I was over halfway through before I looked at the website. When the scales fall from the eyes of conservatives, where will the delusional hawks turn?
Libya will be a far worse problem than ISIS. Syria with Russian help, Iran, and Turkey can take care of ISIS. ISIS will eventually burn itself out. Once they have killed all the undesirables, the real fighting will begin, and it will be over the standard issues – power, land, resources, money.
Does the United States support Kurdish independence or continuing the unitary state of Iraq? Are we willing to crush ISIS regardless of what that means for Iranian influence in Iraq or Bashar Assad’s continued hold on power in Syria? How is success defined even in these limited strikes?
These are the questions that must ultimately be answered. Recognizing how counterproductive our recent foreign policy has been because of our failure to think through these kinds of questions is likely a prerequisite to getting the right answers now.
So true. However, it might take a crystal ball, along with discarding political high jinks, in order to constructively answer them all.
If we’ve learned anything in the past 15 years, it has to be this … clearly the Islamic world is not ready for classically liberal democracy. That means going back to a policy of supporting selected despots simply based on a willingness to live peacefully alongside Israel. It means no more quixotic attempts at nation building in the region. These efforts cannot work – the cultural ground is insufficiently fertile. It means seriously securing our borders to guard against Islamic terrorists simply walking into our country alongside all the undocumented Democrats.
What to do, therefore, with the current train wreck in the region? I say: (1) Don’t get in the middle of a fight between ISIS’ Sunni caliphate and the Shiite caliphate represented by the governments of Iran/Iraq/Syria. Allying with either makes no strategic sense, and neither will ever be our real friend. (2) Draw the strategic line boldly with vigorous military support of our Kurdish friends to the north, and vigorous military support of our Jordanian friends to the south, and use these borders as a firewall and base of operations to deliver aid and comfort to Christian refugees. (3) Go all in with our Israeli and Egyptian friends with a policy to suppress Hamas and Hezbollah – with extreme prejudice.
The mistake of the past WRT Iraq was believing that there was a little George Washington inside every “Iraqi” and that we could bring them “freedom” by removing the boot of Saddam Hussein so they could achieve their natural desire for liberal, inclusive democracy. While it’s true that many of the know-nothing Pundits who populate the DC, NYC and LA TV “news” still believe there is a shiny precious in Iraq somewhere (if only we hadn’t supposedly left Iraq, or funded the unicorn “moderates” in Syria, etc.), but most of the rest of the country learned quite a lot and is justifiably skeptical. Despite all hyperbole in the pundit class, we are nowhere near the situation in 2003, 2008, 2011 or even 1991.
What we’re doing now is much more realpolitik, much more measured and more in line with US interests and is, in my view, probably the best course of action out of a long list of bad COA’s.
It’s notable, for example, that we haven’t lifted a finger over the past couple of months to help Maliki’s government or the Iraqi Army fend off the ISIL advance, yet once the Kurds and our personnel and facilities in Erbil were seriously threatened, we stepped in with not only air support but material support for the Kurds. Taken in isolation a couple of airstrikes and some gear for the Kurds may not seem like much, but it’s quite important as a signal for the various players in Iraq, something the Pundit class unsurprisingly missed.
Personally, I think we’re making the best of a bad situation but we are not “driving†events in Iraq, nor can we. Much depends on Maliki’s actions in the next day or two.
First off, fending off ISIS, before it rolled across so much of Iraq massacring people right and left who wouldn’t convert to Islam or leave, is not what I would consider a gesture of helping Maliki. Rather it would have been a way of preventing a growing terrorist group from expanding into what has become a more muscuar, unstoppable force — one that shows intentions of going well beyond the borders of Iraq.
Secondly, the Kurds have been asking for more sophisticated weaponry from the US for a long time. Being that they seem to be the best vanguard against ISIS, I think this would have been an appropriate defensive action to have taken. However, now that ISIS has penetrated deeper into northern areas, taking over a major dam, and essentially sentenced tens of thousands of people to death on a mountain top, the administration is finally responding with belated surgical strikes, food, water, and armaments to help the Kurds .
Nonetheless for every action there is a reaction. Consequently, ISIS is quickly modifying it’s strategy, making any air strikes less capable of accomplishing their intended missions and goals. This is because, what an earlier, decisive and stronger intervention might have quelled quickly is now jeopardized, as ISIS is melting quickly into the civilian masses — much like Hamas has done in Gaza — making these strikes perilous and costly to collateral losses within the innocent populations who become their human shields.
I think we’ve learned Hillary is running for POTUS, something I wasn’t sure of until today.
I was over halfway through before I looked at the website. When the scales fall from the eyes of conservatives, where will the delusional hawks turn?
Libya will be a far worse problem than ISIS. Syria with Russian help, Iran, and Turkey can take care of ISIS. ISIS will eventually burn itself out. Once they have killed all the undesirables, the real fighting will begin, and it will be over the standard issues – power, land, resources, money.
So true. However, it might take a crystal ball, along with discarding political high jinks, in order to constructively answer them all.
If we’ve learned anything in the past 15 years, it has to be this … clearly the Islamic world is not ready for classically liberal democracy. That means going back to a policy of supporting selected despots simply based on a willingness to live peacefully alongside Israel. It means no more quixotic attempts at nation building in the region. These efforts cannot work – the cultural ground is insufficiently fertile. It means seriously securing our borders to guard against Islamic terrorists simply walking into our country alongside all the undocumented Democrats.
What to do, therefore, with the current train wreck in the region? I say: (1) Don’t get in the middle of a fight between ISIS’ Sunni caliphate and the Shiite caliphate represented by the governments of Iran/Iraq/Syria. Allying with either makes no strategic sense, and neither will ever be our real friend. (2) Draw the strategic line boldly with vigorous military support of our Kurdish friends to the north, and vigorous military support of our Jordanian friends to the south, and use these borders as a firewall and base of operations to deliver aid and comfort to Christian refugees. (3) Go all in with our Israeli and Egyptian friends with a policy to suppress Hamas and Hezbollah – with extreme prejudice.
We’ve learned we don’t know what we’re doing.
Somebody has learned something, but it has no relation to past events. It will worsen the present, but that will not hinder anybody.
The mistake of the past WRT Iraq was believing that there was a little George Washington inside every “Iraqi” and that we could bring them “freedom” by removing the boot of Saddam Hussein so they could achieve their natural desire for liberal, inclusive democracy. While it’s true that many of the know-nothing Pundits who populate the DC, NYC and LA TV “news” still believe there is a shiny precious in Iraq somewhere (if only we hadn’t supposedly left Iraq, or funded the unicorn “moderates” in Syria, etc.), but most of the rest of the country learned quite a lot and is justifiably skeptical. Despite all hyperbole in the pundit class, we are nowhere near the situation in 2003, 2008, 2011 or even 1991.
What we’re doing now is much more realpolitik, much more measured and more in line with US interests and is, in my view, probably the best course of action out of a long list of bad COA’s.
It’s notable, for example, that we haven’t lifted a finger over the past couple of months to help Maliki’s government or the Iraqi Army fend off the ISIL advance, yet once the Kurds and our personnel and facilities in Erbil were seriously threatened, we stepped in with not only air support but material support for the Kurds. Taken in isolation a couple of airstrikes and some gear for the Kurds may not seem like much, but it’s quite important as a signal for the various players in Iraq, something the Pundit class unsurprisingly missed.
Personally, I think we’re making the best of a bad situation but we are not “driving†events in Iraq, nor can we. Much depends on Maliki’s actions in the next day or two.
First off, fending off ISIS, before it rolled across so much of Iraq massacring people right and left who wouldn’t convert to Islam or leave, is not what I would consider a gesture of helping Maliki. Rather it would have been a way of preventing a growing terrorist group from expanding into what has become a more muscuar, unstoppable force — one that shows intentions of going well beyond the borders of Iraq.
Secondly, the Kurds have been asking for more sophisticated weaponry from the US for a long time. Being that they seem to be the best vanguard against ISIS, I think this would have been an appropriate defensive action to have taken. However, now that ISIS has penetrated deeper into northern areas, taking over a major dam, and essentially sentenced tens of thousands of people to death on a mountain top, the administration is finally responding with belated surgical strikes, food, water, and armaments to help the Kurds .
Nonetheless for every action there is a reaction. Consequently, ISIS is quickly modifying it’s strategy, making any air strikes less capable of accomplishing their intended missions and goals. This is because, what an earlier, decisive and stronger intervention might have quelled quickly is now jeopardized, as ISIS is melting quickly into the civilian masses — much like Hamas has done in Gaza — making these strikes perilous and costly to collateral losses within the innocent populations who become their human shields.