When President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced he was setting up an
air base in the middle of Syria to take on the Islamic State and bolster
President Bashar al-Assad, more than a few analysts and politicians praised his
forceful, game-changing, strategic brilliance, suggesting that Putin was crazy
like a fox. Some of us thought he was just crazy.
Well, two
months later, let’s do the math: So far, Putin’s Syrian adventure has resulted
in a Russian civilian airliner carrying 224 people being blown up, apparently
by pro-ISIS militants in Sinai. Turkey shot down a Russian bomber after it
strayed into Turkish territory. And then Syrian rebels killed one of the pilots
as he parachuted to earth and one of the Russian marines sent to rescue him.
Many of the anti-Assad rebels in that area are ethnic Turkmens, with strong
cultural ties to Turkey; Turkey was not amused by Putin bombing Turkmen
villages inside Syria, because it weakens Turkey’s ability to shape Syria’s
future.
Meanwhile,
in Crimea, Ukraine, which Putin annexed, pro-Turkish Tatars apparently cut the
power lines, plunging Crimea into a near total blackout. And in October dozens
of Saudi clerics called for a “holy war” against the governments of Syria, Iran
and Russia.
In sum, Putin’s “crafty” Syrian chess move has left him with a lot more
dead Russians; newly at odds with Turkey and Iran; weakened in Ukraine; acting
as the defense lawyer for Assad — a mass murderer of Sunni Muslims, the same
Sunni Muslims as Putin has in Russia; and with no real advances against ISIS.
Other than that, it’s been a great success.
Truth be told,
I wish Putin had succeeded. It would have saved us all a lot of trouble,
because ISIS is not the “J.V. team” President Obama once called it. It’s
actually the Jihadist All-Star team. It combines the military efficiency of
Iraqi ex-Baathist army officers with the religious zealotry and prison-forged
depravity of its “Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” the Web-savvy of Arab
millennials and a thrill-ride appeal to humiliated young Muslim males, who’ve
never held power, a decent job or a girl’s hand.
And the ISIS threat is becoming strategic. The massive
outflow of refugees from Syria and Iraq that ISIS has provoked is leading the
European Union to start to close internal borders and limit the free flow of
people and probably some goods as well — just the opposite of what the bloc was
created to do. That will only slow the E.U.’s economic growth and fuel greater
nationalism that could ultimately threaten its unity. The E.U. is America’s
most important partner in managing the global system. If it is weakened, we are
weakened.
But to
sustainably destroy ISIS, you need to understand three things: 1) It is the
product of two civil wars; one was between moderate and extremist Sunnis and
the other was between Sunnis and Shiites. And they feed each other. 2) The only
way to defeat ISIS is to minimize the struggle between Sunnis and Shiites and
strengthen the fighting capacity of moderate Sunnis against extremist ones. And
3) the fight has to be led by Arabs and Muslims but strongly backed by America,
the E.U. and, yes, Russia.
Whereas Putin’s goals are uncertain, and perhaps
limited to protecting a truncated Assad regime, Obama really does want to
defeat ISIS. Just as important, he wants to do it without being either Putin or
George W. Bush, who just dove into the middle.
But it isn’t clear that a middle approach exists, let alone the fantasy
options of many Obama critics, as in Donald Trump’s just “bomb the [blank] out
of them.” (Gosh, no one thought of that!) Everyone wants to defeat ISIS with
the “Immaculate Intervention”: more bombs from the air or somebody else’s
troops, boots, risks or political transformation.
Sorry, but to sustainably defeat ISIS you need a
mutually reinforcing coalition. You need Saudi Arabia and the leading Sunni
religious powers to aggressively delegitimize ISIS’s Islamist narrative. You
need Arab, Kurdish and Turkish ground troops — backed by U.S. and NATO air
power and special forces, with Russia’s constructive support — to uproot ISIS
door to door.
You need Iran
to encourage the Shiite-led government in Baghdad to create a semiautonomous
“Sunnistan” in the areas held by ISIS, giving moderate Iraqi Sunnis the same
devolved powers as Kurds in Kurdistan so they have a political alternative to
ISIS. And you need Iran to agree to a political transition in Syria that would
eventually replace Assad.
In short, you need either a power-sharing political
solution that all the key players accept and will enforce, or an armed force to
just crush ISIS and then sit on the region indefinitely, so ISIS doesn’t come
back. Obama can’t secure the former, and doesn’t want to do the latter. Nor do
the American people — nor Obama’s critics, despite what some of them might
suggest.
You can say that when
it comes to ISIS and Syria, Obama has done an impossible job badly, and someone
else might have done it better. But it is still an impossible job as long as
all the key players in that region define their interests as rule or die and as
long as most of the real democrats in that region are living abroad.
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