Following Up: On the Middle East, the “Serious” Candidates are Less Serious Than Ever

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2016 elections, air strikes, allies, burden sharing, coalition, Defense Department, Following Up, free-riding, Iran, Iraq, ISIS, Kurds, Middle East, Pentagon, Saudi Arabia, Sunnis, Syria, terrorism

A recent RealityChek post explained why the label “serious” shouldn’t be used for presidential candidates (in either party) who claim that the United States can create a meaningful anti-ISIS military coalition. More recently, a report from the Pentagon itself further mocks the idea that office-seekers – or anyone else – believing that America’s allies will share much of the burden of defeating the terrorist group have any significant knowledge of the Middle East or world affairs generally. As my post noted, most of the presidential hopefuls in both parties fall into this category – including all of the “mainstream” or “establishment” figures, along with President Obama .

The Defense Department report tallied by country the number of air strikes carried out against ISIS as of January 19, and here are the findings. Overall, of the 9,782 such attacks conducted on targets in Syria and Iraq, the United States has been responsible for 7,551, or more than 77 percent. By target countries, U.S. war planes have carried out nearly 69 percent of the anti-ISIS strikes in Iraq, and just under 94 percent of these operations in Syria. (These counts don’t include Russian activity, or the more than 65,000 “sorties in support of operations” in the two countries, like reconnaissance and targeting missions.)

DoD doesn’t break down the non-U.S. figures by country; according to CNN, one reason is that these various governments define and count “air strike” in many different ways. But given the focus in the United States on local Middle East countries, and the expectation that their own gut level self-interest in will motivate them to practically lead the fight against a group they say is a literally mortal threat, it seems reasonable to surmise that Saudi Arabia et al are dropping the ball.

It’s important to point out that one reason that the United States has dominated the air war against ISIS is that the United States is the world’s dominant military power. At the same time, the U.S. air power is deployed all around the world in order to handle threats in nearly every region. America’s Middle East allies have no military responsibilities beyond their neighborhood.

Moreover, if these countries aren’t all-in for the air war, how realistic is it to expect them to charge into a major ground war against ISIS? The answer: It’s the height of inanity – and ignorance. And the reason is pretty simple: As has repeatedly been the case since the end of World War II, the United States needlessly has made itself vulnerable to the free-rider phenomenon. Under Democratic and Republican presidents alike, Washington has been so infatuated with exercising “global leadership,” and has so loudly advertised its conclusion that America’s own security depends on the security of every corner of the globe, that its European NATO allies, Japan, and South Korea have understandably assumed that the United States would protect them no matter how modest their own efforts.

In the impossibly byzantine Middle East, the free-rider syndrome has been exacerbated by all the other items on the security agendas of countries ranging from Saudi Arabia (like countering Iranian ambitions in the region, and supporting lots of Islamic radicalism itself) to Turkey (like preventing Iraq’s anti-ISIS Kurds from becoming strong enough to create an independent state that would attract Turkey’s own Kurdish minority).

The failure of the “serious” presidential candidates to recognize the coalition delusion shows that accumulating “experience” in making national security policy in Washington by no means proves that they’ve accumulated wisdom or even developed simple common sense. The same of course holds for the establishment media, which keeps clinging to and parroting the same off-the-mark convictions.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: With Allies Like These Against ISIS….

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allies, ISIS, Kurds, Middle East, Obama, oil revenues, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Turkey

It’s lucky for President Obama that ongoing American fears about ebola and most recently yesterday’s shootings in Canada have distracted so much public and media attention from the fight against ISIS terrorists in the Middle East.

About a month and a half after the president unveiled his strategy to defeat the Islamic army, U.S. air strikes and military aid have for the moment blunted its advance on the town of Kobani near the border of Syria and Turkey, and saved thousands of Yazidi refugees from ISIS massacre or enslavement. But the jihadis continue scoring victories in Iraq, and Mr. Obama has acknowledged that meaningful victory “won’t be quick.“

Even more disturbing, however, have been the obstacles Washington has faced in building a viable international coalition to wage the war against ISIS and to prevent the United States from having to reintroduce significant combat forces into the region – a goal that often seems to be the president’s bottom line.

Mr. Obama has spoken repeatedly of how his success in constructing the coalition, and especially bringing regional governments on board, is showing that “the people and governments in the Middle East are rejecting ISIL and standing up for the peace and security that the people of the region and the world deserve.” But today, a senior Treasury Department official made clear just how exaggerated that encouraging claim remains.

In a speech in Washington, D.C., David Cohen, the Treasury official in charge of staunching the impressive revenue streams that have helped make ISIS so formidable, publicly accused “a variety of middlemen, including some from Turkey,” along with “Kurds in Iraq,” of selling and reselling ISIS-extracted and/or refined oil, and helping the organization earn more than $1 million per day from such energy sales.

Turkey, of course, is a NATO ally, and Kurds have been among ISIS’ main targets and victims, as well as U.S. aid recipients. Both Turkish and Iraqi Kurdish officials angrily denied the charges, but as Cohen broadly hinted, active government complicity hasn’t been necessary. ISIS’ Turkish and Kurdish business partners are part of “a long-standing and deeply rooted black market connecting traders in and around the area.”  In other words, these activities have long been – and continue to be – winked at by the regimes in question.

With allies like these, it’s difficult at best to see how the United States can defeat ISIS mainly working through a coalition, and thus avoid large-scale American ground involvement. If Mr. Obama believes that denying the terrorists an Afghanistan-like haven from which attacks on the American homeland ultimately can be planned and launched, he’ll need to adopt the only remaining strategy capable of promoting vital U.S. interests at acceptable levels of cost and risk.

As I’ve advocated, the United States will need to authorize much more extensive air and special forces operations. But the aim would not be to prosecute the kind of open-ended campaign(s) that would be needed not only to defeat ISIS but to contain all the successor and wannabe groups certain to pop up in the Middle East and other failed regions. Rather, the aim would be to keep ISIS (and any others) off balance and unable to turn to nation-building just long enough to enable the U.S. government to enhance further its already considerable energy self-sufficiency and to seal its borders. Thus protected from the only two major threats that Middle East terrorists could pose, Americans would be able to regard this terminally dysfunctional region with the indifference it so richly deserves.