U.S. Proclaims War of Extinction Against ISIS But Assad is Still the Target

From the sidelines of the NATO summit in Wales the United States has announced a war of extinction against Islamic State. This is from Helene Cooper's "U.S. and Allies Form Coalition With Intent to Destroy ISIS":

“There is no containment policy for ISIL,” Secretary of State John Kerry said at the beginning of the meeting, using an alternate acronym for ISIS. “They’re an ambitious, avowed, genocidal, territorial-grabbing, caliphate-desiring quasi state with an irregular army, and leaving them in some capacity intact anywhere would leave a cancer in place that will ultimately come back to haunt us.”

But he and other officials present made clear that at the moment, any ground combat troops would come from either Iraqi security forces and Kurdish pesh merga fighters on the ground in Iraq, or from moderate Syrian rebels opposed to the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. “Obviously I think that’s a red line for everybody here: no boots on the ground,” Mr. Kerry said.

There is a fundamental contradiction in the NATO announcement. In Syria, the U.S. and its coalition of willing nations still maintain the fiction that a moderate opposition exists to battle the jihadis. This is of course the direct opposite of everything we know. Time and again the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the favored fighting force of the United States in its war against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, has cooperated with ISIS and with Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda Syria affiliate. In fact, as recently as the beginning of last month, FSA worked with Nusra and ISIS to capture a border town in Lebanon and murder Lebanese Army soldiers and attack civilians.

This is a win for the neocons and the Gulf Sheikhdoms who cobbled together Islamic State in the first place. FSA has lost all credibility; now it is getting a new lease on life, and the Saudis will be able to continue to do what they have done all along -- fund Sunni zealots:

United States officials said they also expected Saudi Arabia to provide money and aid for moderate Syrian rebel groups. Yousef al-Otaiba, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United States, said in a statement earlier this week that the United Arab Emirates stood ready to join the fight against ISIS. “No one has more at stake than the U.A.E. and other moderate countries in the region that have rejected the regressive Islamist creed and embraced a different, forward-looking path,” the ambassador said. The Emirati government, he said, is “ready to join the international community in an urgent, coordinated and sustained effort to confront a threat that will, if unchecked, have global ramifications for decades to come.”

Enlisting the Sunni neighbors of Syria and Iraq is crucial, experts said, because airstrikes alone will not be enough to push back ISIS. The Obama administration is also seeking to pursue a sequential strategy that begins with gathering intelligence, and is followed by targeted airstrikes, more robust and better-coordinated support for moderate rebels, and finally, a political reconciliation process. 

Administration officials said that building support for moderate rebels in Syria was particularly critical. Earlier this summer, President Obama set aside $500 million to train and support vetted members of the moderate opposition to Mr. Assad of Syria; officials say they expect that Congress will approve that request to the Pentagon at the beginning of October.

But even if that money is approved, American officials will still have a tough road ahead to strengthen the Free Syrian Army, the moderates of choice for the United States. “This is going to take months,” one Defense Department official said on Friday.

So we're seeing all the canards redeployed: the moderate Sunni fighting force to be funded by the U.S. and the Gulf monarchies (in other words, the status quo); the necessity to include Sunni power brokers in the equation (status quo). There is even a reappearance of the mother of all canards -- that Assad is synonymous with poison gas. This is from spooky Rick Gladstone, "Syria May Have Hidden Chemical Arms, U.S. Says":

The United States expressed concern on Thursday that Syria’s government might be harboring undeclared chemical weapons, hidden from the internationally led operation to purge them over the past year, and that Islamist militant extremists now ensconced in that country could possibly seize control of them. 

The assertions by Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations and current president of the Security Council, were made after the Council received a private briefing on the Syria chemical weapons disarmament effort from Sigrid Kaag, the United Nations official appointed last year to coordinate it. Under Ms. Kaag, 96 percent of Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpile, including all of the most lethal materials, have been destroyed. 

But Ms. Kaag told reporters after the briefing that Syria had yet to address what she described as “some discrepancies or questions” about whether it had accounted for all of the chemical weapons in its arsenal. She also said Syria had yet to destroy seven hangars and five tunnels used for mixing and storing the weapons — which is required under the chemical weapons treaty that Syria has signed. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Hague-based group that collaborated with the United Nations in overseeing the Syrian chemical disarmament, is now responsible for ensuring that Syria honors its promise.

This is old news. The fact that it is being given a headline now is just part of the repackaging roll out of the Syrian "moderate opposition" fable. All have to be reminded that the Syrian government is an enemy not an ally against the caliphate. And the preferred method of demonizing Syria has always been to assert that the Assad regime is addicted to poison gas.

Apologists for Obama as multi-dimensional chess player will say that he has to make these moves to keep the Zionist neocons and the Gulf shiekhdoms on board. It was obvious that these two camps were opposed to airstrikes on the caliphate's seat of power in Raqqa province because it would redound to the benefit of the Syrian government. But now that the Saudis and Israelis are on board, Obama will do what he did in Amerli when U.S. forces operated in concert with the Iranian-back Iraqi Shiite militias and the Pentagon will actually work with Syria.

I hope this is true, but it is wishful thinking. A key indicator of bloated, out-of-touch power is the inability to change course, to keep applying the same formula over and over again regardless of outcome. This is what we are seeing in the Middle East because the Gulf monarchies and Israel are frightened that their regional hegemony is slipping. Ten to 20 years from now things should look very different. This can certainly be discerned in Tel Aviv and Riyadh. And that is what we are engaged in here -- the regional powers are trying to maintain control by redirecting the arc of history, to roll back the Arab Spring with salafis and saturation bombing. It is a radical undertaking.

But I think it is too late. Tim Arango had an excellent story yesterday, "Escaping Death in Northern Iraq," about a guy, Ali Hussein Kadhim, a recent recruit to the Iraqi Army when ISIS stormed Tikrit and massacred 1,700 Shiite soldiers. Kadhim escaped by playing dead and then hiding out along Tigris River before making his way to Kurdistan.

The point of Arango's article is not just Kadhim's harrowing tale of escape from death but how U.S. mandates of power sharing between Sunni and Shiite are unrealistic at this point:

The conquests of ISIS have reawakened a sense among Iraq’s Shiite majority that they are facing a threat to their very existence from Sunnis — and nothing highlights this in as dramatic a fashion as images of industrial-scale killings of Shiites in Mr. Hussein’s hometown, with the participation of the dead dictator’s tribesmen. 

In recent days the images and stories emerging from this massacre have begun receiving wide play on Iraqi state television, whose programming has also long included shows detailing the abuses of Mr. Hussein. 

Many here wonder how long the Shiites will restrain themselves from taking widespread revenge against Sunnis, and plunging the country into the sort of neighbor-killing-neighbor conflict of a few years ago.

In other countries that have confronted a brutal past, like South Africa and Bosnia, reconciliation has meant a painful process of apology and forgiveness that Iraq has never seriously pursued. 

Amer al-Khuzaie, Mr. Maliki’s adviser on reconciliation, visited South Africa last year to see if he could learn about how that country’s experience might apply to Iraq. As he toured the prison on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela had been incarcerated, he asked the tour guide how many prisoners were executed during Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment. 

“He told me 125,” Mr. Khuzaie recalled. “This is an incomparable situation between us and South Africa,” he said, referring to the trauma under Mr. Hussein. “We would have a thousand in one day.”

He added: “The culture of Iraqis does not go for forgiveness. We come from the desert; our culture is for revenge.”

Here in Diwaniya, in a region of fertile farmland where several of the soldiers killed in Tikrit were from, the collective memory is still scarred by the trauma of a Shiite uprising against Mr. Hussein’s rule in 1991 that was encouraged by American officials. But the United States then stood by as Mr. Hussein’s security forces slaughtered tens of thousands of people. 

That explains why Shiites in the Iraqi south never trusted the Americans when they invaded in 2003, even though the invasion upended the political order of Sunni domination and placed the Shiites in power. It explains, too, why many Shiites have greeted the recent American military intervention in Iraq with suspicion. 

It was not massacres against Shiites, like the one in Tikrit, that prompted American action, they say, but only because the Kurds in the north, and Yazidis, an ancient Iraqi religious minority, came under threat. 

“They might want the scenario in 1991 to happen again, when they let the Iraqi people die under the injustice of Saddam’s regime,” said Ali al-Rubaie, a representative of the Shiite religious establishment in the holy city of Najaf.