Americans are renowned for their ingenuity. It is that creative spirit that has long been the envy of developing countries. But when it comes to foreign policy, we always seem to be fighting the last war. While we can sympathize with President Obama being stuck with his Iraq and Afghanistan inheritance, it is truly frustrating to sit by and watch the conventional (and unsuccessful) responses that characterize his actions. It is time for American ingenuity to come to the fore.
As events in Iraq and Syria have unfolded and the president has twisted himself into a pretzel trying to prevent the radical forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) from overrunning the Iraqi army — all while trying to bolster the Kurds, dragging the local “stakeholders” into the fray, adjudicating the restructuring of the irrational sectarian Iraqi government, keeping financial pressure on the Iranians, appeasing reluctant NATO allies, dealing with luddite American congressional leaders, rationalizing his own behavior to his increasingly dissatisfied political base, addressing the issues of an upcoming election and somehow continuing to feed a slow domestic economic growth rate — you might better understand why his hair continues to get grayer and his face looks drawn.
{mosads}However, there are answers. He will simply never hear them from his advisers and he won’t hear them from the commentary alive in the Beltway. These folks have a vested interest in conflict, in oversized military budgets, in policies where the depth of understanding doesn’t penetrate below an sound bite. It is a marvel at times to see that the third and fourth estate all seem to sing from the same hymnal.
The current mantra: Our national security concerns force us to reenter the fray in Iraq using air force superiority to degrade the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and provide support for the Kurds and a somewhat reformed Iraqi government. Since ISIS knows no political borders, it may be necessary to carry the fight to Syria and try to do so without openly, or indirectly, supporting the Bashar Assad regime. This we will do by organizing the neighboring states to focus on and support resistance and pressure our NATO allies to make it look like a collective response.
It’s a tricky policy initiative and it will fail and the Beltway geniuses will have American boots on the ground shortly after we sneak through the next election. As an example, just consider the interactions with Turkey. With tanks lined up along its borders with Iraq and Syria, with Iraqi and Kurdish refugees flooding across the border, with imminent danger to the city of Kobani, what does Turkey do? They publicly dispute the U.S Department of State announcement that they have agreed to give U.S. planes access to their airfields and they bomb their own Kurdish minority while refusing to defend Kobani.
Turkey is an historic ally of the United States and a member of NATO. The media describe the issue as a government in conflict; unwilling to support Kurds in Iraq while dealing with a strong separatist Kurdish population within its own borders or dragging its feet in order to gain U.S. support for toppling the Assad government as its pound of flesh for the war on ISIS.
Turkey provides the clue but the evidence is riddled throughout the region. ISIS is not perceived to be the threat to the “stakeholders” that we have thought it to be. At the very same time that we are “degrading” away with our airstrikes, the Saudis, much more concerned with their market share of oil sales, are gradually flooding that market to drive American and Canadian oil producers out of business (knowing as they do that U.S. production requires at least a $75 per barrel market price). For those who watch these things, it is no secret that oil prices have declined over 25 percent since June.
The Qataris are silently battling opposing Egyptian-backed militias in Libya, the Yemeni government is simply struggling to stay in power and Iran, which has deployed forces to support the resistance to ISIS, has no interest in pairing with the American effort. Even at home, our CIA is telling us that a policy of arming rebels simply doesn’t work.
Our strategy is articulated as being about national security. But the administration has failed to make the case. The fact is that we no longer have an historic reliance on Middle Eastern oil and the George W. Bush Doctrine of democratizing the region has been thoroughly discredited. In fact, if the case were being made that radical Islam poses a long-term threat to the U.S. and its allies, the proper response would be to follow Andrew Bacevich’s (The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism ) advice and establish a containment policy allowing the Middle East to stew it its own political juices for a couple of decades and see what comes out of it all. His point is that the people of the Middle East will make their own decisions on how to address modernity and we are foolish to try and impose ours.
Regarding our domestic fears of Americans returning home from the conflict zones and importing terrorist skills, the suggestion has been made that we let them leave, but not return. The argument is that in an open society where people are supposed to have the right and freedom to choose their way in life, zealots certainly have the right to choose to fight for their ethnic or religious beliefs. However, since that zealotry could be turned against their adopted country whose freedoms allowed for the choice, that society has a right to protect itself by insisting they give up their citizenship.
Another suggestion has been for the U.S. government to encourage zealots wanting to travel to Syria — to fight for forces other than ISIS — by training them, even if it was done sub rosa, in much the same way that 2,800 Americans trained (without government support) as a part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, the precursor to World War II. Since the U.S. government has had no luck in identifying resistance fighters it can support in opposition to the Assad regime, these fighters might well be worthy of support.
If you were to spend no more than an afternoon tracking American foreign policy pursuits in the Middle East over the past century since oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1922, it would become immediately apparent that it is embarrassing; with little or no consistency, unnecessary levels of intrigue, unlawful government behavior (as in Iran Contra), expediency versus principled behavior and gross miscalculation of the actual dynamics of the indigenous tribal societies. It is no shame to admit that one is out of one’s league. We are the ingenious society. Let’s use a little of it to get out from under.
Russell is managing director of Cove Hill Advisory Services.