Hyping the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) threat risks generating flawed policies. The White House probably is a source of frustration, as its critics claim, but others seem too eager to commit US combat troops. Meanwhile, the administration, under constant pressure regarding the US effort, has not done enough to energize the anti-IS coalition that President Obama worked so hard to assemble. This inclines allies to believe Washington will do the heavy lifting for them.  Although addressing IS full-bore (and unilaterally) might seem appealing to some, this urge undermines the patience needed for more sensible courses of action.

The Hagel Affair

The resignation of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last month resulted in criticism that the White House is unreceptive to outside views, such as expanding the US military effort against IS. Excessive micromanagement of military related issues by the White House (including the phone line to commanders in Afghanistan that bypassed Hagel) has also been cited.

Past Presidents have done likewise. In overseas crises, many presidents created their own channels, giving White House officials more power than cabinet secretaries. Franklin Roosevelt often relied on Harry Hopkins over Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Richard Nixon used Henry Kissinger in lieu of William Rogers, and Colin Powell found himself outside the Bush administration’s inner circle. Perhaps the most extreme example of presidential micromanagement was Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War.

The Obama White House has long had dicey relations with the Pentagon. This has been, according to the Pentagon’s side of the argument, the source of delays and confusing policy directions on several issues, with the White House accused of falling into “group think.”  For his part, Hagel had complained in the early fall to National Security Advisor Susan Rice in a memo about a lack of cohesion in US policy toward IS.

Nonetheless, White House micromanagement or Pentagon-White House difficulties aside, Obama’s reluctance to ramp up the US military effort against IS excessively seems well founded. Of course, Hagel’s position is not entirely clear, but escalation had been advocated by Hagel’s two predecessors: Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.

Costs of US Escalation

IS appears ready to endure lopsided casualties to inflict some on American combat troops. And IS could follow through on this hope. Not only are its combatants fanatics, the radical Sunni militia also employs deadly suicide bombings against foes in close-up urban combat (as we’ve seen in Kobani). Additionally, IS likely hopes to get a hold of at least a few US military prisoners for filmed beheadings. So why hand IS exactly what it wants?

With large urban areas to be cleared just in Iraq—from Fallujah to Mosul—US combat troops would also likely incur casualties in excess of those suffered in 2003-08 against somewhat less fanatical Sunni Arab insurgents and Shi’a militias during the war.

American military difficulties could be further magnified by reduced interest on the part of Iraq’s Shi’a-dominated government in making the political concessions needed to split Sunni Arab tribes and other secular elements away from IS and marshal its own forces more swiftly. After all, why should Baghdad go the extra mile if the US seems willing to take care of Baghdad’s IS problem militarily?

Recently, despite lost ground in and around Ramadi west of Baghdad, Iraqi and Kurdish forces have made gains between Baghdad and Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) territory to the north. Moving up Iraq’s central line of communications, Iraqi forces have driven IS from some important territory. The siege of the vital Baiji refinery complex has been lifted, and gains have been made in the demographically mixed Diyala Governate northeast of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Kurds continue to push IS slowly westward. Baghdad and the KRG reached a temporary oil agreement yesterday that should clear the way for greater cooperation elsewhere, like battling IS.  Bitter quarrelling under former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki left Iraqi-KRG relations in shambles.

Struggling to rebound from severe reverses last summer, however, the Iraqi Army is in no position to mount a major offensive deep into IS holdings. However, successful Iraqi and Kurdish attacks demonstrate the vulnerability of IS’s vast perimeter. Strong IS forces cannot be everywhere at once to repel various challenges and adequately support ongoing attacks (such as its effort against Kobani).

In terms of a military threat, IS has been largely contained. It cannot advance northward against Turkey; isolated pro-IS sympathies exist in Jordan, but the highly professional Jordanian Army would be a tough nut to crack; and in Iraq, most all Shi’a and Kurdish areas lie outside IS control and are fighting hard to maintain this status. In Syria, IS could advance against weaker rebel forces like the Free Syrian Army, but it seems obsessed with seizing Kobani despite heavy losses.

Coalition and US Escalation

The anti-IS coalition the White House assembled is contributing relatively little to the overall military effort, despite Secretary of State John Kerry’s glowing rhetoric at today’s coalition conclave in Brussels. The air campaign is mainly an American show. Committing more US assets would make it easier for others already foot-dragging over contributions to continue dithering. Now is not the time to ramp up US military efforts, but rather to pressure allies to increase their own contributions.

The bulk of IS’s reinforcements in the form of foreign fighters flow through NATO ally Turkey. The CIA in September and the UN more recently sharply increased their estimate of the number of foreign fighters reaching the Islamic State. To date, Turkey has been more helpful to IS than the coalition because of its passivity. If it cannot be pressured to vigorously interdict incoming fighters, IS would be able to replace many lost fighters—although with less experienced cadres.

The White House (and other allies) must press Turkey harder. President Obama delayed air support for beleaguered Syrian Kurds for two weeks in deference to Turkish concerns (allowing IS to gain a foothold inside Kobani). Even today’s 60-nation gathering seems short on clear goals, let alone a robust military agenda on contributions.

Admittedly, although the Administration has done too little diplomatic spadework, its leverage overseas probably has been undermined by American politicians, pundits, and many in the media demanding an expanded US effort. 

Bottom Line

IS remains a daunting foe, so it will not be defeated easily, soon, or completely. To Americans pressing urgently for quick solutions, this is difficult to accept. But comments like one yesterday by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chair of the House Foreign Relations Middle East and North Africa Sub-Committee, suggesting IS could damage everyone’s way of life are typical of exaggerations impeding objective policymaking.

Yet those claiming the air campaign has been ineffective are also naïve. IS has mostly ground to a halt. In some places, like Kobani, IS is hemorrhaging combat casualties. Meanwhile IS’s infrastructure, leadership, training camps, heavy weapons, oil refineries, and lines of communication have been hammered by the ongoing aerial bombardment. This week, assets in IS’s “capital” of Raqqa, Syria were also subjected to a wave of airstrikes.

Many want IS crushed quickly out of fear of IS attacks against the American homeland. Yet, as we saw in Afghanistan in 2001-02 with al-Qaeda, the combatants would not be completely rounded up should substantial US forces be sent in. Many hundreds at the very least would escape to find refuge elsewhere. In that scenario, IS would likely shift toward an international terrorist mode, posing an even greater threat to the United States. Therefore, a more collective effort—forcing IS to truly understand that it faces dozens of foes and not just a few—would be a wiser way forward. It is meanwhile imperative to strip IS of as many of its non-extremist Sunni Arab allies as possible, so they do not have to be dealt with militarily.

Photo: President Obama addresses reporters during a meeting with th anti-IS coalition on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2014

by Robert E. Hunter

At West Point last May, President Obama said that “Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.” He continued “…US military action cannot be the only—or even primary—component of our leadership in every instance.”

With the growing crisis over the spread of the Ebola virus, not just in West African countries but also now in the United States, the appropriate response to the president’s words should be a rousing “And how!”

The fact is that even after the end of the Cold War returned to us the security of the two broad oceans that we lost in December 1941, the application of resources to the US role in the world has not adjusted to that reality. Even the “wake up call” of 9/11 did not require the level of response that the US applied. We did not have to try remaking Afghanistan in a Western image after toppling the Taliban. We did not need to invade Iraq and try there, too, to remake a society when we had no capacity to do so—a lesson we should have learned in Vietnam. Even in accepting that the US would continue to have interests abroad and would continue to be looked to by so many countries as the “indispensable nation,” we didn’t have to focus that task, year upon year, on—very expensive—military instruments.

Since the end of the Cold War, a succession of administrations, along with every Congress since the opening of the Berlin Wall, has refused to conduct a serious review of US engagement in the outside world—what really matters to us?—and to accept that the military instrument is only one tool, and an increasingly smaller tool compared to what can be lumped together as “non-military instruments.” Even when we throw in to the mix of essential interests the promoting of American values, the military is rarely the biggest part of the answer. Sometimes, it has been necessary in “holding the ring,” as NATO did in Europe until the Soviet Union fell apart because of the rot in the system; but even then the US military was only the “shield,” not the “sword” of change.

Since the end of the Cold War, we have failed to follow Isaiah’s admonition: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” Rather, at least in relative terms, we followed Joel—the latest word in the Old Testament on this subject: “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears.”

There is no need to rehearse the trials and errors in US foreign and security policy in the post-Cold War world, at least in dealing with the causes of conflict and how to prevent them.

Just look at the numbers: we have spent three trillion dollars and more on Afghanistan and Iraq, but a mere pittance on helping other societies help themselves. We spend $7.3 billion on the Transportation Security Administration, and we take off our outer garments and our shoes every time we get on an airplane, but until this past weekend there was next to no effort put into containing the spread of one of the most hideous diseases that has come down the pike since the Black Death several centuries ago. Ask yourself: if you were to get on a plane, tomorrow, coming from some international departure point, which would you be more worried about: a terrorist bomb or a passenger infected with Ebola and entering the phase of being contagious?

For the fiscal year that has just started, the Pentagon has asked for $495.6 billion just in base budget authority while the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention get about $37 billion between them—and that is for everything. Using the categories of the Office of Management and Budget, military matters get, depending on the finer points of definition, between 13:1 and 17:1 as much as all non-military US government engagement in the outside world put together.

During the Clinton administration, the late Senator Jesse Helms engineered the demise of the United States Information Agency—a major element of showing people who we are rather than just telling them what a particular administration wants them to hear; and he nearly crippled the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Even now, USAID (2015 budget request: $1.4 billion) has to rely to a major extent on contractors and, while we heard recently that it is fielding 2,800 hospital beds in West Africa to meet the Ebola outbreak, it should have been able to field 10,000 or even 100,000.

The US military does an outstanding job in helping people in need in disaster zones, and is now beginning to help in places affected by Ebola, but why should the Pentagon have to take the lead, rather than other agencies far better equipped in terms of people and technique? Simple answer: one has the bucks and the congressional interest-group backing, the other goes begging.

President Obama has done better than his recent predecessors in talking up what the United States needs to do to show the world the values that we are made of, as well as analyzing many of the causes of what ails the less developed and more conflicted parts of the world. But his budget people, along with the “military industrial complex” (now 53 years since being called out by President Dwight Eisenhower) and Congress haven’t got the message. This is the message about what directly threatens the United States and what the American people really need their government to do in order to feel—and to be—more secure.

As the United States ramps up to fight yet another war in the Middle East, it is not ready to deal with so many other matters of direct importance to the American people (Ebola, etc.) or that could help keep new wars from being necessary. (By the way, at the moment 59 US embassies abroad do not have an ambassador because of Senate deadlock on confirmations). The White House, which is supposed to take the lead, has been largely silent about asking Congress for the resources needed to do the diplomacy, the aid, the involvement of non-military government agencies, the support of non-governmental organizations, and the mobilization of other countries to act with us (where, in fact, we are near the bottom of the heap among members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of GDP share spent on foreign assistance: a mere .19 percent). Even in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, where we have had a heavy footprint, there has been grossly inadequate engagement of most of the US government’s non-military agencies that could be delivering a lot more in areas that include health, education, counter-narcotics, rule of law, and other human resources.

As Americans—and as members of the human species—our hats should be off to organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carter Center, and Doctors Without Borders for what they are doing in the realm of global health, including in West Africa. But where is the president’s leadership and Congress’ followership in terms of a critical shift of resources? The “nail” that has to be hit right now is Ebola, but our leaders have so far been unwilling to build the right hammer. They are instead building more military hammers that are even less relevant to American security.

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The Obama administration has admitted that it misjudged the extremists who set up the Islamic State in chunks of territory torn from Iraq and Syria. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, confessed that his analysts underestimated the “will to fight” of the jihadists. He also linked it to intelligence failures of the past, such as similar underestimations of the Vietnamese in the 1960s.

At the same time, critics have castigated the Obama administration for its apparent lack of a “will to fight.” According to this line of argument, the president should have armed the moderate Syrian rebels back when the civil war broke out in that country. He should have bombed the country when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his opponents. He shouldn’t have withdrawn U.S. troops from Iraq.

The Islamic State has shown a passionate devotion to struggle. The Obama administration has shown an equally passionate devotion to conflict avoidance. In making this stark contrast, U.S. hawks pay a backhand compliment to the Islamic State: at least they are fighting for what they fervently believe in.

This failure to fight in the Levant is part of a larger critique of Obama as an agnostic. He doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism or the American economic system (no matter how many times Obama has in fact reaffirmed his faith in both). He wasn’t even born in this country, two out of five Americans still suspect, so how could he fully embrace America? And on war and peace issues, he has emerged as the ultimate betrayer of the national interest by giving ground to America’s enemies across the globe. He is a wimp, a traitor, the “coward-in-chief.”

There are two possible responses to this inaccurate picture. The first is to paint a picture of Obama as a president who judiciously uses military force. He has, for instance, been very clear about not sending ground troops into the fight against the Islamic State, even though the top brass believes that destroying IS—as opposed to simply degrading its capabilities—will eventually require “boots on the ground.” The president has also carefully assembled a coalition of international actors to provide multilateral cover in the latest escalation of the conflict in the region. Elsewhere in the world, the administration hasn’t intervened in Ukraine or gone head to head with China in the South China Sea. It has made strong statements, reassured allies, upped arms transfers, and even resorted to various covert strategies. But the president has generally avoided direct confrontation.

Combine this trajectory of restraint with the president’s statements on prioritizing diplomacy and you get the image that the administration would like to cultivate: the current government is committed to “smart power” as opposed to the blunt application of “dumb power” that previous presidents (i.e., George W. Bush) wielded. There is some truth to this picture.

But let’s consider the other alternative: President Obama is no less committed to military action than any of his predecessors. He might personally have a less gung-ho disposition than, say, George W. Bush. But Obama’s personality is only a small part of the equation. Despite the putative end of the Cold War, the United States has remained on a war footing. The national security apparatus is programmed for intervention. What we see now taking place in the skies above Syria and Iraq is not an exception to the Obama-as-pacifist rule. It is a summation of a particular evolution in U.S. militarism toward the asymmetrical warfare of dispensing death at a distance.

For those who doubt the “will to fight” in the White House today, a quick glance at a recent Congressional Research Service report—Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2014—should dispel the misconception. Approximately 31 pages cover this 216-year history. The first 18 pages take the reader from the undeclared war between the United States and France in 1798 to the first deployments of the George W. Bush era. The next five pages list the military engagements of Bush’s two terms. Which leaves roughly eight pages for the as-yet-uncompleted Obama tenure.

By the end of Obama’s second term, he’ll likely be responsible for more than a quarter of all uses of the armed forces abroad in the history of the United States. It should be noted that this list also includes U.S. military participation in peacekeeping missions, earthquake relief, and the like. On the other hand, it doesn’t include the widespread use of air strikes and missile attacks, which have increasingly substituted for the deployment of U.S. armed forces.

In 2014 alone, the Obama administration sent an additional battalion to South Korea in January, several hundred U.S. personnel to pursue the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda in March, several hundred advisors to Iraq in June to assess the threat of the Islamic State, another 130 “assessors” to Iraqi Kurdistan in August to deal with the Yazidi problem, and 600 soldiers also in August to Poland as “reassurance” in the wake of the civil war in Ukraine. The list doesn’t include the air strikes in Syria and Iraq against the Islamic State and several other targets, recent drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, or the dispatch of 3,000 U.S. soldiers to Liberia to address the Ebola epidemic.

So, despite the rants of those hoping to goad the president into buying his very own piece of quagmire in the Middle East, the Obama administration has shown considerable “will to fight.” The problem with the current fight against the Islamic State is that, the adversary’s obvious barbarism notwithstanding, U.S. objectives are not entirely clear. Here are four concerns that should indeed undercut any thinking person’s “will to fight” in this particular situation:

The threat of terrorism – The Islamic State has decapitated its hostages, including American journalists, and routinely engages in atrocities against a wide variety of people. But it has no capability of launching any attacks on the United States. Indeed, the furthest it has gone has been to incite people within the countries arrayed against it to launch “lone wolf” attacks. To justify its latest strikes in Syria, the Obama administration held up “imminent” terrorist attacks devised by a shadowy organization called the Khorasan Group. But even these “imminent” attacks, in the wake of the Syria strikes, were downgraded to merely “aspirational.” It’s easier, of course, to justify a war if Americans feel directly threatened, as they did from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (though the former turned into a fight against the Taliban and the latter never materialized). IS will continue to make threats as long as they produce the result it wants: American soldiers to fight against on the battlefield and a “crusade” it can rail against to drum up more support.

The benefits for Assad – War is never an easy sell, but it’s particularly difficult if it’s against an enemy of your enemy. The Obama administration naturally has not emphasized the benefits that accrue to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad when U.S. air strikes degrade the capabilities of one of his leading opponents. But Syrian diplomats have not been shy to trumpet this self-serving interpretation.

The nature of the “moderate” Syrian forces – The air attacks against Syria are part of a larger policy that includes training Syrian rebels in Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region. The program, which will cost $500 million, is slated to train 5,000 rebels in the first year. The trainees are naturally expected to fight against the Islamic State. But frankly their main objective has been to topple the Assad regime, and it’s not inconceivable that at some point they might team up with the extremists if that advances their prime directive.

It doesn’t help that the United States is wading into a situation where alliances and ideologies seem to change on a daily basis. Case in point: the Nusra Front (Jabhat al-Nusra). It’s affiliated with al-Qaeda, but it also has fought alongside the Free Syrian Army (FSA). When the United States listed the Nusra Front as a target of air strikes, many FSA fighters balked. “As long as al-Nusra, whose members are mostly Syrians, did not attack the Syrian people while fighting the regime, we are against targeting it,” explained an FSA leader on the northern front. It’s a war going on over there: “moderate” is a word that juts doesn’t make sense in an increasingly brutal environment.

The slippery slope of advisors – Although the president has drawn a red line on the issue of U.S. boots on the ground in this conflict, he has fudged the issue by sending over advisors to help with the targeting. He has also warned the U.S. public that this will not be a quick mission, like the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. It’s useful to remember that U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War also began with advisors—in 1950. At that time, we were helping the French in what would be a losing effort. Later, after the partition of the country in 1954, Washington tried to keep the South Vietnamese government afloat (sound familiar?). By 1963, 16,000 U.S. advisors were in country. So, considering the complexity of the war in Syria and Iraq, we might well see a similar “advisor phase” that grows and grows until, surprise: boots on the ground.

These four caveats make the application of “smart power” by the Obama administration look increasingly dumb. There were good reasons for the president to hesitate before intervening directly in the past. He was not Hamlet seized by an existential crisis. He understood the significant trade-offs and calculated that intervention was not worth it.

But that was before domestic political pressure combined with the demands of a national security state still geared to fight a long war on terror. Obama, in the end, indeed showed that he did not have the will to fight. He was willing to stand up against the Islamic State. But he didn’t have the courage to stand up against his more hawkish opponents in Congress and the media.

—John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus. This article was first published by FPIF and was reprinted here with permission.

by Robert E. Hunter

Since the United States invaded Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, and began an era of major military operations in Southwest Asia and the Middle East, “what next” has been sometimes posed, but never adequately answered.

To this day, it is not possible to define what the US would realistically like to see happen in the region. Instead, it has limited itself to tactical steps (e.g., degrade and destroy al-Qaeda and the Islamic State) or Mission Impossible, the total remaking of essentially alien societies.

Direct terrorist threats to the US from Southwest Asia and the Middle East have substantially declined, but efforts to create a New Afghanistan and New Iraq have almost totally failed. The cost: many thousands of Americans killed along with many more locals, tens of thousands maimed, and three trillion dollars and counting.

The US has committed several key errors, some out of lack of knowledge, some out of the felt need to respond to external events, and some in misguided response to the desires of US partners in the region.

After 9/11, the US chose not only to extirpate those responsible for the first attack on the continental United States since 1814, but also to overthrow the Taliban regime, occupy the country, pull in all 27 other NATO allies to help, and try—but fail—to create a New Afghanistan. Then in 2003, a small group of advisors around President George W. Bush leveraged popular reaction to 9/11 to invade Iraq, one of the greatest foreign policy mistakes in US history.

The results have to be seen as having made the late Osama bin Laden the most powerful—or at least the most consequential—person in the world so far in this century.

With the invasion of Iraq, the US blundered into the midst of civil war in the Middle East. It overthrew a Sunni regime that dominated a Shia majority population. Most of the troubles the US now faces in the Middle East flow from that fact. Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states have sought to “redress the balance,” in particular by getting the US to overthrow the minority Alawite (Shia) regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. But in deciding at least in principle to do so, Washington never asked the question “What next?” and the linked question “Cui bono?” (“Who benefits?”). Or if it did pose these questions to itself, it never adequately answered them, certainly never in public.

Thus the United States became an active party in a Sunni-Shia civil war, first unwittingly on the Shia side (invasion of Iraq) and subsequently on the Sunni side. It has also been supporting the geopolitical interests of states that oppose Iran, among other countries, which are competing for power among themselves, thus double-binding the US in support of others’ regional agendas that should mean little or nothing to the United States and its interests.

Meanwhile, radical Islamist fundamentalists in a number of Sunni states poured ideology, money, and arms into Syria, as well as elsewhere in the region. Among other things, these terrorist-promoters have fostered the killing of US and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. It is not apparent that either of the last two US administrations has done anything effective to stop this flow of death from supposedly friendly Gulf Arab states.

The rise of the Islamic State (IS) seemed to catch the US by surprise, in what was an intelligence failure equal to that before 9/11. It was, however, a logical outcome of tolerating the spread of Islamist fundamentalism, along with money and arms to support it, plus calling for Assad’s overthrow without considering the likely consequences. Then came the beheading of two American journalists (now followed by the beheadings of a Briton and a Frenchman), which spurred President Obama to what is now major military action to “degrade and destroy” IS and to renewed US direct engagement in a Middle Eastern conflict with an almost completely unknowable outcome.

This has made the masked terrorist who carried out the first beheadings the second most powerful person so far in the 21st century.

The emergence of Pure Evil is a “special case” and imposes a moral imperative to act, though not just by the United States. But even if there is nearly universal repugnance to IS and its grisly business, and a united effort to expunge it, each and every country and sub-national group in the region is calculating its own interests and opportunities and what it can gain for itself from the willingness of the United States to act.

In its efforts to counter IS, which Obama put most clearly and dramatically in his speech last week to the United Nations General Assembly, the United States, among other things, has thus become even more fully immersed in the interlocking regional civil wars of Sunni/Shia and geopolitical competitions. “Exploiting America” has returned to the fore across the region.

In the process, the US will step up arms supplies to so-called moderates in Syria, in the hope that they will turn these weapons just against IS and not against Assad. Yet the question “What Next?” following Assad’s overthrow still goes unanswered. Indeed, the likely result would be a mess even worse than the current one, certainly an intensified Syrian civil war and its spilling over elsewhere even more than now. At a Senate hearing this month, three US Senators posed this problem to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey. In response, they more or less waved a magic wand and said that such a diversion of weapons from the counter-IS battle to the counter-Assad battle would not happen.

Meanwhile, the United States seems uncertain on whether or not to welcome Iranian support in countering IS, and appears to change its mind on an almost daily basis. As with Syria’s Assad, the US has major issues with Iran, in particular the time-bound negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program as well as Iran’s continued hostility toward Israel. Here, too, the US is failing to ask and answer the relevant questions about the key US security interests in the region.

Life is unfair, as John Kennedy said, and it is unfair that the US is expected, by one and all, to take the lead in trying to sort out the spreading mess in the heart of the Middle East. But if it is even to begin getting things right, within the limits that anyone, in or out of the region, can get things right, the United States has to create a clear set of goals and methods. These must include backing off on trying to overthrow the Assad regime until it is possible—if it is possible—to work toward a process whereby all groups in Syria, including Alawites, will have some sort of guarantee that they will not be slaughtered in a situation of complete chaos.

These goals and methods have to include a stop, a full stop, to the export of ideology and hate, money and arms, from the Sunni states to IS, al-Qaeda, and other terrorists. They have to include greater participation in the Middle East by America’s NATO allies and the European Union against terrorism and its causes, in politics and economics if not in military action. To paraphrase Robert Browning on Heaven: “Or what’s an alliance for?” They have to include a reasonable approach to what we must hope is the concluding phase of the nuclear talks with Iran, plus Iran’s adoption of a reasonable foreign policy, while understanding that it will never be fully accepted back in the world unless it stops certain collateral efforts, as in the Israeli-Palestine conflict where Tehran has no legitimate national interest.

At the same time, the US has a right to ask Pakistan to stop activities that decrease the chances that Afghanistan will have a chance to succeed as a nation after the US and NATO radically reduce their force engagement at the end of this year. The US has a right to ask the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to stop his efforts (paralleling those by some of the Gulf Arab states) to cause the nuclear talks with Iran to fail.

The day has passed when regional parties, purporting to be friends and allies, can ask the United States to sort out their problems while offering little or nothing in return—or even making matters worse for America.

At heart, the Obama administration needs, finally, to seriously answer the question: “What Next?” along with the connected questions “What For?” (that is, “What are our real interests?”) and “How, over time, can we get there?” Until these questions are answered to the best of the administration’s ability and until it acts upon the answers, Osama bin Laden and the masked IS butcher will continue to be the 21st century’s two most consequential people.

by Bernard Chazelle

In matters of battle, there are certain things we’ve come to expect. The pairwise nature of combat, for example. From the playing fields of Eton to the morne plaine of Waterloo, sports and war alike feature two rival sides with an attitude. They come in pairs. One day, Federer shows Nadal how it’s done; the next day, Bush takes on Saddam. Threesomes are uncommon. George Foreman didn’t climb into the ring to tussle with Ali and Frazier. Though no friend of Hitler or Stalin, FDR knew better than to declare war on both of them. Nor did he try to resurrect the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact so more panzer divisions could be in Normandy to greet the GIs. As far as we know, Eisenhower didn’t drop free weaponry for the Nazis to use before the Battle of the Bulge. And Nazi is what they were: not Nazoo, Noozi, or NZ depending on whom you asked. The enemy had a name we all agreed upon. Certain things about combat we’ve come to expect.

Well, expect no more. In the Middle East, the old battle script is quaint. ISIS is our new enemy. Or perhaps it is ISIL, or IS, or Daesh, or the Caliphate, or something. The point is, we have an enemy that “we need to fight there so we won’t have to fight it here.” It seems a pity because we share so much. They hate Bashar al-Assad and so do we. They can’t stand the Persian ayatollahs and neither can we. They have it in for al-Qaeda in Syria and who doesn’t? They draw their spiritual inspiration from our oldest ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, a corrupt theocracy known for its black gooey stuff and religious fanaticism. In the same month ISIS beheaded James Foley, our Saudi associates carried out 19 public beheadings, including a man accused of witchcraft. Our kind of friends.

The US-Saudi axis is key to understanding the rise of ISIS. Despite its public reticence, Riyadh supported the war in Iraq in 2003. Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was still fresh in Saudi memory, so letting Bush finish his dad’s job was fine by the House of Saud. They had another reason to be appreciative. A recent Wikileaks document reveals how cuddly King Abdullah feels about Iran: “[The US should] cut off the head of the snake.” The invasion, it was hoped, would lock Iraq into the Saudi orbit and build a firewall to keep the heretic Shias at bay. Alas, the neocon dream turned into a Saudi nightmare, as Bush’s fiasco pushed Iraq right into the arms of Iran and raised the specter of a Tehran-Baghdad-Damascus axis. The Saudis freaked out and launched Operation “Down with the Shias.”

A catastrophic de-Ba’athification policy had created the ideal terrain for a sectarian war in Iraq. The once-dominant Sunnis had trouble adjusting to their new status as an oppressed minority. Formerly mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad were ethnically cleansed and Shia leaders redoubled their efforts to give the Sunnis something to be mad about. Riyadh couldn’t take the fight to Tehran, so a Sunni-Shia war was the next best thing. Perhaps only the geniuses in Washington believed this could end well, but the Gulf states foresaw a Shia crescent descending upon the region and decided it was time to panic. The sectarian war was on.

Israel had two reasons to go along with the anti-Shia pushback. One was that a nuclear Iran would threaten its regional hegemony. After Iran’s victory in the US-Iraq war, the urge for Israel to defang the ayatollahs had become irresistible. The other factor at play was Iran’s Lebanese client, Hezbollah, which fought the IDF to a stalemate in 2006 and caused Israel to question its deterrent capacity. (The case of Hamas is more complicated because its two patrons, Iran and Qatar, are at loggerheads over Syria). Israel’s will is America’s command, so to see Washington sing from the same hymnal was no surprise. But the US also had its own reasons to join in the anti-Iran chorus.

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Just as Israel fingers Iran as its sole threat to regional dominance, the US knows that only China and Russia can imperil its position as world hegemon. China is a lost cause. The containment fantasies behind the much-touted “Pivot to Asia” died at birth and will not be revived. Last month, with little fanfare, China dethroned the US as the world’s largest economy, one of several reasons the Middle Kingdom is out of America’s hegemonic range. Russia is a different story. It is a midsize economic power. Yet it remains the biggest country in the world, its second nuclear power, and a necessary component of any “world order.” Ukraine and Syria are the current battlegrounds for the containment of Russia. King Abdullah can decapitate witches all he wants, he’s our best-friend-forever. But Vladimir Putin cannot just be a recalcitrant leader with legitimate concerns about the encirclement of his country by NATO forces. Hillary needs to assure us that he is the new Hitler, a comparison of exquisite vulgarity given Russian history. (Now, it is true that Putin illegally invaded Crimea with the overwhelming support of the locals—quite unlike our own illegal invasions, which tend to piss off the natives.)

It is common knowledge in foreign policy circles that the US is not in the Middle East for the oil but for its control. Europe relies on Russia for a third of its gas supply and is more than open to American attempts to reduce its dependency on Gazprom. With US blessing, Qatar lobbied hard to get its North Field gas reserve, the largest in the world, pipelined to Turkey and Europe while bypassing Russia. Assad, a Russia client, balked, and negotiated with Iran a passage for the latter’s South Pars gasfield in the Persian Gulf (adjacent to the North Field). An Iran-Iraq-Syria route would be a Gulf state nightmare and an American headache. It would also dash Ankara’s hopes of playing gatekeeper to European energy needs. The US-Saudi axis could put up with Assad’s murderous policies, but a pipeline from Iran, now that was going too far! Saudi Arabia dispatched its Intelligence chief, Prince Bandar, to Moscow to read Putin the riot act: Stop your support of Assad or expect a nasty Chechen surprise at the Sochi Olympics. Fluent in mafioso language, Putin became furious and made it clear to the sandbox princeling that he didn’t take orders from a terrorist-coddling camel herder. Moscow would stick with Assad and stick it to the sheiks.

With no Syria policy to speak of, Washington pivoted to Ukraine, only to show the world what Western impotence really looks like. Taking their cue from Obama, the leaders of Britain and France threatened the new Hitler with sanctions so painful he’d soon be begging on his knees for mercy: no camembert and pudding for him! Of course, Russia was still welcome to park its oligarchs’ money in London, get its assault ships from Paris (now on hold), and buy its usual $100 billion worth of goods from Berlin every year. But no dessert—that’ll teach him! To be fair, Obama’s Russia policy could have been worse: we could be at war with Moscow. By any other measure, it has been an unmitigated disaster. Putin will soon have achieved all of his objectives in Ukraine, a fact that President Poroshenko all but conceded recently by granting autonomy to the pro-Russia Donbass rebels. Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland can go back to handing out cookies in Kiev: her darling Yatsenyuk has resigned as prime minister and Washington’s plans are in tatters.

Consider the blowback: Moscow and Beijing signed a draft currency swap agreement to bypass the dollar in bilateral payments; the BRICS countries set up their own $100 billion development bank to counter the dominance of the IMF and the World Bank; Putin and the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, agreed to a game-changing $400 billion gas deal after years of stalled negotiations. Nothing like Western sanctimony backed by sanctions to make Russia and China find love. Meanwhile, with its economy mired in quasi-perpetual recession, the West has turned Teddy Roosevelt’s adage on its head: Speak loudly and carry a small stick.

********************

From 10,000 feet, the geopolitics of the Middle East shows a semblance of coherence: a Washington-Riyadh petrodollar axis aligned against a rising Shia crescent backed by Russia, the whole thing played against the backdrop of a race for global dominance combined with blind US support for Israel. The neat rationality of this narrative is an illusion. A closer look reveals a world of Jabberwocky absurdity. While, in March 2011, Saudi troops rolled into Bahrain to repress the Arab Spring aspirations of its people, the Gulf states cunningly seized the zeitgeist of liberation to hijack the peaceful anti-Assad movement. Naturally, the one point of agreement between Bashar and the sheiks was that peace was not an option. Qatar and Saudi Arabia may not be on speaking terms but they found common ground in funding, training, and arming the Syria rebels.

Not the Free Syrian Army, mind you, that hapless bunch of weekend warriors who look ferocious only in the feverish minds of Hillary Clinton and John McCain, but the only two groups in Syria capable of fighting Assad: ISIS and the local al-Qaeda branch (Jabhat al-Nusra). As Steve Clemons reported in the Atlantic, Qatar took the latter under its wing and Saudi Arabia took care of ISIS. There you had two of our closest allies in the Arab world funding the newest branches of the 9/11 franchise. McCain’s reaction to CNN in Jan. 2014? “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar!” When it became clear last spring that the Faustian deal had turned sour and ISIS had the Saudis in its crosshairs, Bandar was fired (McCain was not). ISIS is self-funded at this point—smuggling oil at discount rates along the Turkish border is its principal source of revenue—so cracking down on private financing from the Gulf is largely moot at this point.

The civil war in Syria gave the West a chance to recover its delusional optimism from the early days of the Iraq war. While Obama has repeatedly called the end of the Assad regime a certainty, even a sober analyst like Juan Cole predicted in January of last year that Iranian influence would wither and Assad would be gone by 2014. What happened is the exact opposite. Iran is in the driver’s seat and Assad has never been stronger. The only forces posing a credible threat to ISIS are Assad’s army, Hezbollah, Iran, and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Washington opposes all four of them. Think of FDR preparing for D-Day and refusing help from Britain, Canada, and the French Résistance. Obama is precisely where ISIS wants him to be: fighting the Islamic State while denying himself any chance of success. With ISIS firmly ensconced in urban areas, airstrikes will do little besides boosting recruitment for the group. The Islamic State publicly welcomed the US decision to arm the “moderate” rebels, confident that the weapons will eventually be theirs. In fact, thanks to the cracker jack squads of US-trained Iraqi forces, ISIS is already in possession of a whole arsenal of American weaponry.

Most experts agree that, unlike bin Laden’s organization, ISIS has chosen to focus its ire on the near-enemy and not on the West. Obama is intent on proving them wrong. His policy, such as it is, will help Assad stay in power (so much for regime change) and create a new generation of Western jihadists coming home as fully-trained terrorists. The US president must have in mind a repeat of the 2007 Sunni Awakening which put an end to al-Qaeda in Iraq. This is sure to fail for three reasons: first, the US no longer has 150,000 troops on the ground; second, scared of ISIS as they are, the Iraqi Sunnis are even more afraid of the Shia militias out for revenge; third, ISIS is mostly based in Syria (hence the US airstrikes on Raqqa, in blatant violation of the sort of international law that matters only when Putin breaks it). As for the brilliant idea of training the Iraqi army, words fail. The US has been doing just that for the last 10 years at a cost of $25 billion, and we all know how effective that was. Last June, a mere 800 ISIS fighters defeated 30,000 US-trained soldiers and took over Mosul, making off with millions of dollars worth of American military equipment. No problem, says Washington: more training will do the trick. As has been said, doing the same thing and expecting different results is a definition of insanity.

Speaking of insane, ISIS surely fits the bill. Yet there is a logic to the madness. The undeniable lunacy of the Islamic State is not a collective pathology of which the US can easily wash its hands. Until Bush came along, jihadists controlled a few musty caves in Tora Bora, not large swathes of Iraqi, Syrian, Libyan, and Nigerian territory. The self-proclaimed Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was imprisoned by the US at Iraq’s Camp Bucca, usually not a fate conducive to mental balance. More to the point, Iraq has been in a continuous state of war since 1980. All of the last four American presidents have bombed the country. The Bush family alone started two wars against Iraq. Bill Clinton imposed grotesque sanctions that condemned half a million Iraqi children to a premature death, a price that his State Secretary assured us on “60 Minutes” was worth it. And we call ourselves surprised when the world’s largest PTSD ward extends its tentacles across Iraq and Syria through suicide, mass rape, and crucifixion. We stare into the abyss we’ve created and wonder why it stares back at us.

Obama’s policy is based on a contradiction. We hear that ISIS is such a global danger that the war America ended three years ago needs to be refought; yet how bad can it be if it requires neither ground troops nor the forces that could actually defeat it? Electoral politics is at work and it is no surprise that Obama’s call for war came in the wake of much-publicized beheadings of American journalists. His anti-ISIS partners form a “coalition of the unwilling” that cannot even agree on the enemy: one hears reports of US-funded Syria rebels signing non-aggression pacts with ISIS in order to focus on Assad. Obama’s war is a tragic American farce.

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What should be done? The prevailing confusion over ISIS gives Obama a unique opportunity to break new ground. The first step is to re-engage Iran by concluding the current nuclear talks with the lifting of all sanctions. Times are changing. The Gulf states will eventually fade as a quirk of history but Iran will always be one of the world’s major countries. Nothing would do more for regional peace than to dissolve the noxious US-Saudi axis and bring Iran back in from the cold. The second step is to defuse the new Cold War with Russia. Putin is authoritarian, an oligarch’s friend, and—his real crime in Western eyes—an Asianizer. Oddly enough, the new Hitler is not nearly as autocratic as Yeltsin, the former drunken darling of the West who shelled Russia’s parliament with tanks in 1993 and started the war in Chechnya the following year. If one could do business with Yeltsin so one can with Putin. Obama knows this better than anyone, having had his bacon saved by the man right after the Ghouta chemical attacks last year. The US had its 15 minutes of unipolarity. A failure to engage with Russia and Iran will only hasten its decline.

Except for its new Western recruits crossing the long Turkish border into Syria, everybody hates ISIS. Defusing the Sunni-Shia tension and ending the antiquated proxy conflicts between the US and Russia would reshuffle the deck so dramatically that ISIS would find its local support dwindling. The alternative is to wait for ISIS to burn itself out, which is the current, unspoken American strategy. This will prolong Assad’s murderous rule as well as invigorate the new dictatorship in Egypt, which thrives on regional chaos.

In the Middle East, nothing is what it seems. Saudi Arabia has a defense budget four times as big as Israel’s, yet it couldn’t defeat Andorra if it tried. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel calls ISIS “a threat to the civilized world,” conveniently forgetting that the group didn’t exist until we intervened. After 150,000 deaths in Syria, the US suddenly makes a U-turn and aligns its interests with the Butcher of Damascus. Try to make sense of this timeline if you can: in 2009, Assad and Kerry have an intimate dinner with their wives in a Damascus restaurant, a touching moment captured in pictures broadcast all over the web; in 2013, Kerry compares his former dinner companion to Adolf Hitler; in 2014, all is forgiven and the US throws its lot with Assad against ISIS.

It would be a mistake to dismiss this theater of the absurd as the work of leaders who can’t think straight. The one nonnegotiable constraint is that self-determination is an option that the US and Europe have categorically ruled out for the region. If the consequences are spelled in the language of terror and civil war, so be it. We’ll put out the fires when we have to. Experts will be wheeled in to explain in somber tones why the situation is so dire it requires the dispatch of our newest, shiniest fire trucks. Very serious essayists (not this one obviously) will address the optimal positioning of the water hoses and the training of the new firemen. Only grumpy contrarians will ask why there are so many damn fires in this town. And the show will go on, with its stream of beheadings and airstrikes. Until, one day, the Chinese inform us that we might as well stop piling the corpses because the world has moved on and no one is paying attention any more.

—Bernard Chazelle is Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He is currently on sabbatical at the College de France in Paris and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the author of the book, “The Discrepancy Method,” an investigation into the power of randomness in computing, his current research focuses on “natural algorithms” and the algorithmic complexity of living matter. He has written extensively about politics and music.

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by Jim Lobe

Following up on Paul Pillar’s excellent takedown of Dennis Ross’s remarkably crude display of Islamophobia (whereby Saudi Arabia is considered a “non-Islamist state,” while Syria’s Baathist regime is “Islamist”), it seems we can add Iranophobia to the list of the somewhat irrational feelings held by the man who was supposed to coordinate Iran policy during much of Obama’s first term.

It was demonstrated most recently in an op-ed, “Iran Remains Our Biggest Challenge,” published in the print edition of last Sunday’s Washington Post and co-authored with former Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman, who is identified by the Post as a distinguished fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments but who also serves as a director of the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative (successor to the Project for the New American Century), and Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ross himself is described as a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and “special assistant to the president for the Middle East and South Asia from 2009 to 2011.” (What all three men have in common is membership in the neoconservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA’s) ultra-hawkish task force on Iran which, among other things has recommended that the US provide to Israel Washington’s most powerful bunker-buster bombs and the means to drop them on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Ross and Edelman serve as the task force’s co-chairs.

The op-ed’s argument has become an increasingly familiar refrain by neocons and the Israel lobby and their supporters in Congress since Obama first declared his intent to “destroy” the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL or IS); namely, whatever Washington does, it should not ally itself or cooperate in any with Iran or its regional allies in pursuit of that goal. Whatever threat may be presented by IS, they contend, is dwarfed by those posed by Iran and its presumed nuclear, hegemonic, and anti-American intentions.

Let’s stipulate at the outset that the authors have some valid points. For example, they argue essentially that the US cannot expect the indispensable cooperation of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies if it does anything that could be seen by Riyadh as cooperating with Iran. In their view, Riyadh and Tehran see their rivalry as a zero-sum game, and Riyadh is far more important to Washington’s anti-IS efforts than Tehran. (Of course, Monday’s meeting between two countries’ foreign ministers, as well as Rouhani’s optimism about bilateral relations at Tuesday’s press breakfast may offer some counter-evidence to their argument, not to mention the fact that Iran and Saudi Arabia have worked out their differences in the past, most notably in stabilizing Lebanon.) Similarly, any disinterested observer would have to agree with the authors that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is highly suspicious of, and deeply hostile to the United States (just as, perhaps, Josef Stalin felt about Winston Churchill during World War II, or Ho Chi Minh and his successors felt about China during the Vietnam War.) What the authors contend is “the essential axiom of Middle East politics”—that “the enemy of my enemy is sometimes still my enemy”—is not unique to the Middle East, as much as these culturally sophisticated Washington analysts believe it to be.

But, at the same time, let’s consider some other aspects of their analysis.

On the one hand, they observe that “…both Washington and Tehran have an interest in defanging a militant Sunni group”—an assertion that is difficult to argue with. Yet, a few paragraphs later, they write: “Today, in the two central battlefronts of the Middle East—Syria and Iraq—Iran’s interests are inimical to those of the United States.” Yes, granted, in Syria, Iran prefers to keep Assad in power, while Washington wants him out. But, as the authors noted in the previously cited paragraph, both share an undeniable “interest” in defeating ISIS wherever it appears.

As for Iraq, it seems that both countries share the objective not only of defeating ISIS there, too, but also of stabilizing the country and maintaining its territorial integrity. After all, Tehran clearly played a role—and perhaps a decisive one—in ensuring the departure of Nouri al-Maliki as Iraqi prime minister and rallying the highly factionalized Shia leadership behind Haider al-Abadi—a result clearly supported by Washington as well. If Iran’s interests were truly “inimical” to Washington’s, Maliki would probably still be prime minister. No doubt, Iran is urging Abadi to retain the closest possible links to Tehran and to confine his outreach to the Sunni community to the minimum necessary to separate it from ISIS, while Washington would prefer a more wide-ranging power-sharing arrangement that would also substantially reduce Tehran’s influence in Baghdad. In that respect, the ultimate aims of the US and Iran in Iraq are different; but, at this critical moment, the overlap in their mutual interests appears far more significant.

Then there is the authors’ rather bizarre assertion about Iran’s role during and immediately after the US-led offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan, an assertion that contradicts the testimony of virtually everyone directly involved in the aftermath of the Taliban’s ouster in late 2001 and the creation of the new regime in Kabul:

[quote]“In Afghanistan, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the misapprehension was born that the United States needed Iran’s assistance to rehabilitate its war-torn charge, and this misbegotten notion has since migrated from crisis to crisis. The tactical assistance that Iran offered in Afghanistan in 2001 was largely motivated by its fear of being the next target of U.S. retribution.” [endquote]

This is a radically revisionist interpretation of those events for which the authors provide no supporting evidence whatsoever. In fact, it was quite clear even before the Taliban was ousted that Iraq—not Iran (as much as Ariel Sharon would have preferred)—was the next target, at least for those, including then-Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and then-VP Dick Cheney, not to mention Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who were by then dominating policy making. It was Rumsfeld, for example, who was telling aides on 9/11 itself that the attack offered an opportunity to take out Saddam, and it was Perle and a host of his fellow-neocons who were busy trying to tie Saddam to 9/11 and raising the specter of a nuclear-armed Iraq, a nightmarish vision quickly embraced by Cheney himself! While Tehran was no doubt made uncomfortable by the presence of US forces close to its eastern border, it would be very difficult for Iran’s leaders to seriously believe that they were “the next target” given all of the anti-Saddam hysteria that had been whipped up by the neocons back in Washington, especially when Iran’s good friend and informant, Ahmad Chalabi, was being promoted by the war party here as the presumptive leader of a newly “liberated” Iraq.

No, despite its concerns about the presence of US ground forces, Tehran’s cooperation with Washington in ousting the Taliban and constituting a successor government that could successfully resist the group’s return, respect the rights of the Shia community there, and stabilize the country appears to have been motivated entirely by the very rational calculation of Iran’s national interests, interests that coincided substantially with those of Washington. It was, of course, only when Iran found itself grouped with Saddam and North Korea in the “axis of evil” that anti-US hard-liners in the regime got the upper hand in the internal debate in Tehran, no doubt turbo-charging Khamenei’s pre-existing suspicions about Washington’s intentions and trustworthiness. By all accounts—from US, European, and Iranian officials directly involved in Afghanistan policy—the explicit hostility expressed by George W. Bush in his January, 2002, State of the Union speech marked a turning point in Iran’s willingness to cooperate with a US administration that had turned abruptly and seemingly gratuitously—not to say irrationally (given the extent of Iran’s cooperation in Afghanistan up to that point)—hostile.

Now let’s consider some of the other assertions made by the authors such as: The ebbs and flows of the war on terrorism should not be allowed to conceal the fact that the theocratic Iranian regime and its attempt to upend the regional order remains the most consequential long-term challenge in the Middle East.

Well, let’s see, we’ve been engaged in the “war on terrorism” now for 13 years and have been told—even by the Obama administration—that we’ll be battling IS alone well into the next presidency. And, in those 13 years, it seems that Washington’s biggest, bloodiest, and most expensive pre-occupation by far has been combating Sunni Muslim extremism—as manifested by al-Qaeda and its many affiliates, the Taliban, and Sunni insurgencies, of which the latest is the Islamic State—most of them inspired by the Wahhabi theology native to (when not promoted by) our “non-Islamist” ally, Saudi Arabia. (A lot of effort has also been devoted to working out a reasonable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which virtually every administration has called a highly consequential long-term challenge in the region, but apparently Ross, for obvious reasons, doesn’t want to bring that up in this context.) While curbing Iran’s nuclear program and weakening Iran’s closest allies in the region—most importantly, Syria and Hezbollah—have gained a lot of attention, it has not been so much in the context of the authors’ “war on terrorism.”

As for “upend[ing] the regional order,” Iran’s efforts have been miniscule compared to those of the Bush administration (in which Edelman served) when it invaded and occupied Iraq. And let’s not forget that it has been Saudi Arabia and the UAE that have led and financed the counter-revolution against the democratization movements of the Arab Spring across the region. Which raises the question, what kind of “order” do the authors believe the US should be defending? And how likely is any kind of “order” to be established if the US, as they recommend, undertakes “a systematic effort to isolate Iran in its immediate neighborhood” given its size, population, geostrategic importance, and its unquestioned influence in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as with Assad and Hezbollah? (Fareed Zakaria, who spent a lot of time with Rouhani in New York this week, makes this case quite persuasively in “The Enemy of Our Enemy” published in the Post’s print edition Friday.)

Here’s another statement—or neoconservative cliché—that deserves some serious scrutiny:

[quote] The Islamic Republic is not a normal nation-state seeking to realize its national interests but an ideological entity mired in manufactured conspiracies.[quote]

Compared to whom? Was the US a “normal nation-state” when its leadership invaded Iraq under the highly questionable, if not manufactured, pretext that Saddam represented an imminent threat to our national security due to his alleged support for al-Qaeda and possession of weapons of mass destruction (and then, post hoc, that we were trying to “upend the regional order” in favor of democracy and human rights)? Is Saudi Arabia a normal nation-state when it actively promotes and finances the spread of Wahhabism throughout the Muslim world and beyond and actively supports a bloody and highly repressive dictatorship in Egypt in order to extirpate the Muslim Brotherhood? Of course, this notion—that the Iran is more an ideology than a government—has been around since 1979 (and heavily promoted by Israel’s political leadership), but most serious Iran experts believe that, at the age of 35, the Islamic Republic has settled into middle age, pursuing its national interests as it defines them—and, above all, its survival—in a relatively rational and predictable way.

[quote] The United States and Iran stand at opposite ends of the spectrum of Middle East politics.[endquote]

Given the Rubik’s Cube of Middle Eastern politics at the moment, what does this mean? Even if you accept Ross’s frankly idiotic bipolarization of the region between “Islamists” (like the Muslim Brotherhood, IS, Assad, Hamas, Turkey, Qatar, and Iran) and “non-Islamists” (like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Gen. Sisi, the PLO, Bahrain, Morocco, and the UAE), the spectrum is decidedly non-linear and thus challenges the notion of what constitutes “opposite ends.” The region is obviously multi-polar with many different actors whose interests are sometimes clearly at odds and sometimes clearly overlap. The failure to take that multi-polarity into account is what makes the analysis so crude and unhelpful, to say the least.

Yes, if you consider Syria the critical dividing line, then Iran, which has supported Assad, takes a position that is precisely contrary to Washington’s. But why should Syria serve as the critical reference point? If you take Bahrain, where Iran and Saudi Arabia are at opposite corners, it appears that Washington is somewhere in-between, though leaning increasingly toward Riyadh’s point of view, especially now that Manama has joined the US-led air campaign against IS in Syria. But if you take Iraq, as noted above, Washington and Tehran are closely if uncomfortably aligned, especially compared to, say, Saudi Arabia or IS.

If you take Israel—which appears central to the worldviews of Ross and Edelman—in particular, as your point of reference, then the notion makes a bit more sense, especially given Netanyahu’s avid courtship of the region’s Sunni-led states (minus Turkey and Qatar, at least for the moment) against Iran. But despite the strenuous efforts of the neocons, Netanyahu, and the Israel lobby to make them appear so, the fact is that Israel’s and US interests are not identical, including regarding Iran itself. Israel, after all, is doing virtually everything it can to sabotage the chances of Washington striking a nuclear agreement with Iran, while the Obama administration is trying very hard to reach one, in part because it believes strongly that its regional position will be much improved and because the alternative is potentially so destructive. Similarly, Israel believes that the perpetuation of the Sunni-Shia conflict across the region serves its interests, in part because it diverts the world’s attention from the Israel-Palestinian struggle. Washington, on the other hand, has made clear that the continuing sectarian conflict serves only to further destabilize the region, which is very much contrary to its interests. In that respect, Israel and the US are in very different camps.

In any event, the repetition of these hoary stereotypes of Iran disguised as expert analysis—at a moment when Washington’s need for Tehran’s (at least tacit) cooperation in both Iraq and Syria, not to mention Afghanistan, has become, as noted by Zakaria, so clear—helps illustrate the intellectual and analytical bankruptcy of these authors and their ideology.

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As the wobbly anti-ISIS coalition is being formed with American prodding, the Obama administration should take a strategic look at the future of the Arab world beyond the threat posed by the self-declared Islamic State. Otherwise, the United States would be unprepared to deal with the unintended chaos.

Driven by ideological hubris, the Bush administration on the eve of the Iraq war rejected any suggestions that the war could destabilize the whole region and rock the foundations of the Arab nation-state system.

That system, which was mostly created under the colonial Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916, is now being severely stressed. The Obama administration should avoid repeating the tragic mistake of its predecessor. While trying to halt the advance of ISIS by focused airstrikes, and regardless of the coalition’s effectiveness in “degrading” and  “defeating” ISIS, President Obama should instruct his senior policymakers to explore possible architectures that could emerge from the ashes of Sykes-Picot.

The stresses and fault lines we are witnessing in the region today could easily lead to implosions tomorrow. Rightly or wrongly, Washington would be blamed for the ensuing mayhem.

As Secretary of State John Kerry shuttles between countries chasing the elusive coalition to fight ISIS, the administration seems to be unclear even about terminology. Is it a war or a multifaceted counter-terrorism strategy against ISIS? Whatever it’s called, if this strategy fails to eradicate the Islamic State and its Caliphate, is there a “Plan B” in the making?

Briefing senior policymakers on the eve of the Iraq war, I pointed out the possible unintended consequences of the invasion. George Tenet, former CIA Director, alludes to several of these briefings in his book, At the Center of the Storm.

One of the briefings discussed the possibility that the Iraq invasion could fundamentally unsettle the 100-year old Arab nation-state system. National identity politics, which heretofore has been managed and manipulated by autocratic regimes—tribal, dynastic, monarchical, and presidential—could unravel if the Bush administration failed to anticipate what could happen following Saddam’s demise.

The artificiality of much of those states and their boundaries would come unhinged under the pressures of the invasion and the unleashing of internal forces that have been dormant. National loyalties would be replaced by religious and sectarian affiliations, and the Shia-Sunni disputes that go back to the 7^th century would once again rise to the surface albeit with more violence and bloodshed.

The briefings also emphasized Iraq’s central Islamic dilemma. While for many Sunni Muslims Baghdad represents the golden age of Islam more than 1,200 years ago, Iraq is also the cradle of Shia Islam.

Najaf and Karbala in southern Iraq are sacred for the Shia world because it was there where the fourth Caliph Ali’s son Hussein was “martyred” and buried. Iran, as the self-proclaimed voice of Shia Islam all over the world, is deeply embedded in Iraq and will always demand a central role in the future of Iraq.

Bush administration senior policymakers ignored these warning, arguing Iraqis and other Muslim Arabs would view American and coalition forces as “liberators” and, once the dictator fell, would work together in a spirit of tolerance, inclusion, and compromise. This view, unfortunately, was grounded in the neocons’ imagined ideological perception of the region. As we now know, it was utterly ignorant of ground truths and the social fabric of the different Arab Islamic societies.

Many Bush White House and Defense Department policymakers generally dismissed briefings that focused on the “morning after.” It’s safe to say they cared less about the post-Saddam Middle East than about toppling the dictator.

The region still suffers from those disastrous policies.

ISIS did not emerge in a vacuum, and its transnational ideology, warped as it may be, seems to appeal to Arabs and Muslims who have become disenchanted with the existing political order in Arab lands.

Many citizens view their states as fiefdoms of the ruling elites with no genuine respect for individual rights, personal freedoms, and human dignity. The “securitization” of politics has alienated many young Arabs and is driving them toward extremism.

If the borders between Syria and Iraq are erased by the transnational “Caliphate,” what will become of the borders of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq? Is the Obama administration ready to pick up the pieces when these nation-states disintegrate?

These are the critical questions the Bush administration should have pondered and answered before it invaded Iraq. They are the same questions the Obama administration should ponder and answer before chasing after ISIS in the Iraqi/Syrian desert.

Photo: Then President-elect Barack Obama before taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009. Credit: White House/Pete Souza