Michael Maiello's picture

    How Foreign Policy People Get Things Wrong

    Leslie H. Gelb's op-ed in The New York Times this morning struck me as important. I don't know if he's right that Iraq needs some sort of unified, three state confederation.  It seems reasonable to me. I'm sure it's more complicated than it sounds. But, consider this:

    “The second step of this strategy is to set President Bashar al-Assad of Syria against the jihadis in Iraq, an offensive he started on his own with airstrikes last week. This would acknowledge the reality of Iraq and Syria as one strategic, anti-jihadi battlefield.

    But instead of capitalizing on Mr. Assad’s anti-jihadi instincts, the Obama team now proposes to do what it has resisted doing for almost three years — to send hundreds of millions of dollars in arms aid for the Sunni rebels battling the Assad government. This move has American priorities backward. It will turn Mr. Assad away from the jihadis in Iraq, and back to fighting American-backed rebels in Syria.

    The greatest threat to American interests in the region is ISIS, not Mr. Assad. To fight this enemy, Mr. Obama needs to call on others similarly threatened: Iran, Russia, Iraqi Shiites and Kurds, Jordan, Turkey — and above all, the political leader with the best-armed forces in the region, Mr. Assad. Part of the deal would need to be that the Syrian regime and the rebels largely leave each other alone.”

    Whoa, my friends!

    The criticism of Obama's foreign policy from the activist left (Anne Marie Slaughter and her ilk) and the war loving right (Dick Cheney, people related to Dick Cheney and people who worked for Dick Cheney) is that Obama let ISIS get out of hand because he was too cautious about dealing with Syria.

    Gelb is telling us that this is complete balderdash.  It might sound good on a cable TV show ("He ignored Syria and now a giant paramilitary group has sprung up there, just like how Al-Qaeda thrived in neglected Afghanistan," is a good TV line) but it ignores what anti-war liberals have known forever -- these religious zealot caliphate types do not get along with the mostly secular strongmen of the region.

    Put another way, if in 2002 or 2003, Saddam Hussein could have regained his status as an American puppet by delivering Osama bin Laden to U.S. forces, he would have. Hussein considered bin Laden an enemy just like Assad considers ISIS an enemy.

    I don't believe that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."  Life is more complicated than that.  But it should have come as no surprise that Syria bombed ISIS in Iraq.  If we had acted as Slaughter or Cheney suggested, if we had used our muscle to depose Assad entirely, than it strikes me that ISIS, deprived of its local predator would have flourished even more quickly.

    Seems like there might be a lesson to be learned from recent history about deposing a dictator without a good plan for what comes next. Can't put my finger on it, though.

    I also wonder if people who continue to criticize Obama for not acting forcefully enough against Assad will actually be questioned about this.  ISIS is stronger without Assad.  If ISIS is now our main security concern then any action we take against Assad undermines our ability to deal with ISIS. Unless, that is, the critic is advocating a perpetual occupation of both Iraq and Syria, something that nobody outside of the "foreign policy community" considers tolerable.

    I definitely think this ends the question about whether or not Obama was "too soft" or too cautious about Syria.  Toppling Assad means empowering ISIS.  If we had toppled Assad a year ago we would have more ISIS to deal with now, not less.  

    The hawks got this one wrong and here's the thing -- they repeated the Iraq mistake. Secular strongman dictators in the Middle East are the predators of religion-inspired terrorists and paramilitary groups.  That does not make those dictators our allies.  But if you remove them, their prey will surely flourish.

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    If one takes as the starting point the broad question: "what is in America's best interest in the Middle East," then the broad answer is "a stable Middle East which is not hostile to Western interests, politically or economically.

    The question that needs to be asked: "is a stable Middle East even possible in the short term?"  It seems to me that so much of the banter from all sides is coming from the notion that it is, and if this or that particular approach is used, then one will achieve it.  Then the question asked is which side of the hostility towards the West coin this stability lands on."

    Obama seems to be coming from the perspective where the answer is that stability in the Middle East is not possible. The old days when dictators could rule for decades without any significant armed threat to their rule are over.  But groups such as ISIS cannot control large sections of the map, in part because there enough of the population that don't want to be under the rule of such religious "traditionalists," along with those "strongmen" and their militaries who are not ready to give up power.  

    Sitting back and watching the various local stakeholders in the Middle East slug it out doesn't seem like a strategy to most pundits whether left or right because we (the US and other Western countries) are not in the driver seat.  But for the moment that might be just what we have to do, sticking our finger in here and there from time to time.  

    Groups like ISIS have as much power as they do in part because there were those who, while not necessarily buying into their agenda, thought ISIS would be help them in their agenda more so than the current status quo.  The flipping back and forth in Egypt is a good example of this dynamic. No amount of American involvement would have changed how things have unfolded (except maybe increase anti-Americanism), and it is no more stable than when the Arab Spring began.  

    In a way it is a kind of cold, Machiavellian approach or strategy.  Sit back and wait until the dust settles, then deal with what emerges from the slug fest.  


    Back in the day, the neocons talked a lot about how dismantling the "strongman" regimes in the region would ignite a sorting out of differences that was necessary if the place was to ever come up to speed with the integrated world. The process is underway. It is not pretty.

    When you start something, it takes on a life of its own. Gelb deserves much credit for the hard reporting he has done over the years. But I think he has started to drink the kool-aid he turned down before. You can't deliberately set things into motion and stop them from moving at same time. Assad will never become a part of what stabilizes Iraq. His place in his time is about a lot more than whether he killed anti-jihadists or not. Gelb knows that better than I ever will. All I can say is WTF.

    The above is not an argument to support the hawks who want to put down Assad. It is an argument that foreign policy is not this free adventure where you chase after this and wish for that. It is a process of living with all the other stuff done before.


    Congressman Charlie Wilson (R-Tex) was the man behind giving arms to Afgan rebels to fight a proxy war with the Russians. Of course, it was instrumental in empowering bin Laden and opened the doors for the Taliban to take control of the country. But in the short term,  we did get what we wanted ... they did an excellent job fighting the Russians for us.

     

    I think the real issue is whomever is controlling the political power in Washington, weaves foreign policy based on their political ideology rather than a national foreign policy agenda that's a compromise of all political factions so it doesn't make knee-jerks turns every 2, 4, 6 or 8 years.


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