October 16, 2017--Whatever Happened to ISIS?

It wasn't very long ago that ISIS or ISIL or the Islamic State caused widespread fear in the Middle East and the West. Very much including in the United States.

Almost daily, for many months, ISIS would release a video of the hideous torture and beheading of captured Americans, Europeans, and Muslims. The map of the area showed ISIS's metastasis occurring as more and more territory fell before its brutal, seemingly unstoppable anschluss.

As recently as 2014, ISIS declared itself a caliphate. Which meant that they claimed religious, political, and military authority over all Muslims. All Muslins worldwide. In the region (beginning in expanding parts of Iraq and Syria) with visions of taking over all of the Middle East and ultimately at least as much of Africa and Europe as the previous caliphate of the 7th through 15th centuries occupied.

This terrifying aspiration did not seem far fetched. 

The Iraqis, torn by internal strife between the Shia majority and the Sunnis (who joined ISIS in large numbers), the Iraqi government and military felt powerless to resist. Syria was torn by a hopeless civil war and resisted becoming involved; and no one in the West, including the United States during the last years of the Obama administration, had a response that felt credible. 

And then there were the Russians who saw this divisiveness and chaos as an opportunity to exert influence and even dominance.

But then toward the end of the Obama years and continued and expanded during the early months of the Trump administration--yes, that administration--the U.S. military did two things that appear to have been decisive--somehow after more than a decade of frustration, we were able to train elements of the Iraqi army to actually fight effectively and supplied close-in tactical air support as they took on the previously unvanquished ISIS fighters. 

Slowly the map of the area controlled viciously by ISIS began to contract. As recently as last week the last of their caliphate strongholds, Hawija, fell to the Iraqis. Thousands while retreating were killed and then, rather than dying a martyrs' death, other thousands surrendered, mainly to Kurdish forces who have been in the mix as critical fighters.

A few things--

First--ISIS will continue to inspire and take credit for individual acts of terrorism. As hideous as this it, it's not a caliphate.

Then--though Donald Trump has a checklist of Obama initiatives and achievements that he has made his agenda--to obliterate Obama's political and historical existence is what more than anything else guides Trump. But in spite of this, in regard to ISIS, his military people saw an effective strategy and Trump doubled-down on it. Soon he will be all over Twitter and the media taking credit for "defeating" ISIS. What he boasted during the election campaign.

He is entitled to some of that credit. This is culminating on his, forgive me, watch. Maybe, doubtful, but maybe he will learn something from this--about the big things (war and peace) he might act more moderately than what many are fearing. North Korea a case in point?

Last--seemingly hopeless situations can at times resolve themselves. 

Hawija

May 23, 2017--Trump On the World Stage

Tell the truth--weren't you, like me, expecting, even hoping to see President Trump stumble on the world stage? While in the Middle East, while with the Pope in Rome, while meeting in Sicily with European counterparts at the G-7 summit?

Weakened at home as criminal investigations swirl around him, if he made a fool of himself, if he insulted Islamic leaders, made a botch of talks with the Israelis, again insulted Chancellor Angela Merkel, and said something inappropriate to the new president of France, in the aggregate, if his trip turned out to be a political disaster, it would move him one step closer to impeachment or resignation.

But, four days into his nine-day trip, from all reports, even from media sources that are not well disposed to him, he appears to be staying on script and, remarkably, actually saying a number of things that make sense. Or at least are worth putting on the table.

Before an assemblage of more than three dozen presidents of Sunni Arab nations, carefully avoiding the phrase "radical Islamic terrorists," Trump drew a distinction between ISIS fighters and the peaceful citizens of Islamic nations--

This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects, or different civilizations. This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life and decent people, all in the name of religion, people that want to protect life and want to protect their religion. This is a battle between good and evil.

These comments were met with enthusiastic applause.

He continued, saying he wanted "partners not perfection" and that it was up to Muslim leaders to expunge extremists from their midst--

Drive them out. Drive them out of your places of worship. Drive them out of your communities. Drive them out of your holy land. And drive them out of earth.

This was a play to engage Sunni leaders in contrast to President Obama's alleged desire to strike deals with Shia-dominated countries such as Iran.

One could delete references to Obama and still make the case that a focus on Sunnis, the vast majority in the region, makes more sense. Including as part of an attempt to broker movement toward a two-state solution in Israel, something Trump spoke about yesterday when he told Benjamin Netanyahu that he heard from Sunni Arab leaders while in Saudi Arabia that if this were to happen they would consider expanding relations with Israel. Something that is occurring in private as power shifts across the Middle East.

It was also noted that Air Force One's direct flight from Riyadh to Tel Aviv is the first time there has been such a flight. Whoever added that to Trump's agenda (likely Jared Kushner) deserves praise. Gestures and symbols go a long way in that fraught region.

June 18, 2015--Yugoslavia

Anyone following Behind knows that for years I have been an advocate for a redrawing of national borders in the Middle East. From the political borders imposed on Arab and Islamic people by the victorious Western superpowers at the end of the First World War to others that take history, culture, ethnicity, and religion into consideration.

Broadly speaking, for what we now call Iraq this would minimally mean separate countries for Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds.

Some readers who have communicated with me say it would never work, that rivalries and blood-hatred is so intense that Sunnis would continue to fight with Shia and Turks with Kurds.

That may be but we have been seeing an alternative, deadly scenario playing out with millions either killed or made homeless, stateless.

Others have said to me that they might agree if there were current examples of the successful redrawing of borders.

There very well may be.

Take Yugoslavia as an example.

There is no historic, ancient Yugoslavia. It was a political construct that came about after the chaos of the First World War when territories of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire were fused to become the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. That monarchy was overthrown at the end of World War II and a new "country" emerged, the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, which for decades was dominated and kept from disintegrating by strongman Josip Broz, better known as Marshal Tito.

After Tito died, civil war broke out as Christian Serbs and Croats fought Bosnian Muslims. Many atrocities were committed, especially "ethnic cleansing" by Serbs of Bosnians.

By the mid 1990s, European members of NATO, recalling that World War I begin in Sarajevo, in what was to become Yugoslavia, and also concerned about the slaughter of Bosnians, began to mobilize peacekeeping forces, including eventually convincing President Bill Clinton to participate in bombing Serb forces.

In 1995, through Clinton's leadership, the contesting parties were convened in Ohio and spent weeks in effect confined there until they reached the historic Dayton Accords that once again redrew the map of the Balkans, this time more culturally than politically.

For 20 years, with U.S. and NATO troops still stationed on the ground as peacekeepers, the Accords have more or less held. There is reason to be optimistic that a version of peace will prevail.

This, then, is my best example of what might be possible in the long run in the Middle East if the parties there, left alone by outsiders--very much including the United States, were to stay out to the region and let the natural forces of history unfold and reach, to them, some sort of acceptable resolution.

September 3, 2013: Syria

I don't know how to think about Syria much less what we should or shouldn't do.

On Saturday I listened to President Obama lay out his thinking. I was not impressed. I know he has drawn a red-line, saying that if the Assad regime uses chemical weapons he will have us punish them.

I am wondering, though, why killing 100,000 thus far in the civil war there isn't a red line in itself. I suppose it's how you kill innocent people that counts. If Assad kills them with guns and bombs and rockets the U.S. can stay out of it; if he kills 1,400 with nerve gas we feel compelled to intervene militarily and "degrade" Syria's ability to do so again.

But I recognize that when a leader establishes a red line--which for strategic and even tactical reasons is not a good idea--if he doesn't carry out whatever it is he threatened, other bad people will assume he can be rolled by them as well. Iranians might be inclined to assume they can continue their nuclear weapons programs and the U.S. will back off when that red line is breached.

So to maintain credibility Obama has to launch a "limited" attack on Syria, assuming Congress agrees, perhaps more to send a message to Iran than to Syria.

Of one thing I am certain--that whatever we do or don't do will have many unintended consequences.

All bad.

For starters, there is more than a likelihood that various factions in the region who support Assad will attack Israel, our client state, since they can't attack us directly. If they use poison gas against them, with the Holocaust still very much in Jewish people's minds, Israel will respond massively. What will that reap?

Again, nothing good.

And though various groups of Islamists can't easily attack us in the homeland, it seems likely that there will be a step-up in global terrorist activity. I wouldn't want to be an embassy worker anywhere in the world after we send hundreds of cruise and tomahawk missiles toward Damascus.

Isn't it likely that Iran and Hezbollah will send scores of their fighters and Jihadists to Syria to fight off the rebels as well as to demonstrate their prowess to both Israel and the United States? Will Israel live comfortably with that? The last time they fought in Lebanon and Syria they were effectively defeated by Hezbollah. They have been itching for an opportunity, a justification to have a do-over.

So much of what goes on in that part of the world has to do with posturing and displaying manhood. In other words, behavior there (actually, everywhere) is often emotionally-driven and thus unpredictable since when in the throes of passion all bets are off and individuals as well as peoples often act in ways that appear self-destructive. That is until one deciphers the inner logic.

Suicide-bombing, for example, which might seem the ultimate expression of self-destructiveness (literally so), if one believes that it leads to martyrdom and directly to heaven, makes great "sense."

But here's what really does make sense, though it has no chance whatsoever of happening--

Redraw the map of the region. Actually, redraw the maps of all former-colonial regions. 

The maps we currently live with, which are the cause of much of the religious, nationalistic, and sectarian fighting we are seeing, were drawn up by the victorious big powers (mainly Britain, the United States, and France) at the end of the First World War.

Thus, countries such as Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and Palestine (to name just some) are all artificial constructs that ignore tribal and cultural borders as well as deep history.

Syria, for example, a forced  amalgam of 140 tribes and clans, some that traverse borders with Egypt and Tunisia, could easily be divided into three to 10 tribal regions. Ditto for Iraq.

Where is Kurdistan? Nowhere. It doesn't exist on any map but it is a large cultural region that spans parts of 1919-created countries Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

If we could see redrawn the national borders to create Kurdistan, tensions in that region would ebb significantly.

And if we could see that happen for the rest of the Middle East and, for that matter, all of Africa and portions of Asia, the world be a much more peaceful place.

So, maybe, here's the solution--

Big powers back off. Let the various factions fight it out. Let them exhaust themselves and eventually hope they come to their senses and agree, without the necessity of discussing it that much, to redraw their own borders so that a Kurdistan emerges as well as a few countries for Sunnis and more for the Shia.

Libya, as another example, would disappear and in its place we would have, at a minimum, Barqa, Ubaidat, Mughariba, and Awejeer. Others clans there would undoubtedly demand their own delineated territory and they would have to be accommodated. But being aggregated into a place called "Libya" isn't working, won't work, and eventually will no longer be sustained.

This fantasy of mine would take at least 100 years to be realized. But since this is where we're inevitably headed, we might as well let it start.

That process, among other things, means allowing and encouraging the current simmering and boiling conflicts to stutter to a stalemate. It also means that the U.S. not attack Syria.

Stalemate makes sense since there is no possible way for anyone, any country (us included) to "win."

Things just have to work out. This means waiting for things to revert to their cultural and historical roots--people are by DNA tribal and thus happiest, most satisfied if they are able to live with their own "kind."

For people who wish to live otherwise, there is always Western Europe and the United States.