Baghdad is Next

With weeks to go before the mid-term elections, Democrats are in full retreat. While the reasons for the impending rout are many, foremost has to be the Nobel Peace Prize POTUS launching a new iteration of "perpetual war" in the Middle East.

Voters elected Obama twice in the hope that he was sincere when he said, "We need to do some nation-building here at home." The fact that a truly horrible Republican Party is about to claim the majority in the Senate is proof how far hopes for an Obama era of peace and plenty have fallen.

Yesterday at Andrews Air Force Base Obama addressed military chiefs from 21 nations on the "strategy" going forward to "degrade and destroy" Islamic State. Primarily, it was a PR event. There is no strategy. Air strikes are not working. ISIS continues to roll, consolidating control of Anbar Province. Western Baghdad is now at risk. Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, has long predicted that Baghdad is the eventual target. All Obama could trumpet as a success of his anti-ISIS coalition is the re-capture of Mosul Dam.

Obama Press Secretary Josh Earnest had to throw up a smokescreen to explain why Turkey is bombing the PKK instead of Islamic State. The Kurds are in a battle to the death for the strategically important town of Kobani.

As Tim Arango and Sebnem Arsu say in "Turkish Airstrike Hits Kurds, Complicating Fight Against Islamic State":

That dynamic of twisted allegiances has been on display in the fight for Kobani, too. While Turkey took military action against the P.K.K., the United States ramped up its bombing runs over Kobani in support of the P.K.K.’s Syrian splinter group, the Democratic Union Party, or P.Y.D. — even though the United States and its European allies have listed the P.K.K. as a terrorist group. 

The Pentagon said on Tuesday that American and Saudi warplanes had carried out 21 airstrikes against Islamic State targets near Kobani on Monday and Tuesday, the largest set of attacks in Syria since the air campaign began more than three weeks ago.

For his part, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has insisted that ISIS and the P.K.K. pose the same threat and must both be confronted. 

“Hey, world, when a terrorist organization like ISIS emerges, you all speak out, but why don’t you speak out against the P.K.K. as a terrorist organization?” Mr. Erdogan said recently. “Why don’t you call for a joint fight against them?”

Turkey does not only want to extinguish Kurdish ambitions of autonomy. It also wants the international coalition to fight not just ISIS, but Mr. Assad’s government as well.

“Turkey is against both ISIS and Assad,” the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said Tuesday. 

It may be clear, then, who Turkey’s enemies are, but it is far from clear what its strategy is to face them.

“Frankly, it doesn’t seem like Turkey has a strategy,” Mr. Stein [a Turkey expert and a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based research organization] said, adding that the decision to strike the P.K.K. at this moment was “politically tone-deaf,” even if there had been provocation.

The peace process between Turkey and the P.K.K. brought a halt to a three-decade-long fight that cost more than 40,000 lives. But the strikes on Monday added to a sense that the détente was now at risk, coming after a week in which violent street protests in response to the Turkish government’s inaction on Kobani had left more than 30 people dead in Turkey’s Kurdish region. Mr. Davutoglu on Tuesday sought to separate the situation in Kobani from Turkey’s efforts to make peace with Kurds in Turkey.

“I’m telling those who try to build a relationship between Kobani and the peace process — these two are different from each other,” Mr. Davutoglu said. “The peace process was there before Kobani, and saying so doesn’t mean that we do not think of Kobani as important.”

Coming as it did while Turkey was under pressure from the United States to do more against ISIS, the military action against the P.K.K. represented, intentional or not, a pointed message to its Western ally.

“Airstrikes were not only a strong message to the P.K.K. but also to the United States, saying, ‘I maintain my bargaining position in terms of what needs to be done in Syria,’ ” said Cengiz Candar, a columnist and expert on Turkey’s conflict with the Kurds. “It also legitimized not siding with the P.Y.D.”

But the message Kurdish leaders are taking is that Turkey is happy to see them die on the streets of Kobani.

“It is not two terrorist groups fighting against each other,” said Idris Nassan, a spokesman for the fledgling Kurdish local government in Kobani. “Terrorist groups are attacking civilians. The Turkish government must change its attitude.”

Both sides in the Kobani battle have suffered heavy losses. Kurdish activists say that their side is losing roughly 10 fighters a day, with the casualties obscured by the fact that most of the dead are not ferried across the border to Turkey. In a measure of the rising toll, six Kurdish fighters were buried in the Turkish town of Suruc on Tuesday, the highest number in at least a week.

Kurdish fighters claim to have killed hundreds of Islamic State militants during intensifying clashes over the past week. 

That claim was impossible to verify. But witnesses in Raqqa, the Syrian province that serves as the Islamic State group’s de facto capital, said that the bodies of dozens of ISIS fighters had arrived in the province from Kobani in the past few days.

There is no grand strategy to the anti-ISIS coalition. Of the 21 nations represented at the Andrews Air Force Base session, one-third -- Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (not to mention the host country) -- have sponsorship ties to Islamic State.

In other words, it is the same grand strategy we have seen on display in Afghanistan for many decades: support the jihadis so we can attack the jihadis. A formula for perpetual war.

And Mark Mazzetti has a decent front-page story that backs up this thesis: "C.I.A. Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels":

The C.I.A. review, according to several former American officials familiar with its conclusions, found that the agency’s aid to insurgencies had generally failed in instances when no Americans worked on the ground with the foreign forces in the conflict zones, as is the administration’s plan for training Syrian rebels. 

One exception, the report found, was when the C.I.A. helped arm and train mujahedeen rebels fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan during the 1980s, an operation that slowly bled the Soviet war effort and led to a full military withdrawal in 1989. That covert war was successful without C.I.A. officers in Afghanistan, the report found, largely because there were Pakistani intelligence officers working with the rebels in Afghanistan. 

But the Afghan-Soviet war was also seen as a cautionary tale. Some of the battle-hardened mujahedeen fighters later formed the core of Al Qaeda and used Afghanistan as a base to plan the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. This only fed concerns that no matter how much care was taken to give arms only to so-called moderate rebels in Syria, the weapons could ultimately end up with groups linked to Al Qaeda, like the Nusra Front.

“What came afterwards was impossible to eliminate from anyone’s imagination,” said the former senior official, recalling the administration debate about whether to arm the Syrian rebels.

Besides airstrikes, the other key component of the Obama plan to destroy ISIS is to train 5,000 "moderate" fighters in the cradle of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia:

Last month, Mr. Obama said he would redouble American efforts by having the Pentagon participate in arming and training rebel forces. That program has yet to begin. 

Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said last week that it would be months of “spade work” before the military had determined how to structure the program and how to recruit and vet the rebels. 

“This is going to be a long-term effort,” he said.

People are tired of war. Voters will punish the Democrats at the polls. But empowering the GOP will offer no respite. War, war and more war are on the horizon. Baghdad is next up.