There’s an interesting article at War on the Rocks on the takeaways from the campaign to retake Sinjar. Here’s the critical passage, at least from my standpoint:
The Kurds’ priority in this campaign is not to expel ISIL. Rather, it is to remain strategically significant, consolidate control over territories and resources, and maintain long-term coalition support to help protect their expanded borders. These nationalist priorities mean that capturing Sinjar will not necessarily embolden the Kurds to expel ISIL outside areas they consider Kurdish, at least not without Sunni Arabs taking the lead. Washington should recognize these limitations and also focus on the Sunni Arab local partners that can and should liberate ISIL strongholds, in coordination with the Iraqi government.
The Kurds will fight for Kurdistan but not for Iraq. The Iraqis have shown little desire to fight for Iraq. If they won’t, who will and, more importantly, why should we? To what end?
There are other ways to mitigate the risks posed by terrorism than fighting other people wars for them and I’ve suggested some. The greatest obstacle we face in mitigating the risks is that we won’t acknowledge that our notional allies are actually the greatest supporters of terrorism.
How long are we going to go on playing this game of denial regarding the Saudis? Al Qaeda and ISIS both grow from the poisonous tree of Saudi Salafism. I understood the hypocrisy when the Saudis had us by the barrels, but the energy picture has changed and I fail to see why we are still trapped in this paradigm.
Our natural ally in the Gulf is not the KSA and the Sunnis, but Iran. Iran is a more liberal and tolerant society (granted that’s setting the bar really low), their population is more westernized and better educated, they are nicely-placed if we wanted to aim big antenna arrays in the direction of the ‘Stans and the Caucasus, and they have never been fans of flying airliners into buildings. Between bad and worse Iran is just bad.
As you suggest, we suffer more from our “friends” than from our foes.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Um, Iran used to be an ally. They haven’t been our ally for over 36 years. That is because the Iranian government decided it would be better for Iran to be our enemy instead of our ally for cultural reasons that are deeply important TO THEM. I don’t see how that will change short of declaring Sharia the law of the land and putting a bunch of ayatollahs in charge.
Shorter: the woman of your desires has said “NO!”, and as everyone knows, “NO!” means “NO!”
Our natural allies in the Middle East (other than the Israelis, our clients) are the Iranians and the Turks, i.e. the non-Arab states. Unfortunately, that was the Iranians under the Shah and the Kemalist Turks. Khomeinist Iran has actually declared war against the United States while the Islamist Erdogan government while technically an ally actually supports our foes.
The closest thing we have to a country with shared interests in the region is Israel – and even that is a questionable proposition. We have no shared cultural referants with anyone else in the region, and no natural interests (due to distance) other than that the spice keeps flowing. The Cold War gave us an unnatural interest in the region, but that motivation is long past its expiry date.
We do the imperial thing badly, and we don’t understand the region. (As evidence I could point to the last forty years of foreign policy there, but pick any timeline in living memory from _then_ to _now_ that you like.)
I think it’s well past time to invoke the First Principle of Holes.
I don’t assume the Ayatollahs are any more eternal than the Shah. They’re just the latest bunch of tyrants. The Iranian people have no fundamental beef with the American people.
In the only survey I could find – http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/technical_reports/2011/RAND_TR910.pdf – 39% of Iranians (in 2011) favored re-establishing relations with the US. Post-treaty and eventually post-sanction I’d bet that’s risen to better than half.
In other surveys you find Shia consistently more ‘liberal’ on social attitudes and less religious overall. They are certainly less evangelistic.
So, we’ve got a nation of less radical better educated Muslims who would just love to be our friends if not for their awful government.
Hmmm, this sounds familiar some how….