by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Contenders episode PBS aired a special two-hour Frontline show called “Confronting ISIS,” and I wondered if
that would be a rerun of previous shows they’ve done on the rise of ISIS, but
it was new — it took into account the events of late 2015 (notably the attacks
in Paris and San Bernardino) and 2016. Its two main theses were that the Obama
administration has been feckless in responding to the terror threat, too
terrified of getting the U.S. involved in another ground war in the Middle East
(almost inevitably the show includes the famous clip of Obama saying, “I got
elected to stop wars, not start
’em!”) and too obsessed with finding “allies” in the fight against ISIS to take
the step of direct military engagement; and that one reason Obama had such
trouble finding allies, especially among Middle Eastern countries themselves,
is that nowhere in that part of the region is there a country that regards ISIS
as the primary threat to their own survival.
The show mentions one battle
between ISIS and local anti-ISIS fighters in a town called (I think) Kobila on
the border of Turkey and Syria, in which the U.S. decided they wanted to
support the anti-ISIS fighters and Turkey wouldn’t send in their own troops
(even though one would think any
country would want to stop an armed conflict on their own border!) or let the
U.S. use their big air base in Turkey to supply the anti-ISIS fighters. The
reason was that the anti-ISIS fighters were Kurds, and the Turks regard the
Kurds as a far more existential threat than they do ISIS and don’t want to do anything to give the Kurds a leg-up in a regional conflict.
This pattern has occurred time and time again: Obama at one point thought he
had a coalition of Arab states set up to fight ISIS, only at that time a
Sunni-Shi’a civil war broke out in Yemen and the Sunni Arab states were far
more interested in supporting the Sunni side in the Yemeni civil war than they
were in fighting ISIS. Later Obama thought he had a deal with Russia for a
joint intervention in Syria to bomb ISIS positions — only when the Russians
finally started flying missions, they didn’t target ISIS. Instead they targeted
the U.S.-backed “moderate Syrian rebels” on behalf of their ally, Syrian
president Bashir al-Assad. At one point Obama gave a speech urging the Arab
states in general and Saudi Arabia in particular to contribute more money to the
anti-ISIS fight — and the Saudis responded by cutting off defense ties with the
U.S. and using their army (equipped with high-tech weaponry mostly sold to them
by, guess who, the U.S.) not to
fight ISIS but to go up against proxy armies of the largest and most powerful
Shi’a Muslim nation, Iran. Apparently the Saudis had gone even more ballistic
about the nuclear arms control deal between the U.S. and Iran — the one that
freed Iran to develop their civilian nuclear program and released $1.5 billion
in frozen Iranian assets in exchange for an inspection system that will keep
Iran from developing a bomb for 12 years — regarding it as an even more
existential threat than the Israelis do, and so their main foreign-policy issue
was controlling Iran and the wars they could fight in the region with that sort
of money, not ISIS.
ISIS came up in the last Presidential debate in,
ironically, one of the few sensible things Donald Trump actually said — that he
disagreed with his running mate, Mike Pence, who’d said the U.S. might have to
intervene militarily in Syria if Russia did. Trump’s argument was that we
should be supporting anyone who’s
killing ISIS fighters, no matter who they are or what their reason is for doing
so — including Russia, Iran and the Assad government in Syria. There’s
certainly a precedent for this: World War II, in which the U.S. and Great
Britain basically ignored Joseph Stalin’s terrible human rights record and
allied with him on the ground that Nazi Germany was the bigger, or at least the
more immediate, threat and needed to be stopped even with help from so
unwelcome a source as Stalin’s regime. Of course, there’s a contradiction
between Trump calling for the U.S. to ally itself with Iran to fight ISIS and
his attacks elsewhere in the debate on the Iran nuclear deal, but he’s got a
point — just as Ted Cruz had a point in one of the Republican debates when he
said that strictly from the point of view of U.S. interests, the U.S. was
better off with Arab states being governed by secular dictators like Bashir
al-Assad, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Quaddafi and Saddam Hussein than with the
regimes that have replaced them (or, in Assad’s case, are still trying to
replace him) since. It was a call for the U.S. to stop trying to take down
Assad (something we couldn’t do even if the Russians weren’t flying bombing missions to support him and wipe out
the rebels — the only realistic outcomes for the Syrian civil war are an Assad
victory, his replacement by Right-wing Islamist crazies aligned with al-Qaeda
or ISIS, or the total breakdown of Syria as a state à la Somalia) and to support Generai Sisi, the Egyptian
military leader who deposed Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood (the first
— and, it’s beginning to look like, the only — person ever fairly elected to be president of
Egypt) and re-established the joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip
Morsi had taken down.
The problem with defeating ISIS is the problem with a
“war on terror” in general; you can take out their leaders (as Hillary Clinton
argued for in the last debate) but they’ve got a strong enough bench they can
always replace them; and in the era of the Internet and social media it’s easy
enough for ISIS to recruit people all over the world to commit acts of terror
on their behalf without any discernible link to ISIS Central in Raqqa, Syria
other than a history of looking at the ISIS Web site or Facebook page and
clicking the button that says, “Swear allegiance.” (Alleged Orlando mass
murderer Omar Mateen showed his lack of understanding of the cause he was
supposedly swearing allegiance to when he swore allegiance to ISIS and al-Qaeda and al-Nusra, three groups that hate each other almost as much as each
hates the infidels.) I also liked the fact that the Frontline documentary on ISIS said the name — not “radical
Islamic terror,” the term the Right in general and Donald Trump in particular
is furious with Obama and Hillary Clinton for refusing to use, but Wahhabism,
the ultra-reactionary sect of Islam that is the real driving force behind ISIS, al-Qaeda and the terror
movement in general — and which is also the official state religion of Saudi
Arabia (as the show made clear, the Saudi government and its clerical allies
regard all non-Wahhabi Muslims as heretics and infidels — as do ISIS and their
ilk, which is how they can kill them despite Muhammad’s injunction in the Quran
that Muslims must never kill other Muslims), and which the U.S. has essentially
supported with all the money for the oil we’ve bought from Saudi Arabia all
these years.
