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Back To Iraq

And into Syria on the side of rebels who desecrated Christian holy sites

Here we go:

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress on Tuesday that he would recommend deploying United States combat forces against Islamic extremists in specific operations if the current strategy of airstrikes was not successful, raising the possibility of the kind of escalation that President Obama has flatly ruled out.

More:

When Iraqi or Kurdish forces are trying to dislodge militants from urban areas like Mosul, airstrikes are less effective because they can cause civilian casualties.

In those cases, the general said, he might recommend to the president that the United States send Special Operations troops to provide what he called “close combat advising,” essentially working alongside Iraqi commanders in the field and helping them direct troops to targets.

Steve Chapman says we can’t beat them. Excerpt:

The United States is not incapable of fighting reasonably successful wars. It did so in the 1991 Iraq war, the 1999 Kosovo war and the 1989 invasion of Panama. In each case, we had a well-defined adversary in the form of a government, a limited goal and a clear path to the exit.

We generally fail, though, when we undertake open-ended efforts to stamp out radical insurgents in societies alien to ours. We lack the knowledge, the resources, the compelling interest and the staying power to vanquish those groups.

The Islamic State is vulnerable to its local enemies—which include nearly every country in the region. But that doesn’t mean it can be destroyed by us. In fact, it stands to benefit from one thing at which both Obama and Bush have proved adept: creating enemies faster than we can kill them.

We don’t know how to conduct a successful war against the Islamic State. So chances are we’ll have to settle for the other kind.

Ahmad Salih Khalidi writes that the US is fooling itself on how best to fight ISIS. He says we have to make a deal with Assad. Excerpt:

The alleged moderates have never put together a convincing national program or offered a viable alternative to Mr. Assad. The truth is that there are no “armed moderates” (or “moderate terrorists”) in the Arab world — and precious few beyond. The genuine “moderates” won’t take up arms, and those who do are not truly moderates.

The suggestion in Washington and Brussels that a “Sunni coalition,” made up of Arab states and Turkey, can deal with ISIS is equally fatuous. Neither has any real credibility among the Sunni constituencies attracted to Al Qaeda and similar terrorist organizations; indeed, these countries are their enemies.

In many ways, the current struggle among the Arab gulf kingdoms (Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates) and the various iterations of violent jihadism is a family fight, a struggle for power and legitimacy within Wahhabist, salafist and other interpretations of Islam. So by insisting on a Sunni coalition, the West will only appear to be joining a gulf-led war on the Shiites of Iraq, Syria and Iran. (It bears noting that neither Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite movement based in Lebanon, nor Iran has declared a global war on the West and non-Muslims, unlike Saudi-inspired salafists and their jihadist brethren.)

Supporting the Syrian “moderates” would make some military sense only if it would make any difference on the ground. But in the absence of any large-scale Western or regional commitment to deploy troops, the only real “boots on the ground” capable of destroying ISIS are the Syrian Army and its local allies, including Hezbollah.

A year ago, Terry Mattingly wrote a column about the choice that Syria’s Christians faced as their holy places were being destroyed by rebels. He referenced a speech the Antiochian Orthodox Bishop Basil Essey of Wichita, Kansas, gave to his people on September 8 of that year, as President Obama was trying to decide whether or not to launch air strikes against the Syrian government. From that speech:

We ask your prayers first and foremost for our president. That God might speak as we say in the liturgy “good things to his heart. That God might speak reasonableness and peace to the heart of our president. That he might speak peace to the heart of our elected officials, that they indeed become our representatives, that they speak the voice of the people. God speaks through his people, not through a congressman alone, or a president alone. He speaks through his people. May God hear our prayer for our armed forces. Men and women who sit on the edges of their seats to know whether they will be going to war or not. And don’t believe this “no boots on the ground.” It’s impossible. We’ve heard the promise many times. May God give strength to the parents. The spouses first and foremost of those soldiers, and their children, and their parents and their families, that he might grant them grace during these next coming days to prepare for the tension that must be laid upon them. And God be with the people of Syria. All of them, whether they’re Muslim, they’re Druze, Christians, Orthodox and not. May he be with our Father in God (Patriarch John of Antioch) who has already lost thousands of his people, and priests and deacons and monks and nuns in the war already. Whose monasteries and churches have been occupied and many destroyed by the so-called Free Syrian Army. Whose own brother was kidnapped and still remains kidnapped, Metropolitan Paul along with Archbishop Yohanna, since April 22 by freedom fighters. Freedom fighters–people who rape women, abduct bishops, desecrate churches, open peoples’ chests and pull their beating heart out and eat it in their presence. That’s the Free Syrian Army and their allies, Al Qaeda.

Two days ago I received a call from our Metropolitan Saba Esper, who you know, he has visited here. He is the archbishop of our own Wichita diocese’s sister diocese in south Syria. He spoke by telephone, right before he called me, with Mother Belagia. Mother Belagia is the abbess of the monastery of Saint Thekla in Maalula. It’s only like a 20-30 minute drive north of Damascus. It had been occupied for 3 days (the town). The town is one of three where they still speak Aramaic–Aramaic which our Saviour spoke. The only 3 towns left in the world. The majority of the people in Maaloula are Christians–Orthodox Christians. There’s a smattering of Catholics there, and there’s also some Muslims there, and they live there in peace. The beginning of this week they were occupied by the Free Syrian Army. It turned out to be Al Qaeda, and they turned out to be Chechens–the same ones who abducted our 2 bishops. The nuns took the children there, orphan girls there of St. Thekla, and they and the nuns, many who are aging, into the caves of the village to hide for 4 days. They didn’t even go out to buy bread. The villagers didn’t leave their homes for 4 days. And if you’ve never been to the Middle East, they don’t shop like we do. They go every morning to buy their bread and food for the day. So they were locked in their homes for 4 days. Those who went out were shot, so they knew to stay in their homes. Saba called me on Wednesday. Mother Belagia, and they were ringing all the bells in the town’s churches–the Syrian Army, you know the one that we’re told is so bad. The Syrian Army finally came and drove Al Qaeda out. And what did they find? They found 2 churches in the village completely destroyed. St. Elias, which is ours, the Orthodox church in the village, and St. Rita, which is a Catholic church in the village–completely destroyed. On the inside, the icons, the holy books, everything had been desecrated. Not just ripped off the walls, but covered in urine. Real desecration by that wing of the Free Syrian Army.

God knows what the people of Syria, and by extension the people of Jordan, the people of Lebanon, the people of Turkey and the people of Iraq–because if there’s a war there’s a regional war–God knows the burden they may have to carry this week. Lighten their burden as you can. And that’s by your prayers. Have a soft heart towards the people. Wrongs were done on both sides–vicious wrongs on both sides. But as we’ve heard from some honest politicians this past week, there’s really no good armed force over there. No one we can trust. None. So the choice is between the evil that we know and that we’ve had for 30-40 years in that part of the world, or another evil we don’t know about except what they’ve shown us in this awful civil war for the past 2 and a half years.

The Free Syrian Army, you understand, the same people who desecrated those churches, are now about to be funded and trained by the United States of America. This just in:

House leaders of both parties said Tuesday they expect to pass a measure granting President Barack Obama’s request to arm and equip Syrian rebels.

“The president asked us to authorize the training of the Free Syrian Army,” House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, told reporters in Washington. “That’s what we’re going to do.”

 

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Back To Iraq

And count me as extremely apprehensive. It seems to me, the President is taking a gamble that a discrete application of force at just the right point will tip the balance in precisely the right direction to prevent catastrophe. I am very, very skeptical that this is a good gamble. It has almost never worked […]
Iraq war soldiers

And count me as extremely apprehensive.

It seems to me, the President is taking a gamble that a discrete application of force at just the right point will tip the balance in precisely the right direction to prevent catastrophe. I am very, very skeptical that this is a good gamble. It has almost never worked out in the past.

We do not have a political strategy for Iraq, or for the region, and so we cannot even say whether a given military outcome would serve that strategy. Are we encouraging the Kurds to seek complete independence, and the final collapse of a unitary Iraq? Are we planning to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Iraq by helping Christians, Yazidis and other minorities get out of the country? Do we want Assad to defeat the ISIS-aligned groups within Syria?

I don’t think we have any idea what our answers are to these questions. We literally do not know what outcome we are trying to achieve, outside of the realm of fantasies about liberal democrats holding all the existing states together within their existing borders.

I am terrified by what ISIS represents. I think a case can be made that our top priority for Iraq and Syria should be defeating the group. Logically, though, that likely means accepting an Assad victory in the Syrian civil war and greater Iranian influence in Iraq. And accepting those two outcomes puts us on the opposite side from the major Sunni powers, particularly Saudi Arabia. What else will we have to sacrifice to mollify them?

Back when ISIS first came on the scene in Iraq, I argued that we have a moral responsibility to do what we can to ameliorate the situation in Iraq, but also that direct military intervention would likely prove counter-productive. As the situation in northern Iraq gets worse and worse, I stand by both views.

Even if our plan is simply to get the most vulnerable populations, like the Yazidis, out of the region entirely, there needs to be a much clearer articulation of how we are going to achieve that, and what is going to happen once that goal is achieved. Even more so if our goal is effectively to undertake a long-term commitment to Kurdistan. And in the absence of any kind of regional political process for containing and ultimately resolving the war, even the most limited operation strikes me as extremely risky.

I understand why we’re getting in. But we have no idea what we’re getting into here.

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