Im-Politic: About Those “Serious” Presidential Candidates

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2016 election, Arabs, Bashir Al-Assad, Chris Christie, Im-Politic, Iran, ISIS, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Middle East, Muslims, Obama, Qatar, Republicans, Saudi Araabia, Shiites, Sunnis, Syria, terrorism, Yemen

According to the nation’s mainstream political and media classes, this year’s Republican presidential hopefuls are divided into two main categories. One is comprised of the “serious” candidates who, whether you agree with them or not, clearly know the issues inside out thanks to their experience in government which has exposed them both to the complexities of America’s leading challenges and to the community of – mainstream of course – experts, many of them former policymakers themselves, who constantly fill them in on critical details and new findings. The other is comprised of the candidates who are manifestly non-serious – who can’t possibly know what they’re talking about because they lack both that governing experience and those connections with experts.

It’s a seductive typology – until you realize that all of their experience hasn’t prevented the supposedly serious candidates, and their galaxies of experts, from backing ideas that are completely whacko. Here’s just one prominent example: The belief that America has reliable allies in the Sunni Muslim world and that all that’s been preventing them from banding together into an effective anti-ISIS coalition is President Obama’s lack of resolve.

Propounders of this view have been Republican candidates Jeb Bush and Chris Christie – who the mainstream media has allowed to portray themselves as foreign policy authorities even though they’ve mainly been state governors with no direct background in the field. It’s also been a staple of Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich, who at least can boast of having legislative responsibilities in national security. All of which goes to show you that experience is no guarantee of knowledge and common sense, let alone wisdom.

None of these ostensible diplomatic geniuses seem to know that the Sunni Muslim governments preside over fragile and sometimes failing states that are simply too divided internally and peopled with deeply anti-Western, scapegoating-happy movements and populations to go all-in on any military campaigns in which the United States – the leading symbol of historic Western success (and Arab Muslim failure) – plays any meaningful role. Even more dangerous for Sunni Arab leaders’ survival would be joining with the West to wipe out a group that claims to seek the return of Islam’s glory caliphate days.

But that’s not the biggest obstacle to creating a regional alliance against ISIS. For among the leading anti-Western scapegoaters have been the Sunni Muslim governments themselves. As widely noted, it’s been a great way to divert their populations’ attentions from their own records of keeping their countries backward and oppressed – and in some cases poverty-stricken. In addition, the political and economic elites of countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar are filled not only with ISIS sympathizers. They’re filled with leading ISIS funders. More broadly, as The Economist (not known for iconoclasm) has observed:

“among observers of the Muslim world, it’s a commonplace that Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment has used its wealth to propagate, globally, its own puritanical school of Sunni Islam, one that despises more elaborate forms of worship and their practitioners. A catchall term for this kind of Islam is Salafism, a school that stresses the life of Muhammad and his immediate successors and distrusts any thinking or practice that emerged later. Salafism can be politically quietist, and it has some peaceful adherents, but it can also be ultra-violent. It can provide soil in which terrorist weeds can flourish.”

Finally, the Sunni Arab leaders are anything but united behind American geopolitical aims (which are pretty confused themselves). For example, the top Syria priority of conservative Persian Gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia isn’t defeating ISIS. It’s ousting dictator Bashir Al-Assad, a long-time ally of their arch-enemy Iran, the world’s leading Shiite Muslim power. Indeed, reports have multiplied that the Saudis have slacked off even their initial anti-ISIS military moves in Syria in order to concentrate more of their resources on countering Iranian influence in their southern neighbor, Yemen.

To be sure, the conventional wisdom isn’t always wrong, and experience doesn’t always produce disaster. But establishment Republican candidates’ infatuation with the fantasy of a powerful Middle Eastern anti-ISIS coalition just waiting to be created makes alarmingly clear that it often is and can. So does recalling that the major supporters of U.S. military intervention in Vietnam were considered “the best and the brightest,” and that almost no major economists predicted the last, almost catastrophic, financial crisis. By the same token, the unconventional wisdom and inexperience can’t guarantee success, or avert calamitous failure.

Instead, the real lesson here is that the word “serious” has been thrown around way too carelessly, and self-servingly, in this campaign season – especially considering the recent records of establishment politicians in both major political parties. Encouragingly, poll results so far are making clear that big portions of the public aren’t buying these labels. Is it too much to hope that the political and media classes might display comparable savvy? Are are these self-styled taste- and king-makers too conflicted?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: It’s High Time for America to Take the Hint(s) in the Middle East

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border security, foreign policy, Iran, Iraq, ISIS, John Boehner, Jordan, Middle East, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Palestinians, Shiites, Sunnis, terrorism, Yemen

Sometimes, when countries are lucky, reality knocks them over the head with a two-by-four before they make fatal mistakes. The United States, over whom God is said to watch (along with fools and drunks) has just gotten two of them in connection with the Middle East in the last week. Yet no one should bet the ranch that these broadest of hints will be taken.

The first came in a Saturday Washington Post news article on the regional situation just before a Saudi-led coalition started intervening in Yemen’s civil war. As Post reporter Liz Sly explained it:

“The United States is aligned alongside Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and against them in Yemen. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, who have joined in the Saudi offensive in Yemen, are bombing factions in Libya backed by Turkey and Qatar, who also support the Saudi offensive in Yemen. The Syrian conflict has been fueled by competition among all regional powers to outmaneuver one another on battlefields far from home.”

The clear message: This is a madhouse that even Bismarck couldn’t deal with, much less Susan Rice.

The second sign that current Middle East policy is flying the United States into a mountain came from, of all people, House Speaker John Boehner. Now traveling through the region, the Ohio Republican declared, “America’s ability to lead in the world depends on Jordan’s ability to remain a stabilizing force in the Middle East, and we could not ask for a more solid partner.”

This is the same Jordan whose Sunni king from an Arabian peninsula tribe rules over a population that’s long been more than half comprised of always restive Palestinians, but whose demographic profile is now being reshaped by enormous refugee waves from disintegrating neighboring countries. Among the newcomers – hundreds of thousands of Shiites who comprise that sect’s first significant presence in the country. In other words, Boehner believes that the future of America’s global leadership depends on the national equivalent of a time bomb whose ticking he can’t, or won’t, hear.

As I’ve written before, it’s time for the United States to go. But not in the belief that various surrogates – like Arab coalitions – can effectively replace or even supplement American power. Or that the domestic energy revolution is already advanced enough to make the region marginal to U.S. economic interests.  Or that ISIS is so brutal that it will ultimately tear itself apart or provoke a powerful backlash.  Or that one of these days, Iran and Saudi Arabia may be ruled by moderates and genuine modernizers. Or that (similarly), Islam in all its forms might undergo a Reformation and help lead all the Middle East’s peoples out of dysfunction.

Instead, the United States urgently needs to begin actively and explicitly preparing its exit by using domestic policies to minimize Middle East dependencies and threats. This means ensuring that the economy develops energy sources large and diverse (geographically as well as in terms of fuel types) to turn Middle East oil producers into permanent global energy market followers, not leaders. It means securing U.S. borders well enough to keep out terrorists from within the region (and their supporters from without). And until marginalization policies are firmly in place, it means (a) harrassing ISIS with air strikes and special forces to keep it off balance, and (b) either preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon, or crippling its economy through sanctions if current negotiations fail, until marginalization policies are in place.

Above all, it means that American leaders must realize that foreign policy-making isn’t first and foremost about acting out their fantasies – whether imperial or humanitarian. (Yes, I know – the two often overlap.) Instead, foreign policy-making is first and foremost about promoting and defending the nation’s security and welfare. Before the energy revolution in particular, the United States had no viable alternative to active, often dangerous, involvement in the Middle East’s deadly affairs. Now the vastly superior disengagement option, which emphasizes (domestic) conditions that Washington can reasonably hope to control, is within our grasp. I’d hate to be the one to have to explain to future generations why this opportunity wasn’t aggressively seized.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Obama’s Anti-Terror Strategy is Crackpot Realism

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border security, Iraq, ISIS, Middle East, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, realism, Syria, terrorism, Yemen

At a press conference this morning in India (Yesterday morning? Tonight? I still can’t keep that international dateline straight!), President Obama performed a major public service in presenting concisely the fundamental rationale for his anti-terrorism strategy. In the process, he unwittingly performed another major public service in making clear why this strategy – whose essence is supported across the spectrum of mainstream American politics – is loony.

Here’s Mr. Obama’s statement in full:

“…Yemen has never been a perfect democracy or an island of stability.  What I’ve said is, is that our efforts to go after terrorist networks inside of Yemen without a occupying U.S. army, but rather by partnering and intelligence-sharing with that local government, is the approach that we’re going to need to take.  And that continues to be the case.  The alternative would be for us to play whack-a-mole every time there is a terrorist actor inside of any given country, to deploy U.S. troops.  And that’s not a sustainable strategy.

“So we’ll continue to try to refine and fine-tune this model, but it is the model that we’re going to have to work with, because the alternative would be massive U.S. deployments in perpetuity, which would create its own blowback and cause probably more problems than it would potentially solve.

“And we’re going to have to recognize that there are going to be a number of the countries where terrorists have located that are not strong countries.  That’s the nature of the problem that we confront.  Terrorists typically are not going to be locating and maintaining bases and having broad networks inside of countries that have strong central governments, strong militaries and strong law enforcement.  By definition, we’re going to be operating in places where oftentimes there’s a vacuum or capabilities are somewhat low.  And we’ve got to just continually apply patience, training, resources, and we then have to help in some cases broker political agreements as well.”

The problem here is not per se that President Obama is counseling patience. Easy, quick, effective fixes for difficult public policy challenges are rare. Instead, the problem is two-fold. First, despite the need for realistic expectations, time is not America’s friend in the Middle East if you assign importance, as you should, to the aim of protecting the U.S. homeland from a terrorist attack originating in the region. For the longer it takes for the Obama strategy to achieve any significant degree of success, the likelier that some terrorist group will either establish and consolidate a haven for planning and training for such strikes by militarily conquering territory (a la ISIS in Iraq and Syria) or gain one by prevailing in civil conflict in any of the many failed states in the Middle East as well as in North Africa (as could be happening in Yemen now).

Second, the president remains pathetically unaware (like the rest of the nation’s foreign policy establishment and the Mainstream Media that worships it) that the United States has much better options. As I’ve written numerous times (e.g., this post), because of simple geography, the United States is much better advised to protect against terror attacks not by trying to manipulate events in the highly dysfunctional and deeply anti-American and anti-western Middle East, but by securing its own borders and ensuring (or at least dramatically cutting the odds) that terrorists can get from those foreign sanctuaries to here. As difficult as that might be, it’s surely much easier than trying to create even minimal stability – and therefore minimally reliable partners – in a region that clearly lacks the wherewithal to produce either. And by the way, this homeland-focused strategy is much likelier to avoid blowback than the current approach.

Until Washington can put adequate border security arrangements in place, the nation will need to act militarily to prevent the creation or at least consolidation of terrorist havens. No question, the lighter the touch the better, but contrary to Mr. Obama’s apparent belief, the bottom line is not ruling out a set of tactics (like the “boots on the ground” to which the president again alluded). The bottom line is keeping the foe off balance long enough for the United States to establish effective domestic defenses.

Unless this strategic sea change takes place, Mr. Obama himself will keep playing whack-a-mole in the Middle East – with diminishing returns fostering mounting dangers. So could many of his successors.