Americans now realize our 2003 decision to wage war against Iraq's Saddam Hussein was a huge mistake. The Bush administration took its eyes off the source of the 2001 attacks, namely Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, to chase down a dictator who had nothing to do with that attack and whose secular leftist ideology was in fact despised by the fundamentalist right-wing Osama bin Laden. Twelve years and thousands of Iraqi and American lives later, the only beneficiary is Iran, which profits from replacement of a dictatorial Sunni government by a dictatorial Shiite one, and dismemberment of the Sunni-dominated Iraqi Army. Iraq is now unstable and effectively split three ways, with Kurds ruling in the north, Sunnis under ISIS ruling in the west, and Shiites ruling in the southeast. U.S. meddling made everything worse and stimulated the rise of ISIS by giving dispossessed Sunnis nowhere else to turn.
Now the Obama administration is making precisely the same mistake in Syria, helping create and maintain a civil war that has created 250,000 civilian deaths, 11 million refugees, the European migrant crisis and the spread of ISIS. This mistake is called "regime change." The late U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas called it "the arrogance of power." Just as we diverted our attention from Afghanistan in order to "fix" Iraq, we now divert our attention from ISIS to fix Syria. According to U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark and also "WikiLeaks," the U.S. has sought since 2003 to destabilize the Assad government.
Bashar Assad is a brutal dictator, but he poses little threat to America. U.S. and rebel efforts to remove him created a civil war that causes far more misery than Assad would have caused, and that further contributes to the rise of ISIS. According to a NATO study in June 2013, 70 percent of Syrians support Assad. Considering that we have little national interest in overthrowing him, that there are brutal dictators all over the world, and that most Syrians support Assad, it's hard to understand our obsession with regime change in Syria. We should instead cooperate with the United Nations to conduct a popular referendum in that war-torn country, even if it means Assad might remain in power. Except for the rebels and the U.S., all parties including Assad appear to agree on a referendum. It would end the civil war and allow everyone to focus on defeating ISIS.
The realpolitik of the Mideast is probably beyond human comprehension. It traces back to the Sunni-Shia split within Islam, a split arising from the question of who would inherit Mohammad's mantel after that prophet's death in the year 632.
Sunnis-- Turkey and the Arab Gulf states -- oppose the Sunni ISIS, but oppose Shiite Iran and Assad even more; Saudi Arabia is too involved in its war in Yemen against Iranian-backed Houthis to become involved in ground combat in Syria.
Shiites -- Iran, Assad's Syria, and southern Iraq -- strongly oppose ISIS.
Kurds -- in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran -- envision an independent Kurdistan carved from those four nations. Naturally, all four oppose the Kurds. Kurds also oppose ISIS.
Now mix in Russia, which supports Iran and Assad, and the U.S., which supports Turkey and the Arabs and opposes Assad, and add Israel, which strongly opposes Iran and Syria, and you sense the Mideast's perilous complexity.
Saudi Arabia has been nearly absent from the fight against ISIS. This is not surprising, given that ISIS and Saudi Arabia are both strongly Sunni, and that Saudi Arabia's extreme "Wahhabist" version of Islam is considered by many to be the inspiration for ISIS and Al Qaeda. Saudi Arabia spawned Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 Twin Towers terrorists. A 2009 WikiLeaks memo from the U.S. secretary of state asserted that the primary source of funding of Sunni terrorist groups worldwide was Saudi Arabia. It's a mystery to me why the U.S. sides with Saudi Arabia and against Iran.
Unlike Saudi Arabia, Iran is engaged on the ground against ISIS. So are the Kurds. Russia is actively engaged in the air. Assad opposes ISIS but the difficulties of the ongoing civil war prevent him from fully engaging with them on the ground.
A United Nations-sanctioned alliance of Mideastern ground forces backed by U.S., Russian, and European air power could quickly defeat ISIS. The U.S. must get over its obsession with regime change and ally with Russia, Assad's Syria and other nations. This would end the war, save countless Syrian civilian lives, end the refugee crisis and make the world safer.
Commentary on 12/08/2015