Tonight Obama addresses the nation about the kind of commitment his administration is willing to make to eradicate Islamic State, a jihadi group more extreme than Al Qaeda that Obama had dismissed until recently as a "JV" team and whose rise to power in northern Syria and Iraq was the direct result of policies the United States pursued to achieve the ouster of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
All indications are that the commitment is going to be a lengthy and costly one, and that it will include airstrikes in Syria. Tim Arango provides a helpful overview, "Longtime Rivals Look to Team Up to Confront ISIS," of the jigsaw puzzle of issues brought on by the Arab Spring and the conservative reaction to it.
Arango tries to pluck out the hopeful pieces, like the U.S. working with Iran to beat back ISIS, but the overall message is that war is going to be a staple of the Greater Middle East for a long time. You have Qatar and Turkey at war with the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia and Egypt; you have Sunni battling Shia; you have Turkey paranoid about PKK attacks from a generously armed Kurdistan; you have jihadis attacking jihadis attacking the Syrian Arab Army; you have jihadis -- Nusra, ISIS, even the "moderate" Free Syrian Army -- working together to attack the Lebanese Army which is underwritten by Saudi Arabia, a country that also funds the Salafi terror groups.
Into this maelstrom jets the Hogarthian U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with his faithful slave Michael Gordon. Court scribe Gordon has a helpful article in today's paper, "John Kerry Arrives in Iraq for Talks on Joint Strategy Against ISIS," in that it makes perfectly clear the future the Obama administration envisions for Iraq, which is less a unitary state and more a Confederate States of the Tigris and Euphrates.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the formation of a government the other day but because all the sticky issues -- those pertaining to the Kurds: oil rights, boundaries, budgetary allotments; and those pertaining to the Sunnis who want to lead the ministries of defense and interior -- have been tabled for a later date.
That is why Kerry is in Baghdad. He comes with a proposal for federalizing Iraq. (What the U.S. is seeking to prevent in Ukraine by launching Cold War 2.0, it is trying to apply to Iraq by launching GWOT 2.0, a kind of schizophrenia that only makes sense according to the rules of the Great Game.)
One major initiative to roll back ISIS’ gains in Iraq, American officials said, is the establishment of national guard units that would be recruited locally and given the main security responsibilities in their home areas.
In an echo of the Sunni Awakening, in which Iraqi tribes made common cause with American forces to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq, some of the national guard units would be drawn from local tribes. But unlike the Awakening, the soldiers would formally be part of Iraq’s security structure and would be trained on Iraqi military bases. Reporting to local governors, they would also receive salaries and pensions from the government.
The plan is intended to rebuild the fighting capability that the Iraqi government lost after much of its army faded away in the face of ISIS’ onslaught.
The decentralization of security responsibilities is also intended to ease sectarian tensions by giving Sunnis more control over their own affairs and reduce the need for the largely Shiite army to be deployed on their territory.
It would also replace the ad hoc arrangements regarding paying Awakening members that eventually led to its demise.
“The people of Anbar will take on ISIL,” the State Department official added, using an alternative name for ISIS. “The people of Nineveh will take on ISIL in Nineveh, and they will have assistance from the national army when they need it.”
“One thing Abadi has said repeatedly,” the official added, “is that he is not going to use “military units from the south and go into areas in the north and west” to fight ISIS.
But the plan still requires assistance from the United States or other nations in training and advising the Iraqi military that would back up the local forces. And it requires a major effort to enlist Sunnis in the new national guard units, persuade them to pledge loyalty to the Iraqi government and equip and train them so they would be a credible fighting force.
“So the core principle in Iraq of what comes after ISIL is now pretty well laid out,” said the State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity under the State Department’s protocol for briefing reporters. “It’s going to be a very difficult, long road to get there.”“It’s going to be a very difficult, long road to get there.” -- No kidding. In the American proposal, backed no doubt by the Saudis, Iraq will become a series of Bantustans topped by a powerful unitary Kuridstan in the north. Maybe Iraqis are tired enough of war that they will accept the fool's gold the U.S. is offering. But I doubt it. The Sadrists are strong nationalists. This means there is more chaos coming.
But don't expect any leadership from a feckless U.S. Congress. All indications are Congress will avoid any new vote on an authorization for the use of military force (AUMF). This is a great quote reported yesterday by Jonathan Weisman, Mark Landler and Jeremy Peters, "As Obama Makes Case, Congress Is Divided on Campaign Against Militants":
Democratic leaders in the Senate and Republican leaders in the House want to avoid a public vote to authorize force, fearing the unknown political consequences eight weeks before the midterm elections on Nov. 4.
“A lot of people would like to stay on the sideline and say, ‘Just bomb the place and tell us about it later,’ ” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, who supports having an authorization vote. “It’s an election year. A lot of Democrats don’t know how it would play in their party, and Republicans don’t want to change anything. We like the path we’re on now. We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long.”We're about to relaunch decades-long commitments to warfare, the Imperial Presidency completely triumphant, and Congress is too scared to even schedule a vote. This is not what democracy looks like.
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