The last review of the situation I did was in my 2014 "ISIS - Do Something Stupid Now" post (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/09/isis-do-something-stupid-now.html). At that point we had little experience with ISIS (or ISIL or daesh). But almost two years have passed and ISIS is still with us. So what's changed and what has stayed the same?
The propensity for doing something stupid NOW, as in before thinking the ramifications through, has continued. And the Middle East continues to churn. I write this a few days after a failed Coup attempt in Turkey. Back then I certainly did not predict a Turkish Coup nor that it would fail. But a much overlooked attribute of the Middle East is the regularity with which unexpected things continue to happen.
When I wrote the previous post al Maliki was in charge of Iraq. Shortly afterward he was forced out and replaced by al Abadi. He seems to be doing a much better job of governing the country as opposed to just looking out for the interests of the Shiites. As a result of this more enlightened approach Iraqi forces have had considerable success in pushing ISIS out of large chunks of Anbar province. As is often the case, things have been going slowly, much more slowly than one would hope. I talked about things changing in "a year or so". Some things have changed but most things have stayed the same.
And unlike the change for the better that has happened in Iraq things have gotten worse in Turkey. (For the moment I am confining myself to the fight against ISIS.) An informal truce between the government and the Kurds lasted for a good long while. This truce was upheld by the Kurds. They wanted to focus on supporting the Kurdish sections of Iraq and Syria. But the Erdogan government of Turkey abruptly broke the truce. This has resulted in a number of tit-for-tat actions on both sides. The Turks have bombed and shelled Kurdish territory in Turkey. In retaliation the Kurds have staged a number of terrorist attacks on Turkish soil. The back and forth has remained at a relatively low level so far but who knows what the future will bring.
And it has become apparent that Turkey was using a policy of "benign neglect" when it came to ISIS. But there have recently been a number of ISIS terrorist attacks inside Turkey. The most recent one occurred in the main airport in Istanbul. It looks like the Turkish government is moving toward a more anti-ISIS stance. But Erdogan is using the failed Coup as an excuse to tighten his control of the country. Tens of thousands of people have been rounded up. So it is likely that he will step up his harassment of the Kurds but it is also likely he will step up his harassment of ISIS. What's the net? Who knows.
So the Turkish situation is complex and fraught with opportunities for the US to put a foot wrong. As is the situation with the Iraqis and, therefore, with the Kurds. We would like to support the Kurds much more actively as they have been the most effective in opposing ISIS. But this is likely to antagonize Turkey, Iraq, or both. And that's just three countries. Let's now widen our view.
I'll start with Iran because they are intimately connected with Iraq and ISIS. We have done a nuclear deal with Iran. This takes Iranian nukes off the table. This should universally be seen as a good thing. But the Republican position of "we're against anything Obama is for" means that this deal must be bad mouthed. The Obama Administration wants to improve relations with Iran and to nudge them away from bad behavior (supporting terrorists) and toward good behavior.
Iran has been helpful in our efforts to defeat ISIS. But they continue to generally support various terrorist factions in the Middle East. The Iranian street is strongly in favor of the nuclear deal and would like to go back to having normal relations with the rest of the world. The street believes that this would substantially improver the Iranian economy. An improved economy, it is thought, would improve the position of moderates in Iran. This will hopefully create a moderating force within Iran. It is way too soon to be able to predict success for this admittedly optimistic scenario.
Let's move on to Syria. The Civil War grinds on. It has hemorrhaged hundreds of thousands of refugees into Europe through Turkey. Just when Assad looked to be on the ropes the Russians swooped in and saved him. The result is that there is plenty of outside support available to fund the carnage and destruction the various sides want to inflict on each other. No side is strong enough to take the other sides out nor weak enough to be eliminated by the others. So there continues to be no end in sight.
The rest of the Middle East seems frozen in amber. The Saudis continue to maintain their support of the Wahhabi faction of Islam. The Wahhabis continue to provide religious cover (and lots of under the table money) to extremists. Egypt seems to have settled into the 2.0 version of a military dictatorship. Any US efforts to assist Libya in its efforts to get back on track have been sabotaged by Republican "get Hillary" actions so it continues to churn. The Israelis continue to build settlements and generally drift toward a "one state" solution. But the Palestinian population bomb guarantees this strategy will eventually fail. But in the mean time any possibility of a "two state" solution recedes into the distance.
A more distant component of the general churn is the Afghanistan/Pakistan situation. The Afghan government has turned over and the new crew seem to be doing a better job of governance. So there seems to be glacially slow progress in Afghanistan. I really don't know what is going on with Pakistan. The ISI secret service seems to be still in bed with the Taliban. But who controls what, and what the trends are is a total mystery to me. So here too things are more "same old - same old" than anything else.
There is a constant to all this. And that is there are a lot of moving pieces that all interact. Pushing one piece hard (i.e. "bombing [insert the location of your choice here] until the sand glows") is going to be good for defense contractors and bad for pretty much everyone else. And let me quote from my previous post here: "There is a near unanimous belief in the area [throughout the Arab world] that we [the US] have interfered too much in the area." Any kind of substantial unilateral US military action would generate large amounts of blow back.
We need to stick with a strategy of working through the locals. This is frustrating in the extreme. Each and every one of our local allies has important interests that conflict with the actions we would like to see taken. As a single example, Turkey has a large economic base, a large population, and a large well trained and equipped military. They could swoop in and wipe ISIS out without raising a sweat. But for a long list of reasons Turkey is not going to do that. They even think it is a good idea to put road blocks in our way. I could go to the next and the next and the next of our allies. The details vary but what is common is that they find reasons to not do what we would prefer.
But wait! It's worse. Say somebody, Turkey for instance, went ahead and did what we wanted. That would likely be viewed badly by others of our allies and that might result in them taking actions we really don't want them to take. So is the situation hopeless? No! There is actually a precedent for this kind of situation. It is of all things the Cold War.
The Cold War was the same sort of complicated mess. And there a serious misstep could have resulted in Global Nuclear War. So what did we do? We were slow, methodical, and persistent. And it eventually worked. But it did take fifty years. I think the Middle East situation can be worked out in less than fifty years. But it will take much longer than anyone wants it to. Remember that when it started, no one thought the Cold War would last as long as it did.
What got the USSR in the end was economics. They just couldn't get their economy to work very well. Eventually the western economy grew so far past the communist one that their side collapsed from the inside. The common problem in the Middle East is bad government. This results in stagnant economies. Oil has propped these economies up for a long time. These governments have succeeded in buying their populations off. But that is getting harder and harder to do. Even within just the Oil industry technology marches on. Things like Fracking require the kind of nimble response repressive regimes are bad at.
Technology also marches on and opens the populations of these countries up to what is going on in the rest of the world. This opening up was what kicked off the Arab Spring. At base it was a movement for better, more open government. That genie has temporarily been forced back into the bottle. The authoritarian regimes prevailed. But will they be able to next time? We want to be seen as the good guys the next time the lid comes off. The way to do this is to act like good guys. And that means, in the most simplistic terms, that we want the State Department not the Defense Department to be the lead agency.
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