by Shireen T. Hunter

Throughout the recent handwringing about how the US and other Western countries failed to foresee the emergence of ISIS, one factor has been totally ignored, either intentionally or inadvertently: the impact of Washington’s hostility towards Iran, especially its persistent tendency to treat any anti-Iranian movement or idea in the Middle East as either good or the lesser evil compared to dealing with Tehran. This attitude has been coupled with a consistent unwillingness to support positive forces for change and reform in Iran; indeed, actually undermining them by insisting on their meeting preconditions that the West knows can’t be met due to Iran’s internal political dynamics. Significantly, this Western and especially American attitude predated any dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.

The first Western mistake followed the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the coming to power of Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in 1989. Instead of taking advantage of Iran’s vulnerability at the time, as well as Rafsanjani’s efforts both to move Iran towards moderation and openness domestically and internationally and to reach out to the West to help him achieve these goals, the United States chose to put all of its eggs into Saddam Hussein’s basket and adamantly refused to acknowledge his many transgressions—against Iraq’s neighbors and own people—until his fateful 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Nevertheless, with great difficulty—due to leftist opposition—Rafsanjani managed to secure Iran’s neutrality in the Persian Gulf War, a fact that facilitated US military operations. He also secured the release of the last of the Western hostages held in Lebanon. Yet, instead of encouraging the moderate political trends in Iran, the US under President George H. W. Bush embarked on a policy of containing Iran (soon to be replaced by the Clinton administration’s “dual containment” policy, which was then followed in 1996 by Congress’ enactment of the first oil sanctions against Iran at a time when Rafsanjani was actively encouraging American oil companies, notably Conoco, to invest). This policy of containment was first announced during a trip to Central Asia in 1992 by then-Secretary of State James Baker who declared containing Iran’s influence in the region would constitute a major goal of US policy.

Guided by this objective, the US subsequently bought into Pakistan’s argument that the Taliban would constitute a credible barrier to Iran’s influence in Afghanistan and, through it, in Central Asia as well. Hence Washington did not object to Pakistan’s arming and promoting the Taliban, a step that eventually led to the fall of the Afghan government of Burhaneddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Masood, two leaders who supported a version of Islam far more moderate than that of the Taliban. It is forgotten today that the Afghan civil war began with attacks by the Pakistan-based and more radical Islamists, first through Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and, when Islamabad judged him to be too difficult to control, through the Taliban.

Even after the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, followed by the 9/11 attacks and the US invasion of Afghanistan, which Iran directly and actively supported, Washington continued to rely on Pakistan as its key regional partner. Despite massive US aid, Islamabad actively—if covertly—undermined US strategy in Afghanistan while it scorned Iran’s offers to help stabilize the country.

Just as Washington ignored or rebuffed Rafsanjani’s efforts to moderate Iran’s domestic and international policies, it similarly declined to help his successor, President Mohammad Khatami, who promoted a tolerant and reformist Islam and a less confrontational approach to relations with the West and Iran’s neighbors. Thus, holding out for the best—namely, a secular, pro-western government in Tehran—the US lost the relatively good. And when Iran actively helped the US both to oust the Taliban and facilitate the transition that followed, it was rewarded by President George W. Bush with membership in the “axis of evil,” paving the way for new and ever more punitive sanctions.

After the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Tehran quietly put forward an offer for a comprehensive deal with the US not only to cooperate on efforts to stabilize Washington’s latest conquest, but also to address all outstanding issues between the two countries, from acceptance of Israel and Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Palestinian resistance groups to Iran’s nuclear program. The Bush administration did not even bother to respond. Moreover, fearful that Iran might become the unintended beneficiary of the Ba’ath regime’s removal, Washington essentially stood by as its regional Sunni allies worked to undermine the fledgling Shia-led government in Baghdad not only by denying it aid and formal diplomatic recognition, but also, in the case of some Gulf states, encouraging and supporting the burgeoning Sunni insurgency, including al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which did not hesitate to attack US personnel, as well as their Shia brethren. Ironically if predictably, Washington’s policy of ignoring Sunni extremists forced Iraq’s Shia government to move closer to Iran.

Of course, the unanticipated insurgency and the increasing sectarian violence that it fostered also derailed hopes by the Bush administration—especially its neoconservative faction—that its “success” in Iraq would lead to “regime change”—either through destabilization or an actual attack—as well. At the same time, however, the administration bought into the idea that the increasingly sectarian nature of the conflict could also be used to curb Iran’s influence, notably by forging a de facto alliance between Israel and the Sunni-led states against Tehran and what Jordan’s King Abdullah ominously called the “Shia Crescent.” Of course, not only did Washington’s acceptance and even promotion of this idea contribute to rising sectarian tensions and extremism throughout the region, but it also failed to produce any progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Once again, rather than working with Iran to stabilize Iraq, which would have required exerting real pressure on its Sunni allies that were supporting the insurgency, containing Iran’s influence remained Washington’s overriding priority.

It was in this context that the so-called Arab Spring blossomed and, with it, renewed hopes in Washington to reshape the Middle East, if not by achieving “regime change” in Iran, then at least by weakening its regional influence, particularly in the Levant. Even as the Obama administration publicly depicted the movement as the dawn of open and democratic societies, its closest regional partners—to which Washington had so often and so counter-productively deferred in Iraq—saw it as a way to redress the region’s strategic balance that had been upset by the 2003 invasion and the empowerment of Iraq’s Shia majority.

As the movement progressed from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya and the (thwarted) pro-democracy movement in Bahrain, it eventually reached Syria and the minority Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s most important regional ally. While the Gulf states and Turkey led the charge against the regime, the US and much of the West were not far behind. Predictably, however, in its desire to see Assad overthrown and Iran weakened, the US and its allies largely ignored the steadily growing influence of groups such as al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, and similar foreign-backed Sunni extremist groups whose violence toward Syrian Shias, Alawites, Alevis, and Christians has been exceeded only by AQI’s successor, the Islamic State (ISIS).

Thus, for the past 25 years or more, the West—especially the United States—has made containing Iran its overriding priority in the Gulf and has too often seen the Wahhabi/Salafi version of Islam and its violent offshoots as an effective counterweight to Iranian influence. In doing so, it has unintentionally helped create monsters like Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and now Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi.

This critique by no means absolves Iran, Syria, Shia militias, or Iraq’s Shia-led government of their own mistakes and crimes. They have their own not insignificant share of responsibility in creating the region’s current problems and conflicts. And they have to do their part if the region’s problems are to be resolved. But as great powers that claim the world’s moral and political leadership with the power to intervene at will in other countries, the US and other Western countries must be judged by higher standards.At the very least, they need to offer a coherent and positive vision of a functioning Middle East and South Asia.

This requires going beyond the platitudes about wanting to advance democracy and human rights.

While the Western powers do not have a clear vision of what kind of Middle East they want and even less how to achieve it, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and al-Nusra have their own regional plans, based on ethnic and sectarian cleansing as we have already seen in both Syria and Iraq.

In short, until the US and the West admit at least to themselves that they have made mistakes in the region in the last few decades, particularly in their efforts to isolate and weaken Iran, and learn from those mistakes and change course, their efforts at defeating extremism and stabilizing the region are bound to fail.

The West cannot get all that it desires in the region, because political engineering has its limits. But if it embarks on a strategy of conflict resolution—fostering regional cooperation, instead of fighting it; and promoting compromise instead of complete capitulation by Iran or any other local power—its interests and those of the region will be better served. Until such a strategy is adopted and seriously implemented, however, every day that passes will make it that much harder to end the violence in the Middle East and encourage compromise and reconciliation. The same is equally true for the regional players. By pursuing maximalist goals they will all end up losers.

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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 recent burst of recriminations about what the U.S. intelligence community did or did not tell the president of the United States in advance about the rise of the extremist group sometimes called ISIS, and about associated events in Iraq, is only a variation on some well-established tendencies in Washington discourse. The tendency that in recent years has, of course, become especially strongly entrenched is that of couching any issue in the way that is best designed to bash one’s political opponents. For those determined to bash and frustrate Barack Obama at every turn, it is a tendency that trumps everything else. Thus we now have the curious circumstance of some of Mr. Obama’s Republican critics, who in other contexts would be at least as quick as anyone else to come down on U.S. intelligence agencies (and most other parts of the federal bureaucracy) like a ton of bricks, saying that the president got good information but failed to act on it. (Some critics, however, have tried to lower their cognitive dissonance by saying that “everyone” could see what was coming with ISIS.)

Relationships between the intelligence community and presidential administrations over the past few decades have not fallen into any particular pattern distinguishable by party. One of the best relationships was with the administration of the elder George Bush—perhaps not surprisingly, given that president’s prior experience as a Director of Central Intelligence under President Gerald Ford. Probably the worst was during the presidency of the younger George Bush, whose administration—in the course of selling the Iraq War—strove to discredit the intelligence community’s judgments that contradicted the administration’s assertions about an alliance between Iraq and al-Qaeda, pushed for public use of reporting about alleged weapons programs that the community did not consider credible, and ignored the community’s judgments about the likely mess in Iraq that would follow the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Relations also have varied under Democratic presidents. Mr. Obama, given the evidently deliberate and methodical way he weighs input, including from the civilian and military bureaucracy, before major national security decisions, probably has been one of the better users of intelligence, at least in the sense of paying attention to it. His remark on 60 Minutes that led to the accusations about ISIS, however, did sound like gratuitous blame-shifting.

One very longstanding and bipartisan tendency that this recent imbroglio has diluted (because the political motive to attack Obama is even stronger than political motives to attack intelligence agencies) is to assume that any apparently insufficient U.S. reaction to an untoward development overseas must be due to policymakers not being sufficiently informed, and this must be because intelligence services failed. It is remarkable how, when anything disturbing goes bump in the night overseas, the label “intelligence failure” gets quickly and automatically applied by those who have no basis whatever for knowing what the intelligence community did or did not say—in classified, intra-governmental channels—to policymakers.

The current case does demonstrate in undiluted form, however, several other recurrent tendencies, one of which is to affix the label “surprise” to certain events not so much because of the state of knowledge or understanding of those who make national security policy but more because we, the public—and the press and chattering class—were surprised. Or to be even more accurate, this often happens because those of us outside government weren’t paying much attention to the developments in question until something especially dramatic seized our attention, even though we actually had enough information about the possibilities that we should not have been surprised. Thus the dramatic gains by ISIS earlier this year have been labeled a “surprise” because a swift territorial advance and gruesome videotaped killings grabbed public attention.

Another tendency is to believe that if government is working properly, surprises shouldn’t happen. This belief disregards how much that is relevant to foreign policy and national security is unknowable, no matter how brilliant either an intelligence service or a policymaker may be. This is partly because of other countries and entities keeping secrets but even more so because some future events are inherently unpredictable—given that they involve decisions that others have not yet made, or social processes too complex or psychological mechanisms too fickle to model. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was referring to this epistemological reality in the comment that he made recently about the Iraqi army’s collapse and that the president erroneously characterized in his 60 Minutes interview. Clapper was not saying that the intelligence community messed up on this question; he instead was observing that this type of sudden loss of will in the heat of battle has always been unpredictable.

Yet another recurring tendency is to think that proper policy responses always flow from a good empirical understanding of the problem at hand, including the sort of information, analysis, and predictions that a well-functioning intelligence service might be expected to provide. In fact, proper responses often do not flow that way from an understanding of the problem. Often there are conflicting national interests at stake, there are serious costs and risks to possible responses, and the likely benefits of responses may not outweigh the likely costs. No matter how accurate a picture of ISIS the intelligence community may be providing to the president and his policy advisers, that picture is not likely to constitute a case for the United States to take more, rather than less, forceful action in Syria or Iraq. If President Obama is now taking more forceful measures in those places than he was earlier, it is neither because he is belatedly reacting to good intelligence nor because the intelligence community is belatedly getting its judgments right, but instead because he is responding to how the rest of us have decided that we are not just surprised but alarmed by ISIS.

This article was first published by the National Interest 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.

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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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The wisdom of any application of military force will involve much more than the goals initially laid out and the resources initially applied to achieve those goals. Those initial conditions are only a snapshot in time of what is inevitably a dynamic process. History has repeatedly shown that overseas military endeavors have a way of becoming something much different from what they began as. History also has repeatedly shown that the dominant type of change is escalation to something bigger and costlier than originally intended, sometimes even to the point of expanding to blunders of tragic proportions.

Several processes, working together or independently, drive the process of escalation. Some of these processes are, considered in isolation, logical and reasonable. Some of them are rooted in universal human nature; some are more characteristically American.

The “Win the War” Objective. A distinctively American (and non-Clausewitzian) way of approaching the use of military force is to believe that if something is worth fighting for, then we ought to realize that we are “at war” and ought to do whatever it takes to “win” the war. This mindset has had a huge influence through the years on discourse in the United States about using the military instrument in foreign affairs, including in more recent years with a so-called “war on terror”. The attitude severs the use of force from all other calculations about the costs and benefits of using it in particular ways and particular circumstances. There thus is no limit to potential escalation as the sometimes elusive “win” is pursued.

Standard Procedures and the Military’s Operational Requirements. Military forces, for quite understandable reasons of operational security or effectiveness, insist that if they are called on to perform certain missions then they must be permitted to use certain minimal levels of forces, to put their troops in certain places, or to operate in certain other ways regardless of the political or diplomatic side-effects. Some of the classic and most consequential examples occurred at the onset of World War I, when mobilization schedules of armies helped to push statesmen into a much bigger armed confrontation than they wanted, and when German troops violated Belgian neutrality because that’s what a military plan called for. More recent U.S. military history has had many more modest examples of military requirements driving escalation, such as ground forces being needed to provide security for air bases. In the interest of force security, a remarkably large amount of firepower has sometimes been used in support of quite small objectives (such as the deposition and capture of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989).

Hoping That Just a Little More Will Do It. If a given level of force does not accomplish the declared objective, then an understandable and quite reasonable next question is whether a bit more force will be sufficient to do the trick. It may be logically sound to decide that it is worth trying some more force. The calculation of the moment weighs the marginal costs of doing so against the marginal benefits. The marginal cost of a slight escalation may be low, with the benefit being the chance of a significant breakthrough. But a series of individual decisions like this, while they may be individually justifiable, can result in escalation to total costs that are far out of proportion to any possible benefit. The U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1968 is an example.

One Objective Leads to Another. The nature of some objectives is such that if they are to be achieved—or as a consequence of being achieved—some other objective needs to be pursued as well. Or even if it does not really need to be pursued, it comes into play naturally and is not easily dismissed amid the momentum and fog of war. This is the process that often is given the namemission creep. An example is how Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, which began as an offensive to oust the Taliban, became a long-term nation-building effort.

Responding to the Adversary’s Escalation. It take two to tango and to make war. The adversary has many of these same reasons to escalate a conflict against us, and perhaps other reasons as well. When he does, we are apt to counter-escalate, not only for emotional reasons of revenge but also perhaps for more justifiable reasons of deterrence. This is the chief type of escalation that was the subject of much strategic doctrine developed during the Cold War.

Domestic Political Vulnerability. Statesmen do not make their decisions about military force in a political vacuum. They have domestic political flanks to protect. Mitigating charges of weakness or wimpiness is an added, and possibly even the principal, motivation to escalate the use of force against what is widely perceived as a threat.

The emerging military campaign against ISIS will not become another World War I or Vietnam War, but all of the above factors are seeds of escalation of that campaign, possibly to levels well above what either the Obama administration or its more hawkish critics are talking about. Some of the factors are already quite evidently in play. The absolutist vocabulary about being at war and having to win the war is very prevalent. The president already has been pushed by the political and rhetorical forces this vocabulary represents toward greater use of military force than he otherwise would have preferred. The dynamic of each side in the armed conflict escalating in response to the other side’s escalation also has already begun. A major stimulant for the American public’s alarmist and militant attitude toward ISIS was the group’s intentionally provocative videotaped killings—which the group described as retaliation for U.S. military strikes against it.

The military’s operational requirements are also starting to come into play as a mechanism of escalation, as we hear military experts telling us how air and ground operations really are inseparable, and how effective air strikes depend on reliable spotters on the ground. There also will no doubt be decision points ahead about whether a little more use of force will do the job, as the United States pursues the impossible to accomplish declared objective of “destroying” ISIS. Finally, the potential for mission creep is substantial, with unanswered questions about what will follow in the countries in conflict even if ISIS could be “destroyed.” Perhaps the most glaring such question is in Syria, where, given the anathema toward dealing with the Assad regime, it remains unclear what would fill any vacuum left by a destroyed ISIS—and what the United States can, should, or will do about it. The much-discussed “moderate” forces are far from constituting a credible answer to that question

There is significant danger of the campaign against ISIS and the costs it incurs getting far, far out of proportion to any threat the group poses to U.S. interests.

This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission.

Imagine hearing news that North Korea was planning to organize an international conference on criminal justice reform, or being invited by Cuba to a conference promoting political freedom. The likely reaction would be incredulity, followed by laughter. Well, those conferences are imaginary, but here’s a real one: a “Global Conference on Human Rights,” sponsored by Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia? That absolute monarchy where political parties and labor unions are prohibited, religions other than Islam are forbidden, women are second-class citizens, and human rights activists are routinely locked up?

Yes indeed, unlikely as it may seem. Saudi Arabia’s official Human Rights Commission, a government organization, and the Gulf Research Center, a think tank, have announced that they will organize a three-day international rights conference, to be held in Riyadh in December, “under the patronage” of King Abdullah. The announcement says the event “will gather together Heads of States and representatives of national ministries, members of Parliaments, international, regional, and inter-governmental organizations, religious scholars, academics, national Human Rights Commissions, and NGOs.”

Given Saudi Arabia’s unsavory reputation on this subject—it is routinely denounced in the State Department’s annual human rights report and by activist groups such as Human Rights Watch—Riyadh might seem to be an unlikely venue for such an event. But the key to understanding the rationale for this conference lies in the announced theme: “Promoting a Culture of Tolerance.” This is not about individuals’ freedom of expression, or the status of women, or freedom of assembly. This is about the Islamic State, or ISIS.

According to the announcement, “The objectives of the conference are to consolidate efforts to promote and protect human rights with a special focus on the promotion of a culture of peace, tolerance, dialogue and mutual understanding among people at the national, regional and global levels…Given the ever growing increase in cases of intolerance, discrimination, social exclusion and acts of violence including those motivated by religious and political extremism, this conference seeks to provide recommendations to be implemented by at the policy level.”

That language is entirely consistent with the ideological position Saudi Arabia has sought to stake out as the threat from the Islamic extremist group has spread across neighboring Iraq and in Syria. The Saudis, who find their position as the worldwide leaders of Sunni Islam challenged by ISIS’s proclamation of itself as a “caliphate,” or trans-national Muslim state, are preaching that the ISIS message is a perversion of Islam, unjustified by religious texts or by history, and that its ruthless violence contravenes the principles of the faith.

Last month, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al al-Sheikh, the highest religious authority in the country, said ISIS and its ideological parent al-Qaeda, were “enemy number one of Islam,” not representatives of the faith. “Extremist and militant ideas and terrorism which spread decay on Earth, destroying human civilization, are not in any way part of Islam, but are enemy number one of Islam, and Muslims are their first victims,” he said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency. King Abdullah and other senior princes of the ruling al-Saud family have issued similar statements. Earlier this year the government made it a crime for Saudi citizens to support ISIS or to go to Iraq or Syria to join the group’s military ranks.

Saudi Arabia is a conservative Sunni state that adheres to the most rigid form of the religion, known to outsiders as Wahhabism, and enshrines religion as a cornerstone of national policy. All citizens must be Muslims. In the last two decades of the 20^th century, the kingdom spent billions of dollars of its oil wealth to promote that version of Islam across the Arab world, in Africa and Asia, and even in the Americas. But the rulers got a rude awakening in 2003 when al-Qaeda, denouncing them as corrupt agents of the West, began an armed uprising inside Saudi Arabia. It took the Saudis more than three years, punctuated by gunfire in the streets, to suppress that challenge.

Since then, they have been preaching a modified version of Islam that might be described as softer at the edges: the rules of personal and social behavior remain strict, as dictated in the Koran, but the religion favors tolerance, understanding, and non-violence. The Ministry of Islamic Affairs has published a “Platform of Moderation,” which declares that “beneficial knowledge and good deeds are the key to happiness and the basis of Deliverance.” King Abdullah even promoted an “Interfaith Dialogue” and allowed himself to be photographed with Pope Benedict XVI.

That is the context in which the agenda for the planned conference should be understood. Topics to be discussed include “national policies and strategies aiming to combat all forms of intolerance, discrimination, ethnic exclusiveness, and acts of violence based on religion or belief,” and establishment of an “international partnership for the promotion of a culture of tolerance, dialogue among civilizations, and combatting hatred.”

Saudi Arabia has never deserved to be included among the ranks of the world’s most oppressive regimes, as it is every year by Parade magazine. Life is restricted for women, and discrimination against the kingdom’s Shia majority is entrenched, but male Sunni citizens have far greater freedom than people in Cuba or North Korea. They are allowed to travel abroad, live where they like, take whatever jobs they find suitable, make money and keep it, interact with foreigners, have as many children as they want, attend any university they can get into, take their families to the amusement park or the beach, and—with some restrictions—surf the Internet. But those freedoms are granted by the regime, which can revoke them at any time for any reason, or for no reason. Public actions or statements that the authorities interpret as challenging the monarchy or promoting terrorism are likely to result in harsh punishment. Apostasy—a term that is interpreted broadly—is punishable by execution.

The announcement of the December rights conference makes no mention of any of Saudi Arabia’s domestic policies.

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

As it attempts to hammer out a coalition to combat the Islamic State (IS, ISIL or ISIS), the Obama administration is encountering a variety of complications. More strident calls from certain domestic political quarters for broader US intervention threaten to undermine the overall effort, and potentially increase the danger to Americans. The iffy response of many regional and other allies to US requests for meaningful military participation could also harm US efforts. At this point, a clear vision of the situation even a few months from now is impossible to predict.

Some American politicians seem to be implying that ISIS could be confronted in a manner that would involve practically no threat to the “homeland,” such as by committing far larger US forces. That would not be true under any scenario. Indeed, the harder US forces hit ISIS, the more its assets in the region and acolytes far beyond would likely attempt to exact revenge.

Yet, even with all that in mind, no attempt has been made from Congressional hawks to put the ISIS threat at home in perspective. Americans have vastly more to fear every day, for example, from the ongoing epidemic of violent crime and traffic fatalities than ISIS.

Perhaps the wildest comment so far amidst hyperventilating in Washington came from Senator Lindsey Graham on Sept 13: “This is ISIL versus mankind,” he said. “It’s going to take an army [ours] to beat an army.” He also urged President Obama to put combat troops into Iraq and Syria “before we all get killed back here at home.”

ISIS is appallingly barbaric, but the Senator’s comment implies that ISIS could kill millions of Americans as if it had suddenly inherited a sizeable nuclear arsenal. Moreover, the desire to commit US combat troops en masse as crisis firemen probably rests on the delusion that prior robust US military intervention in Iraq was a thumping success.

Ironically, if Sen. Graham’s prime concern is American lives, sending large numbers of US combat troops into battle against ISIS would result in quite a few American fatalities. Even the 1600 US non-combat troops in Iraq now could become victims of ISIS suicide bombings that occur regularly throughout that country. Nonetheless, ISIS still poses a far greater threat to nearby Middle East countries than it does to Europe or the US.

Adverse Effects

The more US allies inside and outside the Middle East get the impression that Washington will increase its military support, the less incentive they will have to bear more of the military burden. In Iraq itself, the more the US does, the less the new Shi’a-dominated government might feel it has to do to woo back Iraq’s Sunni Arabs. And many Sunni Arabs might not make deals with Baghdad if they could do so with US ground forces instead (as they did during the so-called “Awakening”). So, saber-rattling along the lines that the US might commit far more military assets could do more damage to the anti-ISIS cause and long-term stability than to ISIS.

That is why US Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey’s comment on Capitol Hill on Sept. 16 regarding the prospect of greater involvement of US “advisors” on the frontlines against ISIS also serves to muddy the waters. He admitted that President Obama has left open the possibility of employing US troops in more exposed combat-related roles on a “case by case basis.” The White House, however, later stated that no US combat troops would be deployed to Iraq or Syria.

Coalition Foot-Dragging

The last thing Washington needs is more trouble in extracting commitments for concrete military action from its allies. There have been statements that a number of allies—including those in the region—are prepared to participate militarily. Most of these assertions, however, have stopped short, perhaps ominously, of specifics. In the region, especially among Sunni states closest to Iraq and Syria, no less than four concerns have produced widespread reluctance to become involved directly and militarily.

First, these countries fear military operations against ISIS (even limited military cooperation, as in basing) would make them high profile targets for retaliation from the group (as well as its sympathizers among their own populations). Turkey’s refusal to base coalition aircraft was a serious setback. Then there is the desire to avoid conflict with fellow Sunnis, regardless of how wayward they have become. Making confrontation with Sunnis that much more dicey would be doing so alongside a Shi’a-dominated, partially Iranian-backed government in Baghdad.

Lastly, based on its appalling past track record under former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, there are doubts whether the Iraqi government under new Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi will offer full inclusion to Iraq’s Sunni Arabs. Parallel fears exist concerning Iraqi Shi’a militia excesses during an anti-ISIS ground campaign; some already have occurred.

Meanwhile, exposing its iffy ability to chart a more enlightened course, the Abadi government’s defense and interior ministry nominees were once again rejected Sept. 16 by an Iraqi parliament still riven by sectarian and factional differences. This leaves the cabinet’s two premier national security posts in limbo.

European allies also have concerns much like their regional counterparts over making themselves more inviting targets for ISIS terrorism by signing up for greater military cooperation with the US. Memories of large-scale 2004-05 extremist attacks in London and Madrid in retaliation for European participation in US-led military intervention in Iraq remain painful. Aside from grisly beheadings of Western prisoners, there have been online threats of ISIS retaliation in response to allied military cooperation with the US against ISIS.

Even in the United States there can be no genuine political consensus on how to respond to the ISIS threat in the politically heated environment close to November’s Congressional elections. Views range from leaving the mess entirely to Iraqis, Syrians and neighboring countries to calls for massive US intervention along the lines suggested by Senator Graham. Furthermore, broad international coalitions are notoriously unwieldy, and the one now being assembled by the US is shaping up to be no different. At this point, no one is in a position to predict the situation in the region affected by the ISIS challenge a few months from now with any certainty—let alone several years down the road.

Photo: President Barack Obama talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to congratulate him and the Iraqi people on the approval of a new Iraqi government during a phone call in the Oval Office, Sept. 8, 2014. Credit: White House/Pete Souza)

Last week epitomized the highs and lows of hoping for an improvement in US-Iran relations. A BBC report on Sept. 5 that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had approved Iranian cooperation with the US military in the fight against ISIS was met with near elation in many quarters. Some analysts (myself included) felt this announcement would clarify the strategic value of normalized US-Iran relations for the publics and policymakers of both countries. But after the ensuing Iranian denials that cooperation was in fact approved, the Americans went even further by denying even the possibility of formal cooperation. A Sept. 8 State Department briefing reiterated the exclusion of Iran from the broad 40-nation coalition announced by President Obama to combat ISIS, and Secretary of State John Kerry’s Sept. 12 assertion in Ankara that including Iran “would not be appropriate” because of its involvement in Syria and its alleged status as a “state sponsor of terror in various places” put the icing on the cake.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Iranian hardliners have taken heart from this very public snub. Even Marziah Afkham, the spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, a stronghold of pragmatists who favors improved relations with the West, felt compelled toregister “serious doubts about [the coalition’s] seriousness to fight against the root and true reasons for terrorism.” She noted without elaboration that “[s]ome of the countries in the coalition are among the financial and military supporters of terrorists in Iraq and Syria.”

Unlike US policymakers, Iranian statesmen—and the wider public—have a long memory. As the recent anniversary of Sept. 11 reminds us to “never forget,” we can do little but remember the lives lost and contemplate how the United States was drawn into a global conflict with religious extremists 13 years ago. For Iranians, however, the fateful date came four years before.

The Taliban reached global prominence in 1998, a year when its fighters launched a devastating offensive in northern Afghanistan. Much as the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) last month swept across northern Iraq, forcing the Kurdish Peshmerga to retreat to within 40kms of Erbil, the better-armed and better-organized Taliban overcame all resistance by the Iran and Uzbekistani-backed coalition there during that summer. On Aug 8, it captured Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan’s fourth largest city, located just 100km from the border with Uzbekistan. Overwhelming local militias, Taliban troops and their allies massacred an estimated 2,000 Hazara civilians in what Human Rights Watch called “one of the worst atrocities of Afghanistan’s long civil war.” In addition, they stormed the Iranian consulate, killing a journalist and ten members of the diplomatic mission, despite assurances from the government of Pakistan, a chief sponsor of the Taliban at the time, that diplomats would not be targeted.

The diplomats’ murder—as well as the massacre of civilians—outraged both the Iranian regime and the broader public. Foreign Ministry officials mourned their fallen colleagues, whom they celebrated as martyrs akin to those who died ”defending the borders of this great country during eight years of holy defense” during Iran’s 1980-88 war with Iraq. An official statement broadcast on Iranian state television asserted Iran’s ”right to defend the security of its citizens” and warned that “the consequences of the Taliban action is on the shoulders of the Taliban and their supporters.”

For Iran, there was no question that the Taliban enjoyed the support of two states: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Without significant financial support from Saudi sources and the help of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Taliban would not have been able to stage such a brutal offensive. While it had taken Kabul two years before, the conquest of Mazar-e Sharif consolidated the Taliban’s position as the ruler of virtually all of Afghanistan, a status that no doubt contributed to its increasingly close cooperation with al-Qaeda.

Iran responded by building up its forces along the Afghan border and conducting major military exercises. But the Islamic Republic felt unable to commit to a costly and unpredictable war in Afghanistan unilaterally. It was only three years later, with 9/11, that the US came to realize the full nature of the threat posed by al-Qaeda and its Taliban collaborators.

Suddenly, Iran and the United States had a common enemy. As Washington mulled its strategy to rout the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda, officials in Tehran reached out to offer strategic support. Years of experience in Afghanistan had given the Iranians deep insight into how the Taliban operated in the ethnically and geographically complex nation.

The secret discussions that occurred between American and Iranian officials in the weeks that followed were the highest-level talks held between the two countries since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis. Many analysts believed that the new-found alignment of strategic interests, combined with President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist policies and conciliatory tone, would spur the US and Iran to normalize relations and actively cooperate against the terrorist threat.

In a grave blunder, however, neoconservatives and other hawks in the Bush administration opposed collaboration with Iran, thus depriving coalition forces of a valuable ally. Two months later, in a triumph of politics over pragmatism, Bush gratuitously lumped Iran together with Iraq and North Korea in his infamous “axis of evil,” a move that greatly strengthened hard-line forces in Tehran who had long argued that Washington simply could not be trusted.

It is striking how this situation mirrors that faced by the US and Iran today as both countries face the threat posed by ISIS. The Rouhani administration has opened the door to reconciliation, and the rise of reinvigorated Sunni extremism in the region gives Washington and Tehran a common enemy. Indeed, Iran has sent arms and advisers to Iraq to help the Peshmerga and Iraqi forces roll back ISIS’s recent advances.

Nonetheless, the US remains unwilling to include Iran in its coalition efforts. This position has given hardliners in Iran yet another opportunity to instill doubts about Washington’s sincerity and trustworthiness. Unsurprisingly, the events of 1998 and 2001 weigh heavily on Iran’s collective memory. Indeed, the conservative website Javan Online last week recalled “Iran’s bitter experience of cooperation with the US in Afghanistan,” citing it as reason to dismiss cooperation with Washington against ISIS. The conservative refrain that members of the coalition are “among financial and military supporters of terrorists” is also rooted in the historical memory of the 1998 offensive. Iran also continues to view Saudi Arabia as a key source both of funding for ISIS and other radical Sunni groups and of their intolerant and violent ideology, just as it was for the Taliban.

That Riyadh and its Gulf allies should be treated by Washington as central partners in the anti-ISIS coalition, while Tehran is excluded from any formal participation is particularly galling to Iranians who have suffered the brunt of US sanctions. Not only is this, in their view, illogical. To them, it also suggests that Washington is simply unable to learn from its past mistakes.

–Esfandyar Batmanghelidj is a founding partner of the 1st Europe-Iran Forum, a conference focused on commercial opportunities in Iran to be held in London in October. He has conducted extensive research on Iranian political economy and social history.

Photo: Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif shakes hands with US Secretary of State John Kerr on July 14, 2014 in Vienna.