy, especially when it has such dangerous
consequences.
As horrifying as the
beheading of the two U.S. journalists was, revenge is never a good
basis for foreign policy. We should keep in mind that Matthew Olson,
the outgoing head of the National Counterterrorism Center, said last
week that “there is no credible information that [ISIS] is
planning to attack the United States,” and there is “no
indication at this point of a cell of foreign fighters operating in
the United States – full stop.”
Instead, we have to
recognize that military solutions really don’t work. Have we
forgotten the failures of the U.S. wars in the Middle East over these
many years?
We need to keep our
focus on the medium- and long-term solutions, something not so easy
to do in a political year.
We have to recognize
that military attacks are not only wrong in a host of ways (illegal
in international law, immoral because of civilian casualties, a
distraction from vitally needed diplomacy) but also that those
strikes are making real solutions impossible.
Why?
We have to start by
understanding just why ISIS is so powerful.
First, ISIS
has good weapons (mostly U.S. and Saudi weapons that have flooded the
region for more than 15 years). So we need to start thinking
about the need for an arms embargo on all sides.
Second, ISIS
has good military leadership, some of it provided by Sunni Iraqi
generals who were kicked out of their positions in the military
when the U.S. invaded and who are now providing training,
strategy and military leadership to ISIS-allied militias and ISIS
itself. These guys are a very secular bunch. They drink and smoke,
and they will be unlikely to stick around ISIS if they believe they
have any chance of recovering their lost jobs, prestige, and
dignity. That could happen over time, but only if a really new
government takes hold in Iraq, but it’s not going to be enough to
simply choose a new prime minister and announce a new government made
up of too many of the same old sectarian faces.
Third, ISIS
has support from Sunni tribal leaders – the very people
President Obama says he wants to "persuade" to break with
ISIS. But these are people who have suffered grievously –
first during the U.S. invasion, and especially in the years of the
US-backed Shi’a-controlled sectarian government of Nuri al-Maliki.
They were demonized, attacked, and dispossessed by the government in
Baghdad, and many of them thus see ISIS at the moment as the only
force they can ally with to challenge that government. And many of
them control large and powerful militias now fighting alongside ISIS
against the government in Baghdad.
Fourth, ISIS has
support from ordinary Iraqi Sunnis, who (also largely secular) may
hate what ISIS stands for, its extremism and violence, but who have
suffered terribly under Maliki's sectarian Shi’a-controlled
government from arrests, torture, extra-judicial executions, and
more. As a result they also are willing to ally with ISIS against
Baghdad, at least for now.
So, weakening ISIS
requires ending the support it relies on from tribal leaders,
military figures, and ordinary Iraqi Sunnis. The key
question is how do we do that?
Step One: Stop
the airstrikes. Because what we in the U.S. see as
“hooray, we got the bad guys” is seen by many in Iraq, especially
the very Sunnis the president wants to persuade to break with ISIS,
as the U.S. acting as the air force for the Kurds and the Shi’a
against the Sunnis. Thus the airstrikes defeat the important goal of
ending popular support for ISIS, and instead actually serve to
strengthen the extremist organization.
Step Two:
Make real the commitment for “No boots on the ground.” In
announcements during just the last few weeks, the White House has
acknowledged sending close to 1,300 pairs of boots to the ground in
Iraq. And who knows how many unacknowledged pairs of CIA and JSOC
(special operations forces) sneakers may already be in Iraq? We need
a call to “Stop the Slippery Slide Towards Even More Boots on the
Ground!” The U.S. must also stop flooding the region with
arms that only result in more violence against civilians, and end its
policy of ignoring the violations of human rights and international
law committed by its allies. We need enforcement of the Leahy
Law (that prohibits assistance to foreign military units known to
violate human rights) here at home.
Step Three: Organize
a real diplomatic partnership to deal with ISIS. Even
though the U.S. is carrying out airstrikes and deploying new troops
in Iraq, everyone agrees there is no military solution. So
diplomacy must have center stage. That means serious engagement with
Iran, among other players. Tehran has more influence in Baghdad than
Washington does. If we are serious about wanting to encourage the
Iraqi government to accept a truly more inclusive approach, joint
pressure from the U.S. and Iran holds the best chance. Even
though Iran is predominantly Shi’a itself, the country’s leaders
are very worried about the instability in their next-door neighbor
resulting from the years of Shi’a sectarianism in Baghdad. The
U.S.-Iran nuclear talks appear to be moving very well; this is the
moment to broaden those talks to include discussion of a real “grand
bargain” between the U.S. and Iran, to include all the regional
crises.
Step Four:
Initiate a new search for broader diplomatic solutions in the United
Nations. That means working to build a real coalition
aimed at using diplomatic and financial pressures, not military
strikes, at the international level in both Iraq and Syria. All the
regional governments have their own concerns. Turkey, for instance,
knows that joining a U.S.-led military assault on Iraq could threaten
the lives of its 49 diplomats and their families now held by ISIS. A
real coalition is needed not for military strikes but for powerful
diplomacy. That means pressuring U.S. ally Saudi Arabia to stop
arming and financing ISIS and other extremist fighters; pressuring
U.S. ally Turkey to stop allowing ISIS and other fighters to cross
into Syria over the Turkish border; pressuring U.S. allies Qatar,
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others to stop financing and arming
everyone and anyone in Syria who says they're against Assad. We
don't need another Coalition of the Killing (see Step One for why).
Why not work to make it a Coalition of the Rebuilding?
Step Five: Push
the UN, despite Lakhdar Brahimi's resignation, to restart real
negotiations on ending the civil war in Syria. That means
everyone involved needs to be at the table: the Syrian regime; civil
society inside Syria including non-violent activists, women, young
people, refugees, etc.; the armed rebels; the external opposition;
the regional and global players supporting all sides – the US,
Russia, Iran, Saudi, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, and beyond. This
could provide a moment to work with Russia on Syria policy, thus
building on the successful joint effort to destroy Syria’s chemical
weapons and perhaps lessening tensions over Ukraine. An arms embargo
on all side should be on the long-term agenda.
Step Six –
Massively increase US humanitarian contributions to U.N.
agencies for the now millions of refugees and IDPs in and from both
Syria and Iraq. The U.S. has pledged significant
funds, but much of it has not actually been made available to the
agencies, and more should be pledged and given.
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