Obama's War on ISIS Crashes on the Launch Pad

Obama made his speech announcing a new iteration of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), this one ostensibly directed against the Islamic State rising in northern Iraq and Syria, on Wednesday evening. The day-after coverage faithfully repeated the president's message -- that U.S. airstrikes on ISIS in its Syrian stronghold are in the works; that Syria's president Bashar al-Assad cannot be a partner in this struggle; that Sunni allies in the Middle East will be organized; and that local "moderate" Sunni fighters will trained in Saudi Arabia with half-a-billion dollars Congress has yet to approve -- with the exception of one discordant frontpage "news analysis" article by Peter Baker which sounded the alarm that what Obama was proposing amounted to perpetual war.

This morning the discordant notes have multiplied. All the main stories in the Gray Lady today regarding Obama's commitment to wage war on ISIS are thoroughly negative.

The place to begin . . . or, better yet, if you are to read only one article today, make sure it is "U.S. Pins Hope on Syrian Rebels With Loyalties All Over the Map" by Ben Hubbard, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti. It punctures the lie at the heart of the president's war plans: the training of a "moderate" Sunni fighting force to take on ISIS. Point by point it goes through and debunks the hooey being peddled by the administration:

1) The idea that there is a "moderate" group, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), ready to partner with the U.S. is a fiction:

Analysts who track the rebel movement say that the concept of the Free Syrian Army as a unified force with an effective command structure is a myth. 

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The Syrian rebels are a scattered archipelago of mostly local forces with ideologies that range from nationalist to jihadist. Their rank-and-file fighters are largely from the rural underclass, with few having clear political visions beyond a general interest in greater rights or the dream of an Islamic state. 

Most have no effective links to the exile Syrian National Coalition, meaning they have no political body to represent their cause. And the coalition’s Supreme Military Council, which was intended to unite the moderate rebel forces, has all but collapsed. 

“There’s a lot of skepticism about this piece of the president’s strategy,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “The so-called moderate rebels have often been very immoderate and ineffective.”

2) Arms intended for the "moderates" end up with the jihadis:

Even as they line up to support Mr. Obama’s strategy against ISIS, some European allies remain skeptical about the efficacy of arming the Syrian rebels. Germany, for instance, has been arming and training Kurdish pesh merga forces in Iraq, but has resisted doing the same for any groups in Syria — partly out of fear that the weapons could end up in the hands of ISIS or other radical groups. 

“We can’t really control the final destination of these arms,” said Peter Wittig, the German ambassador to the United States.

3) Forming local fighters into an armed fighting force has a poor track record (i.e., Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.):

The approach — training and arming local fighters — has also not been effective in other arenas, whether Iraq, where the military melted away when ISIS attacked, or in Mali, where forces trained in counterterrorism switched sides to join Islamist fighters.

4) The U.S. experience so far -- the April 2013 approved CIA covert operations in Jordan and Turkey -- in arming and training the Syrian opposition has been a bust:

American involvement with the rebels so far has largely been through so-called operations rooms in Jordan and Turkey staffed by intelligence officials from the United States and other countries that have provided arms to limited numbers of vetted rebels. So far, the support provided has included light arms, ammunition and antitank missiles, which have helped the groups destroy government armor but have not resulted in major rebel advances or helped control the spread of ISIS.

“The United States can probably work with them to some extent, but they haven’t been hugely effective so far, which is why the Islamic State is there in the first place,” said Mr. Lund, the Syria analyst. 

The support so far has been limited, leaving many rebels feeling that the aid is prolonging the war, not helping them win. And the fluidity of battlefield alliances in Syria means that even mainline rebels often end up fighting alongside the Nusra Front, whose suicide bombers are relied on by other groups to soften up government targets.

Combine the Hubbard, Schmitt and Mazzetti story with one by Anne Barnard and David Kirkpatrick, "Arabs Give Tepid Support to U.S. Fight Against ISIS," and you get a sense of Obama's GWOT relaunch crashing on the pad. The only nations in the region, Syria and Iran, expressing an interest in partnering with the U.S. to eradicate ISIS are being shunned:

While Arab nations allied with the United States vowed on Thursday to “do their share” to fight ISIS and issued a joint communiqué supporting a broad strategy, the underlying tone was one of reluctance. The government perhaps most eager to join a coalition against ISIS was that of Syria, which Mr. Obama had already ruled out as a partner for what he described as terrorizing its citizens. 

Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Fayssal Mekdad, told NBC News that Syria and the United States were “fighting the same enemy,” terrorism, and that his government had “no reservations” about airstrikes as long as the United States coordinated with it. He added, “We are ready to talk.”

Turkey, the nation most critical to a successful crackdown on the caliphate, refused to even sign a communique pledging military support:

At a meeting in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to build a coalition for the American mission, at least 10 Arab states signed a communiqué pledging to join “in the many aspects of a coordinated military campaign,” but with the qualification “as appropriate” and without any specifics. Turkey attended the meeting but declined to sign.

Turkey is critical because its border is the main jihadi route to the Syrian battlefield. As Patrick Cockburn made clear  in "Isis Consolidates," the only way to deal with ISIS is for Turkey to crack down on the jihadis crossing its borders. (Also worthy of mention here is Seymour Hersh's article pointing blame at Turkey for the Ghouta poison gas attack last summer that was used as a false flag to prompt a U.S. attack on Damascus.) Turkey's non-committal stance is a strong tell that ISIS will survive.