Bigger Threat: ISIS or Congress?

What is behind the fear of ISIS in the West? The ISIS crisis in Iraq and its parallel in Syria challenges both governments as well as the status quo in the Middle East. But why would people believe that this band of fighters is an existential treat to the West? Attorney General Eric Holder shared his alarmism yesterday that the threat from ISIS is:

…more frightening than anything I think I’ve seen as attorney general

ABC News headlined “See the Terrifying ISIS Map Showing Its Five-Year Expansion Plan,” with the black flag of the Caliphate spreading like spilled crude oil across Africa, Central Asia, the Balkans, and Spain.

Lt. Gen. Joseph L. Votel, head of the Joint Special Operations Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week:

There’s risks to allowing things just to try to resolve themselves, particularly when there are interests that could affect our country…

All of this jowl-shaking goes on while the Obama administration is tumbling to the fact that there is no on-the-ground military option for us. According to a classified report leaked to The New York Times, our top brass believe:

That only about half of Iraq’s operational units are capable enough for American commandos to advise them if the White House decides to help roll back the advances made by Sunni militants in northern and western Iraq over the past month

Since Iraq’s political deadlock doesn’t look like it will be broken anytime soon, the US can’t take Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-sectarian side in a war against Iraq’s Sunnis without real repercussions from the billion Sunnis around the world.

But how serious is the ISIS threat? Most estimates say they have a core of perhaps 10,000 soldiers and maybe another 10k of new recruits. They are fighting the Syrian Army, Iranian-backed militias, the YPG, the Peshmerga, Al Nusra Front, the Free Syrian Army, in addition to the “Iraqi army” and Iraqi Shiite militias.

Let’s remember that we couldn’t hold Iraq with 168,000 troops, and the most advanced military equipment on earth. So the chance that ISIS can seize or even temporarily hold portions of Baghdad with some fraction of 10,000 is zero. From Gary Brecher at Pando News:

ISIS is about as scary as your neighbor’s yappy Shih Tzu: all noise and no teeth. Let’s just sober up, for Christ’s sake, and remember we’re talking about a half-assed Sunni militia that couldn’t face up to Assad’s mediocre Syrian Arab Army and still hasn’t found a way to occupy Sunni Iraqi towns that were outright abandoned by the [Iraqi] Army

ISIS is spread quite thin, but the Pentagon’s report says that Iraq’s armed forces and security apparatus are so badly run, so infiltrated with Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen and informers from ISIS, that there isn’t much of an opening for greater US involvement. The report is based on the findings of six teams of American Special Operations forces who were tasked with assessing the Iraqi Army that America trained and equipped at a cost of more than $25 billion.

Yet, in a show of cognitive dissonance, James Dubik, the retired Army Lt. General who oversaw the training of the Iraqi Army in 2007 and 2008, said that Iraq’s security forces could make gains against ISIS even if only half its divisions were effective, but that an advisory effort was very important:

Even if half was whipped into good enough shape, that would be enough to turn the tide

At a July 3rd Pentagon news conference, General Dempsey noted that, while Iraqi security forces were capable of defending Baghdad, they were not capable on their own of launching a counteroffensive and reversing the ISIS gains. So today, the three factions—Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shia Arabs—are holding their own, consolidating their turf, not trying very hard to occupy the other groups’ territories.

This is an existential crisis for America?

Did we liberate Iraq, or did we destroy it?  If we destroyed Iraq, are we responsible for restoring the infrastructure to its previous capabilities? Taxing ourselves to restore Iraq might teach us that we shouldn’t attack countries that are not threatening us, but we can’t afford to pay that bill.

We have the most advanced military in the world, there is no real second place to us in military might. Yet as a nation, we are failing ourselves. We are down the global ladder when it comes to healthcare, public education, repairing our infrastructure and providing social services. We can’t get out of our own way on policy because of our divided politics. We are the global leader in incarcerating our own citizens.

Why do we look at ISIS and say that they are our existential threat?

Like Pogo said: “we have met the enemy, and he is us”.

 

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An Inept Foreign Policy Team

A ton of issues confront America’s foreign policy these days, and it seems that the success of the Obama-Kerry team worsens by the week:
• We back the Ukrainian government in a shooting war with its own citizens
• We can’t get on the same page with Europe regarding Russian sanctions
• Kerry couldn’t get a ceasefire deal in Israel for the current crisis
• Iraq shows that our huge expense on military and police training was a sham. We are now backing a failed state
• Kerry is trying (along with the 5 permanent members of the Security Council + Germany) to close a nuclear deal with Iran by July 20th – yet talk has moved on to debating the length of an extension to the deadline, not just the substance of the deal
• Kerry moved to defuse the electoral crisis in Afghanistan , but his effort had little effect

We could add to this list Syria, Egypt, Libya and China. Oh, and our little spying problem with Germany, or our little banking problem with France.

It is tempting to say President Obama and his Secretary of State are accident-prone, given to stumbles on the international stage. There may be some truth to that. We can say they inherited a set of policies with enough inertia that no single administration could completely alter the outcomes.

That’s all true, but we cannot point to a situation where things have gotten better.

Let’s focus on Afghanistan. Jim White at Emptywheel on Mr. Kerry’s trip to resolve the Afghan electoral crisis:

Three short weeks from tomorrow marks the date on which Afghanistan’s new president is to be sworn in. The problem, though, is that Abdullah Abdullah refuses to believe that he could have beaten Ashraf Ghani by a million votes in the first round and then lost to him by a million votes in the runoff a few weeks later

Kerry did not solve the crisis, but he did lay hands on the next ruler. Pictures can say much more than the words. Check out this photo of Kerry with the two candidates.

Kerry & Afghan leadersReuters carried these photos of Ghani and Abdullah with Kerry In their story on Kerry’s visit to Kabul. Standing in front of the same backdrop of US and Afghan flags, the photo of Ghani and Kerry could pass as a propaganda photo with Ghani at his inaugural as the new president.

The photo with Abdullah, on the other hand, shows an uncomfortable Abdullah in a sideways glance at Kerry, who seems uninterested in shaking hands, as he did with Ghani.

Perhaps Abdullah and Kerry did shake hands, but Reuters selected a photo that seems to capture the essence of the current political crisis.

Kerry and the UN proposed a special audit of suspected fraudulent votes. Outgoing President Hamid Karzai is backing the proposal, which involves an audit of votes from 8,000 polling stations, or about 43% of the 8.1 million ballots cast. From the New York Times:

…within minutes, Mr. Abdullah’s campaign said it had already made clear to UN officials that the plan was not acceptable…A senior aide to Mr. Abdullah said the campaign had its own plan, which would entail audits of votes from about 11,000 of the roughly 22,000 polling stations

So, two plans. What could go wrong? More from Jim White:

The huge problem that Afghanistan faces is that there is no real way to audit this election after the fact… outside of Kabul, Afghan society is structured around village life and women often live their entire lives without going outside the walls of the family compound. Village elders carry huge influence for all residents of the village…

White quotes Anand Gopal, from his book, No Good Men Among the Living, pg. 261, on the 2009 election:

The goal was to ensure that women cast ballots, or, even better, that their husbands did so on their behalf. The men…performed the valuable work of liaising with the village elders and maleks, for whom a vote was not an exercise of democracy but a down payment on access, an effort to ensure that the right people were in power when the time came to call in a favor

So votes typically came in blocks, and apparently, it isn’t unusual for a village to report 90% support for a single candidate. Just how could the UN go about auditing these ballot boxes?

All of our money and all of our young peoples’ lives lost, for dueling ballot box-stuffing, with each side claiming the other is at fault, while vaguely threatening some kind of military force.

Kerry is smiling at the guy who is a member of the majority ethnic group and has the backing of Karzai. And of course, Kerry won’t look at the guy who doesn’t want to do what Kerry did in 2004 – go away quietly.

Apparently, from the perspective of the conventional American viewpoint, Ghani is the “legitimate” winner with a million-vote lead. Backing Ghani offers the Administration and the Pentagon an option to delay US withdrawal from Afghanistan to assure a peaceful transition.

Regardless of Mr. Obama’s true intentions, it appears corporate contractors and military suppliers will get another feed at the trough.

Go Team Kerry!

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