Tag Archives: sunni

Our ISIS Problem Is That Everyone Wants Someone Else to Take Out ISIS

by DerickQAWfhh Posted on December 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Michael Knights writes today about why it’s so damn hard to destroy ISIS, even though they’re not really all that formidable a force. Basically, it’s because everyone except the United States has bigger fish to fry:

All of our allies and rivals have far more complex goals than degrading and defeating the Islamic State. For them, the current battle is really a game of positioning for the truly decisive action that will begin as soon as the Islamic State is defeated.

The first priority of most actors is consolidating their control on the ground. The Kurds in Syria and Iraq are staking out their long-term territorial claims. Iranian-backed groups like Badr are carving out principalities in Iraqi areas like Diyala and Tuz Khurmatu. Abu Mahdi al-Muhadis, the most senior Iranian proxy in Iraq and a U.S.-designated terrorist involved in the deaths of U.S. and British troops, is seeking to quickly build the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) into a new permanent institution akin to a ministry.

….The Assad regime in Syria is integrating with the Russian military machine….Syrian Sunni groups are tightening military ties to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. Iranian-backed groups in Iraq continue to deepen their ties with Russia and Iran….The Baghdad Operations Command continues to hold around half of the offensive-capable Iraqi military units in reserve in the capital despite the declining risk of an Islamic State attack on Baghdad. Why? To offset the risk posed by the Shia militias.

The whole thing is worth a read, even if, in the end, it boils down to our old friends Team Sunni vs. Team Shia. Basically, everyone is willing to give lip service to fighting ISIS, but for most of the actors in the Middle East it’s not really a high priority. They’d rather keep their powder dry for the main event. In that respect, ISIS is sort of like Donald Trump. All the other Republicans want to get rid of him, but they don’t want to spend a lot of their own energy doing it. They want someone else to do it, so that it will be someone else who’s too worn out to win the actual nomination fight.

More generally, Knights is concerned that the US has no good post-ISIS strategy. We simply have too many allies who hate each others’ guts, and we’re not willing to just take a side in the Sunni-Shia civil war and let the chips fall. “Though Washington may seek to play the role of the balancer between these camps, the U.S. government is faced with impossible choices between traditional Sunni allies and the up-and-coming Shia actors who are critical players in the war against the Islamic State.”

Personally, I’m not convinced there’s a workable answer, which means we need to maintain a pretty light touch in the region and not get sucked into its endless sectarian feuds. But who knows? Maybe President Trump will be able to thread this delicate needle after his landslide victory next November.

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Our ISIS Problem Is That Everyone Wants Someone Else to Take Out ISIS

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The US Has No Clean Battle Lines in the Middle East

by DelorasMueller Posted on March 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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From The Corner:

The United States is sending mixed signals to its allies in the Middle East by simultaneously giving support to the Saudi-led Sunni coalition fighting in Yemen and negotiating with Shiite Iran on its nuclear program, according to NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel.

Engel pinpoints an apparent contradiction: Even as the U.S. is assisting Saudi Arabia and other nations in “confronting the Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen” by providing intelligence and other support, it continues to negotiate with Tehran on its nuclear program, and to collaborate with Iranian forces in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq.

As a result, Engel says, “the Saudis, and the larger Sunni Muslim world, doesn’t sic feel the U.S. can really be trusted.”

Gee, no kidding. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni ally of the US that hates Iran. Iraq is a Shiite ally who’s cozy with Iran. The US itself is hostile toward Iran, but shares a common enemy in ISIS. Syria is a total mess with no clear good guys. And, yes, a good nuclear deal with Iran would be a bonus for the safety of the entire region.

That’s it. That’s the way the world is. The United States is not allied solely with Shiite or Sunni regimes and hasn’t been since at least 9/11. It’s confusing. It’s messy. And maybe President Obama hasn’t handled it as skillfully as he could have. But who could have done any better? There just aren’t any clean battle lines here, and the sooner everyone faces up to that, the better off we’ll be.

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The US Has No Clean Battle Lines in the Middle East

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Good News From Iraq: Baghdad Finally Cuts a Deal With the Kurds

by GeorgiannaChewi Posted on December 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Politically, the primary challenge facing Iraq’s new Shiite leaders is forging a government that includes significant participation from the Sunni minority and slowly regains their trust in a unified state. It’s been Job 1 from the start. That said, building a political accommodation with the northern Kurds is a close second, and today brought some good news on that front:

In a far-reaching deal with the potential to unite Iraq in the face of a Sunni insurgency, the government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi agreed on Tuesday to a long-term pact with the autonomous Kurdish region over how to divide the country’s oil wealth and cooperate on fighting Islamic State extremists.

The deal unites Baghdad and Erbil, the Kurdish capital in the north, over the issue of oil revenues and budget payments, and is likely to halt a drive — at least in the short term — by the Kurds for an independent state. It includes payments from the central government for the salaries of Kurdish security forces, known as the pesh merga, and also will allow the flow of weapons to the Kurds from the United States, with the government in Baghdad as intermediary.

….The reconciliation between Baghdad and the Kurdish region also appeared to validate one element of President Obama’s strategy in confronting the Islamic State: pushing for a new, more inclusive leader of Iraq. When the extremists swept into Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June, Mr. Obama decided that Mr. Maliki had to go before the United States would ramp up its military efforts against the Islamic State.

A deal with the Kurds was always going to be easier than regaining the participation of the Sunnis. Kurdistan has long had de facto autonomy from Baghdad, and negotiating over oil wealth is a fairly straightforward bit of dealmaking. An accommodation has been possible all along whenever Baghdad was willing to compromise—and the ISIS threat gave the new government there plenty of motivation to do just that.

The same can’t be said of accommodation with the Sunnis. The Sunni-Shia divide in the Arab regions of Iraq is deeper and more fundamental, and there’s no single, well-defined Sunni region with established leadership and relatively clear demands that can be negotiated with cleanly. There are just years—or decades or centuries, depending on how you want to count—of mistrust and bad blood. Combine that with nearly a decade of rampant corruption and tribal jingoism under Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite government and you don’t have a problem that can be solved either quickly or easily.

Still, the Kurdish deal suggests that Haider al-Abadi may be genuinely willing to do the work necessary to rein in tensions and provide the Sunni minority with the representation and influence it wants. Maybe. As always, it’s not wise to read too much into this. But it’s a good sign.

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Good News From Iraq: Baghdad Finally Cuts a Deal With the Kurds

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Take Two: What’s Behind the Religious Conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq

by Ryan44Swxlkc Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Earlier today I recommended a Fareed Zakaria video about the roots of the current civil wars in Syria and Iraq. Sam Barkin, a professor at UMass Boston, emails to say that Zakaria’s history is faulty:

While reading your post of about an hour ago on arming the Syrian rebels, I clicked on the embedded video of Fareed Zakaria’s five-minute historical primer. He makes what seems to be a compelling case about the historical complexities of Syria. There’s just one problem. His history is wrong. Really quite wrong, in a way that makes me worry about his analysis.

He claims that three contemporary countries in the Levant—Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon—were intentionally set up by the European colonial countries with minority-rule governments, explicitly for divide-and-rule purposes. In Iraq, it’s true, the monarchy was Sunni (it also wasn’t Iraqi, but that’s a different story). The British did deal with the local elites, as they tended to do in their protectorates, and the local elites were by and large Sunni, but that was a pre-existing condition.

However, in the two French-protectorate countries, Syria and Lebanon, the French at no point tried to empower minorities at the expense of ethnic/religious majorities. In Syria, which is roughly three-quarters Sunni, almost all of the heads of state and government until 1970 (it may in fact be all of them, I didn’t have the patience to check) were Sunni. The central role of the Shiite Alawites in the security service did not begin until after Assad senior consolidated power after the 1970 coup. And I can assure you that the French were not fans either of Assad or of the Ba’ath party more generally. Lebanon, meanwhile, was designed by the French specifically to be Christian majority (in fact, the French redrew the map of Lebanon in 1920 to ensure such a majority). The Christians probably remained a majority in Lebanon into the 1960s.

So telling the story of Syria (either current Syria or Greater Syria) as one of a history of sectarianism and minority rule is simply historically factually wrong. And it leaves me wondering if Zakaria really doesn’t know the history, or if he’s taking some serious historical liberties in order to make his point.

In a nutshell, Barkin is saying that only in Iraq can you argue that a minority-rule government was originally installed by a colonial power. In Lebanon it was a case of demographic changes turning a Christian majority into a minority, and in Syria the minority Alawites took power long after the French had withdrawn. Zakaria is right that in all three cases, conflict between religious minorities and majorities are still central to what’s going on today, but the historical backdrop is more complicated than he allows.

I thought this was worth passing along. Anyone else care to weigh in?

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Take Two: What’s Behind the Religious Conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq

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On Iraq, McCain Won’t Take McCain’s Advice

by LeslieP12ovdt Posted on June 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) went ballistic. In response to the intensifying crisis in Iraq, an apoplectic McCain took to the Senate floor and demanded the resignation of President Barack Obama’s entire national security team. He huffed that Obama’s advisers have “been a total failure.” He suggested that Obama was somehow responsible for the present predicament in Iraq. And what was McCain’s big idea for addressing the crisis? What steps would he take had he not been prevented from becoming commander in chief by Obama? The senator proposed calling in former General David Petraeus, who led US forces in Iraq during the 2007 surge, and former General James Mattis, who succeeded Petraeus. That was it: Ask Petraeus what to do.

Well, it turns out, McCain wouldn’t abide by his own advice. Earlier this week, I contacted Petraeus’ office to ask what he thought the president should be doing in Iraq. Not surprisingly, Petraeus did not respond to the invitation (which was probably one of many from reporters). But on Wednesday, Petraeus, speaking at a conference in London, did share his current views. He accused Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of “undermining” national reconciliation—an obvious point made by most observers. He also declared that Iraq needed a more inclusive government—another obvious point that the president and others have pushed. And Petraeus dismissed the possibility of US airstrikes against the Sunni insurgents that have captured several cities in Iraq:

This cannot be the United States being the air force of Shia militias or a Shia-on-Sunni Arab fight. It has to be a fight of all of Iraq against extremists who do happen to be Sunni Arabs but extremists that are wreaking havoc on a country that really had an enormous opportunity back in 2011, has made progress in certain areas but has certainly not capitalized on that enormous opportunity in the way that we had all hoped.

McCain, apparently, wasn’t listening. On Thursday, McCain went full McCain. He called for ousting Maliki. (Obama and his aides are trying to nudge Maliki aside, but it’s not a snap-of-the-fingers task to get rid of a Washington-endorsed guy who was elected.) And McCain demanded, yes, airstrikes:

Of course Maliki has to be transitioned out. But the only way that’s going to happen is for us to assure Iraqis that we will be there to assist. And let me make it clear: No one that I know wants to send combat troops on the ground, but airstrikes are an important factor, psychologically and many other ways, and that may require some forward air controllers and some special forces.

Several other GOPers joined McCain on the Senate floor to denounce Obama. On the other side of the Capitol, House Speaker John Boehner has been blasting Obama on Iraq, accusing the president of “napping” but not proposing any specific actions. On Wednesday, Boehner refused to comment on whether Obama should order airstrikes. The crisis is confounding Obama’s GOP critics. And they’re not even listening to Petraeus.

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On Iraq, McCain Won’t Take McCain’s Advice

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