House and Senate approved assisting Syrian rebels. Obama has started to strike ISIL aka ISIS in Syria.
Obama’s ambitious goal is “…to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL.” Realistic? I don’t think so. Too many players. Too many conflicting interests. No US Boots on the ground.
In my opinion, it is in the US National Interest to keep ISIL off balance – uncomfortable – no safety anywhere. This should reduce the chances of a terrorist trained by ISIL attacking the US or our allies. The goal is modest and fits what the US and our so called allies can achieve.
I want to say what you will read below is a mess… But that is precisely the point. There are many actors and motives so no one will be able to predict the outcome.
How did we get here?
The Syrian Civil War is a reaction to the Arab Spring beginning in the spring of 2011.
Obama’s reaction was to:
• Condemn Assad.
• Create economic sanctions.
• Urge him to step down.
• Provide assistance to our allies to take care of the refugee problem.
• Threated Assad with a Chemical Weapons Red Line then not back up the threat.
A Political leader should never threaten and not respond. Obama probably made an off the cuff press conference statement, but that does not justify the mistake. (Personally - I believe he made a bad mistake making the statement and made it worse by not doing anything when the red line was crossed. Other countries must know the President’s word is bond.) Thank goodness the US was able to get Assad to destroy all of Syria’s Chemical weapons.
• Belated support of the
Free Syrian Army
• Belated support of the
Iraqi Kurds
As a result, the US was mostly on the sidelines leaving the outcome of the conflict to multiple actors who allowed or supported ISIL. Obama clearly made mistakes since he is totally reversing his policy.
Other Actors:
Turkey:
The Turkish Military has 623, 000 forces (1 Million if the reserves are included. I am not a Military expert but I would think Turkey has the most powerful Military in the Middle East excluding Israel.
Unfortunately, the Turkish public is against intervention so we cannot expect major Turkish boots on ground with the exception of an exclave in Syria, which inscribes the tomb of Suleyman Shah, grandfather to Ottoman Empire founder Osman I.
Home to almost 650,000 Syrian refugees, Turkey has been providing light arms and training to Syrian rebel groups since at least May 2012. Its northern border with Syria has become the primary conduit through which weapons flow from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to opposition forces on the ground.
Unfortunately, part of the “freedom fighters”, arms and funds are going to ISIL. Can we get Turkey to stop the manpower and arms flow to ISIL? Could they even identify ISIL supporters? I doubt it. They would have to do an extreme “border security” to stop the supplies.
Another problem is the ambivalence of Turkey toward the Kurds. Anywhere from 15% to 25% of Turkey’s population is Kurdish. Nonviolent and violent actions have been taken by the Kurds to get basic Human Rights from Turkey. The PKK - Kurdistan Workers' Party has been fighting for either autonomy or independence off and on since 1974. The PKK military wing withdrew from Turkey to Northern Iraq in 2013. But there still is distrust between both parties. Thus Turkey has prevented Turkish Kurds from aiding their fellow Kurds in Kobani, Syria. Turkish leaders are also suspicious of links between the Syrian Kurds defending Kobani and Kurdish separatist groups fighting the Turkish state.
There is an added complexity to this chess game is Turkey is dependent on Iran for part of their energy. See Iranian Leverage over Turkey?. What does this mean? Is Iran going to affect Turkey on the Syrian Civil War.
Saudi Arabia:
They are one of our more problematic allies. 15 of the 19 911 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. After all these years, we still don’t know the full extent of Saudi Involvement.
Former Senator Bob Graham, the co-chairman of the official inquiry into 9/11, goes into detail about Saudi Arabia, 9/11 and the Rise of ISIS
Our oil money has been funding extremist politics for years by Saudi citizens and/or the government.
You can read the Frontline documentary – Wahhabism showing direct or indirect support for:
• Exported to Pakistan, through systems of madrassas and throughout the Islamic world.
• Taliban
• Bin Laden’s Philosophy.
For an excellent post on Saudi Arabia, I refer you to Saudis Lobbied John McCain & Lindsey Graham to sell War.
How do we compel – influence (whatever your term) the Saudi’s to stop supporting and funding ISIL? A radical military option is out of the question (This is more of a problem on a right wing website). Attacking the Saudi’s would plunge the world into an economic recession because of their oil influence. (This is probably the best reason to move to renewable energy to make the Saudi’s economically irrelevant. I love it … a National Security reason for renewable energy.)
Qatar:
(see Saudi Arabia …) Both countries have a significant Wahhabi influence. Qatar has funded from 1 to 3 Billion dollars in aid to the Syrian rebels. Unfortunately, the funding has gone to the extremist.
Iran:
Since 2003, Iran’s goals in Iraq were twofold: to bleed the Americans and to bolster the power of its Shiite clients. Iran’s influence on Iraq can be seen with an Iraqi judge, under pressure from the Prime Minister, awarded Maliki the first chance to form a government even though Ayad Allawi, a persistent enemy of the Iranians won the plurality of the votes… he ruling directly contradicted the Iraqi constitution, but American officials did not contest it.
But it was the meeting with Qassem Suleiman the head of the Iranian Quds Force that was ultimately decisive. According to American officials, he broke the Iraqi deadlock by leaning on Sadr to support Maliki, in exchange for control of several government ministries… The U.S. obtained a transcript of the meeting, and knew the exact terms of the agreement. Yet it decided not to contest Iran’s interference.
With Turkish and US assistance now flowing to the rebels, Tehran knows that its first and only priority in Syria is to ensure the survival of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. To that end, even as it struggles under the weight of international sanctions, Tehran extended loans and a generous line of credit to the Syrian government. Iran also dispatched military and intelligence advisers to help Syria's mukhabarat suppress the unrest, and the IRGC-QF to help direct the military efforts against an increasingly lethal collection of rebel factions. As the challenges to the Assad regime have mounted, Iran has also mobilized the Lebanese Hezbollah, a proxy funded and trained by Iran, along with organized Iraqi Shi’a volunteers, and even IRGC Ground Forces when deemed necessary. – for more detail, please review The Syria Strategies of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey - See more at: The Syria Strategies of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey
The US is talking to Iran about the threat ISIL poses. Complicated because Iran supports Assad. In Syria, the Iranian-backed Lebanese-Shi'ite Hizballah militia are fighting alongside Syrian government troops against rebel groups.
What a mess!
Iraq Shi'ite Government:
NOURI MALIKI! And Iran.
As I stated in 2005, Iran won the last Iraq War. They are still good buddies..
As Dexter Filkins, reported less than twenty-four hours after the last convoy of American fighters left, Maliki’s government ordered the arrest of Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, the highest-ranking Sunni Arab. Prosecutors accused Hashemi of having run a death squad that assassinated police officers and government officials. The practice was not uncommon at the time. “During the civil war, many political leaders in Iraq had death squads,” a former Western diplomat said. “Maliki started using the security forces to go after his rivals.” In moving against Hashemi, Maliki was signalling that he intended to depose his sectarian rivals… Hashemi flew to the Kurdish region, in northern Iraq, where officials offered to protect him… When Hashemi fled, American officials did not publicly protest. Three months later, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to death; he remains in exile…
With the expulsion of Hashemi, Maliki began an aggressive campaign to crack down on dissent—especially Sunni dissent—and to centralize authority in his office…
When the Integrity Commission uncovered a network in Maliki’s cabinet that was issuing government contracts to fake companies, he blocked the prosecutions; soon afterward, the commission’s director was replaced with a Maliki ally. In addition, Maliki created the Office of the Commander-in-Chief, which gave him personal control over the country’s million-man Army and police force, often requiring local commanders to report directly to him.
As Maliki gathered power, he set out to banish every trace of Sunni influence from the bureaucracy…
Rafe al-Essawi, the finance minister in 2012 (a Sunni), … was forced to escape to Abu Dhabi after his Department attempted to uncover what a former CIA agent said “The corruption is Olympian.” …
For Sunnis, the government’s pursuit of Essawi was transparently sectarian, and they reacted with furious protests. “Democracy is new in Iraq,” Essawi told me. “Everything is fragile. It is very easy to slide back into dictatorship.” For years, Sunni leaders have asked for checks on the government’s power to punish its citizens. Counterterrorism laws allow any Iraqi to be held indefinitely without charges, and human-rights groups estimate that tens of thousands of Sunni men have been detained, many of them for years, and often incommunicado; female suspects, they say, are tortured and often raped in detention. Sunnis have demanded that the laws be repealed, and the imprisoned women released. They also call for withdrawing the Army from Sunni cities, and relaxing de-Baathification strictures, which have been used to exclude Sunnis from government jobs and election ballots…
Maliki has ignored these demands, and his government responded savagely to the new round of protests. In April, after a soldier was killed in the Sunni town of Hawija, troops attacked an encampment of protesters there, killing at least forty-four people. In a televised speech, Maliki warned of a “sectarian war,” and blamed the violence on “remnants of the Baath Party.” Hundreds of Iraqis, most of them Sunni civilians, were killed as the crackdown continued.
In my opinion, Maliki, Iraqi Shi'ite and Iran are responsible for the Sunni - ISIS uprising. How can the Iraqi Sunni ever trust the Shi’ites?
Iraqi Kurds:
The Iraqi Kurds have endured chemical weapons attacks, destruction of whole towns and villages, deceit by the US in the 1970’s as well as a lack of support by the US in their current situation.
The Bush and Obama administration wanted to keep a united Iraq so they did not support the Iraqi Kurds with military equipment or allow them to sell Kurdish oil on the open market. The Iraqi government is supposed to give the Kurds 17% of the oil revenue – most of the oil is produced from Southern Iraq (There is a school of thought that that Kurds cannot produce enough oil to make up for the 17% of Iraqi oil.) . Unfortunately Iraq reduced and finally cutoff payments to the Kurds.
In my opinion, this was a grave mistake.
The Iraqi Kurds have been a consistent ally of the US. They could have repelled ISIL before they took Mosul. But no weapons or support. The Kurds have had to get some support from Iran.
I understand the “law of unintended consequences” if we supported breaking up Iraq into three (3) either independent or federalized states. Eventual Civil War, Iran intervention, who knows what which is why there is a “law of unintended consequences”. BUT we could have at least given military support to the Kurds. It may have indirectly pressured Iraq – Maliki to be less sectarian.
Syria Kurds:
The YPG People's Protection Units is the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD).[6] The group has taken a defensive position, fighting against any group that has the intention of bringing the Syrian civil war to Kurdish inhabited areas.
The leftist PKK and its Syrian branch, the YPG, is now a major guerrilla force taking on ISIL and was largely responsible for rescuing the Yazidis trapped at Sinjar.
Note the Kurds in Syria were mainly defensive keeping any opposition whether Assad or ISIL from over running Kurdish Syria.
We should have been funding the Syria Kurds since 2011.
Free Syrian Army:
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) may be the largest of the Syrian Opposition – 1,000 – 25,000.
On 23 September 2011, the Free Syrian Army merged with the Free Officers Movement; Western observers like The Wall Street Journal considered the FSA since then the main military defectors group. Free Syrian Army was estimated in December 2011 to number between 1,000 and 25,000 men. 90 percent of the FSA consists of Sunni Muslims, but a small minority are (Shia) Alawites and some Druze fought in FSA units, some FSA units are led by Druze. As for further ethnic minorities, a Palestinian rebel commander in the Yarmouk enclave in southern Damascus in 2012 considered his rebel brigade to be part of FSA.
Why do we have a CIA? If I was Obama, I would wonder what I am getting for the
$15B? I would have wanted to know who to fund in 2011 forward since my policy was to overthrow Assad.
Why weren’t we training and funding the FSA in 2011 forward? Since President Obama has done a 180 I can conclude the 2011 passive policy was wrong.
[ISIL - Islamic State of Iraq and the Levanthttp://en.wikipedia.org/... ]
ISIL was started in 2004 as The Free commonly known as "al-Qaeda in Iraq" (AQI) by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who was killed in 2006. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the current leader. The size of ISIL is anywhere from 15k to 30k. The composition is former al-Qaeda in Iraq, Salaam’s former Baathist, foreign fighters (scary because they can come home to US or Europe).
What Next?
Syria and Iraq are a mess. Getting ISIL out of Iraq is doable. Iran would never let ISIL occupy part of Iraq. Medium and long term (10 15 years) Iraq will still stay a mess because the Shias (Shi'a) do not have the democratic mindset to be inclusive with the Sunnis or Kurds.
In my opinion, Syria will be like the Lebanese Civil War which lasted from 1975 to 1990. After years and blood the side were probably exhausted. Same will happen in Syria.
US cannot save everyone in the world. As a matter of fact, if we are involved directly in ground combat, we would BE the problem. All we can do is fund our allies and keep ISIL off balance.