Trudy Rubin: How should the U.S. respond to IS attacks in Paris?

While it's disheartening to read Trudy Rubin's assessment of the Obama adminstration's missed opportunities to change the course of developments in Syria and Iraq, it's encouraging that she sees Hillary Clinton's blueprint for defeating IS as the most likely approach to achieve long-term success.  

Yes, there's a partisan element to both of my reactions, but mostly they're driven by the desire to see IS put out of business. 

Rubin's primary focus in this op-ed, per the headline, is on understanding the complex forces at play and taking that understanding as a framework for an American strategy that resonates with the realities on the ground.  Therefore, she only alludes in passing to the administration's "missed opportunity" to arm moderate Sunnis in Syria in 2012 which might have been a hedge against the IS takeover of so much turf and population. 

But as the piece goes on, she delves into some of the political tangles that made the options in 2012 much harder to read then than they appear in hindsight (not that Rubin wasn't advocating at the time for that strategy, by the way, but IS was not a factor in 2012).  The main problem was and continues to be that Obama's been bending over backwards to subject American intervention in Iraq to the will of the Iraqi government, and that government in 2012 was, and to a more moderated degree still is, dominated by Shiites and influenced by Iran.  The result has been a de facto embargo on U.S. assistance to Sunnis in northern and western Iraq who want to join the fight against (faux-)Sunni IS.  

Obama in 2012 was looking at a chaotic situation in Syria.  Any assumption that weapons delivered to moderate Sunnis fighting Assad would not have been among the weapons in IS hands today is just an assumption -- just as it would have been a bet on an unsure thing at the time.  Today the Repubicans who want to call Obama feckless for not intervening in Syria accuse him of having been overly intrusive in Libya.  

All of which is water under the bridge, but that one narrow aspect of Rubin's perspective is the only quibble I have with the substance of the piece.  Otherwise, Rubin make the most sense of anyone I've heard in terms of a strategic plan for the U.S.'s role in enabling regional Muslim fighters to excise the IS cancer from their midst.  She crystallizes what we should be looking for in the coming weeks to determine if the U.S. is taking steps that could increase the prospects for making progress against the human equivalent of global warming as a threat to international peace and human welfare. 

The fact that she opens by contemptuously dismissing the GOP candidates' reactions to Paris as so much useless, thoroughly counterproductive demagoguery is just a bonus feature.     

How should the United States respond to Islamic State attacks in Paris?
by Trudy Rubin,  Philadelphia Inquirer columnist

Empowering Sunni Iraqis is key      

   The response from the Republican presidential candidates has been to whip up hysteria over Syrian refugees and hostility toward all Muslims — with rhetoric so repulsive that it shames the country. Ben Carson likened refugees   to “rabid dogs,” while Donald Trump said he would “absolutely” create a database to track Muslims inside the country.

   Much easier to play the demagogue than to present a detailed plan.

   To her credit, Hillary Clinton did just that in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations on Thursday. She called for an     intensified focus on Syria (implicitly criticizing President Obama’s timid approach).

   But to my mind, her most important point was about Iraq. She called for U.S. help for Iraqi Sunni tribal leaders who want to fight ISIS but can’t get the weapons and support to do it. That is the one step that, in the near term, might set the so-called caliphate back on its heels.

   Why do I focus on Iraq, not Syria? Because I see little chance of routing ISIS in Syria, even with a more resolute policy than Obama’s. Airstrikes alone won’t do it (although more U.S. special forces on the ground would make them more effective).

   Almost no one, certainly not Trump or Clinton, advocates sending tens of thousands of U.S. ground troops. So it is crucial to find Arab allies on the ground who can drive ISIS back with our help.

   Right now, our main allies in Syria are Kurds, who are liberating areas that they want to hold in the future. But they can’t liberate the heavily Sunni territory at the heart of the caliphate.

   Obama missed his chance in 2012 to aid thousands of moderate Syrian Sunni fighters, including many army defectors, who might have developed into a viable force to repel both ISIS and Bashar al-Assad. Those moderates have long   since fled, been killed, or joined Islamist militias out of frustration. This leaves Washington without a ground force that can crush the Syrian portion of the jihadi state.

   As for enlisting the help of Russia or even Iran in a grand coalition to defeat the jihadis, forget it. Moscow and Tehran hold all the cards in new diplomatic   efforts to end the Syrian conflict. Even after the terrorists’ downing of aRussian plane, Putin’s primary goal — and Iran’s — is to bolster the Assad regime, not to defeat ISIS. This practically guarantees that the talks   — or any plan to hold Syrian elections   — will ultimately fail.

   Thus the best chance to squeeze the caliphate, which extends across eastern Syria and western Iraq, is to push from the Iraqi side of the border. This is why it is so important for the administration to stop its shilly-shallying about helping Iraqi Sunni tribal leaders who have been eager to enter the fight for more than a year.

   “If Iraq is the only front where we can reduce ISIS, it becomes acutely important to get back the cities there that they control,” said retired Col.   Richard Welch, who spent more than six years working with Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq.

   The U.S. military is familiar with many of these tribal leaders, who took part in the “Awakening” movement during the middle of the last decade. At that time, U.S. forces helped them roll back al-Qaeda.  

   Last week , I spoke by phone to Sheikh Abdullah al-Yawar of the Shammar tribe, whose base is near Iraq’s border with Syria. His tribe has been battling jihadis for more than a decade. Six months ago, when I visited the sheikh, he hoped to get U.S. reenter the fight   support to   against ISIS, but he says nothing has happened since then.

   “We met with Americans last June and told them we had 4,000 volunteers and gave them a list at the end of July,” Yawar told me Thursday. “They told me that in two months, they would start training 2,400 and would give us weapons. But since then, nothing has happened, nothing has changed.”

   Many other Sunni sheikhs are also eager to fight ISIS in Iraq’s Sunni heartlands, where the extremists have captured   major cities such as Ramadi and Mosul, which is the heart of the so-called caliphate. But the Obama administration insists on funneling weapons and training for the tribes through the Shiite-led central government, which passes on almost nothing to the Sunnis. (U.S. weapons are reaching Iraqi Kurds, but the Kurds — as in Syria — can’t go it alone.)

   The administration has been holding off for months on aiding Sunni tribes directly, waiting for the Iraqi parliament to pass a national guard law that would subsume Sunni tribal fighters under the national Iraqi army. But Iranian pressure has blocked the law’s passage.

   The result: Only a couple of thousand Sunnis have joined the struggle. “There are no real Sunni fighters being trained to take back Mosul,” says Yawar. “Seriously, there is nothing moving to face ISIS.”

   This is nuts. As Clinton put it Thursday: “We need to lay the foundation for a Second Sunni Awakening. We need to put sustained pressure on the government in Baghdad to … finally stand up a national guard …arming Sunni and Kurdish forces. … If Baghdad won’t do that, the coalition should do so directly.”

   This is the kind of serious issue candidates should be discussing, not registering all Muslims or banning refugees. trubin@phillynews.com  

A house divided

Uh-huh, so a couple of things in today's Inbox got me to thinking.  One was about the massive scandal about John Kerry letting it slip that he believes the Charlie Hebdo murders were justified! 

Or rather it was the scandal created by the vast right-wing media death star constellation out of a verbal miscue by Kerry when he said that the Hebdo attack unlike the latest attack had a "legitimacy" -- which he immediately corrected and said he meant a "rationale", i.e., that the target was chosen based on a perceived offense to Muslims as opposed to the randomness of Friday night's mass murders.  Too late, he said legitimacy -- and anyway it's just as bad if he meant to say rationale, cuz there ain't no rationale for the irrational -- so let's make believe that we think he meant to say murderous terrorism makes sense and go for the jugular!  No shame, and apparently not a shred of self-respect either, on the part of RW propaganda whores who are being well compensated for dropping their last crumpled-up shred of intellectual honesty or journalistic integrity into the cigarette disposal can outside the front door. 

The other Inbox thing was Sen. Al Franken's request.  It was that I put myself in the Thanksgiving dinner seat of the irrepressible Uncle Murray, the iconic old fart who has to nudger everyone around the table about political topics.  So Franken asks, what are the topics I want to nudger the relatives (and the Senate) about this year? 

Well, as everyone around my dinner table knows, I hate to have to share my opinions on stuff.  But I overcame my natural disinclination to express myself in writing and responded thus:  

The timing of this survey is going to make it a skewed sample, since security will be utmost on every sane person's agenda less than a week after Paris, Sinai and Beirut have shown us a new threat on the doorstep.  I am sane in that way myself! 

At this very specific moment I am most deeply troubled by the polarization in America, so deep that millions of citizens believe the right-wing media's attack claiming that John Kerry's verbal confusion means that he really does support terrorist murderers. 

I am troubled by it because it has one possible and one definite outcome, and both are scary to the bone.  It's definite that a divided country is more vulnerable and less effective in dealing with an external enemy.  It's possible that the fear and loathing could lead to the election of a warmongering neocon chickenhawk who will precipitate not a piecemeal but an all-out WWIII, i.e., nuclear. 

After that, my many other worries include global warming, voting rights, women's reproductive rights, Repubican (I'll use Republican when they resume using Democratic as an adjective rather than Democrat) attacks on Medicare and Social Security, racial profiling by police and the criminal justice system, the highest incarceration rates in the world along with a corrections and re-entry system that doesn't correct or build people toward productive post-release lives, crumbling infrastructure that requires a massive investment that would also create good jobs, stronger enforcement and oversight of Wall Street as well as polluters, and stronger support for and enforcement regarding workers' rights as well as a significantly increased federal minimum wage. If you want more, lemme know!

P.S.  The Daniel Pipes and Hassan Abdi articles I wrote about yesterday both moved me, albeit it in opposite directions.  So FYI I wrote a letter to the Inquirer about them.  Don't know if they'll print it, so I'll share it with y'all.

To the editor:

What a stark contrast of perspectives you've offered between Tuesday's and Wednesday's opinion pages!  

Daniel Pipes' Tuesday op-ed "In denial on Islamist terror" argues that we should stop denying that terrorist organziations like al Qaeda and IS are Islamic.  In a verbal cloud of vitriol and loose opinions, Pipes conflates "rape gangs, exotic diseases and bloodbaths" with Islam and Muslims. He explicitly argues in favor of a strong national turn to the right, as if a reaction borne of visceral anger and hate would help to solve the complex problem of IS.  

By the end of Pipes' essay, I was struck by its failure to propose even one single benefit that would arise from adopting an official policy of referring to these terrorist groups as Islamic. 

Meanwhile, Imam Hassan Abdi's Wednesday letter economically conveys an amazing amount of information and a palpable cry of the heart to move us toward a constructive understanding.  Hassan shows clearly why IS is not Islamic, and he pleads with us not to collude with IS's recruitment efforts by tarring Muslims with the brush of condemnation and otherness that is rightly raised against IS.  This is not the West versus Islam -- that is why President Obama is insisting that Muslim nations take the point in the effort to defeat IS. 

Hassan's argument is for building unity to overcome divisiveness; I profoundly agree with his view. 

The right-wing call for casting Islam as our enemy is cut from the exact same tattered bolt of neoconservative ideology as created the "Axis of Evil" and the Iraq War.  Let's not fall for it again, for God's sake.  

Howard Dansky