A few weeks ago, I met with a senior US diplomat who characterized the Obama administration’s sole foreign policy objective with one word — “rapprochement.”
This was offered unprompted and I’d no doubt insult you to make you guess which regime is the object of the president’s single-minded solicitousness.
When I asked if this policy meant that Iran’s terrorism and the atrocities being committed by its militia and death squad proxies in Syria and Iraq would therefore be downplayed or ignored by the White House, the diplomat inclined his head slightly in my direction, adding that during his own recent travels to the Middle East he had encountered many “reasonable” people who were similarly terrified and anxious at America’s acquiescence to expanding Khomeinist hegemony in the region.
There are also plenty of unreasonable sorts taking full advantage of this dawning geopolitical reality — Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, for one — which is why the so-called strategy to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State (ISIS) is in fact the jihadist army’s greatest propaganda asset.
And to think that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi once had to try to convince Sunnis that the Great Satan and the Islamic Republic were working together.
What began as Mideast conspiracy theory now has the distinction of being an aspirational presidential legacy.
Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor and the director of strategic communications, privately whispers about what a great ally Iran would make, so much more responsible and well-behaved than those awful Gulf states which are now reluctantly enlisted as avowed partners in a coalition against ISIS.
Never has a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing been so well earned as it has with Rhodes.
As Michael Doran recently observed in an excellent anatomy of the Obama administration’s actual Iran policy, it is this National Security Council member who also not-so-privately likens a grand bargain with Tehran to Obamacare as a matter of national priority.
The “rollout” of this second-term initiative seems to be proceeding accordingly. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have staged a coup in Yemen. They also shout “Death to America, death to Israel, damnation to the Jews.”
No doubt lacking their own advisors in strategic communications, the Houthis nonetheless have little to fear from such empurpled rhetoric because The New York Times, dutifully relying on top administration officials’ say-so, was still able to report with a straight face that the Houthis are “a lot more moderate” than these imprecations would suggest, premised on their shared loathing for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
This sole criterion for moderation must be applied selectively, however, because ISIS, after all, also loathes Al-Qaeda enough to war against it in Syria and to rob it of its recruits in northern Libya.
But I don’t see anyone in US government discerning centrist or pragmatic motives to the agents of the caliphate.
It also bears remembering that when Syrian activists and rebels were still burning Iranian, Hezbollah and Russian flags and begging Obama for a no-fly zone, their suspected anti-American extremism was a subject of much-interrogated debate and insinuation in the White House.
Hillary Clinton famously wondered aloud if the Free Syrian Army was in fact Al-Qaeda or Hamas when it largely still consisted of defected soldiers from the regime's Syrian Arab Army. Now, after four years of attritional warfare, fudged red-lines, and cynical indifference to Damascus and Tehran’s ongoing atrocities in Syria, the administration does have plans for the dwindling contingent of moderate rebels.
This is from an article published last week in Wall Street Journal, which is meant to be a bit of good news about the planned training of 5,000 rebels per year and their ability to call in US airstrikes against ISIS: “US officials have said if the US begins attacking Assad’s forces, the uneasy peace between Iran, an Assad ally, and the US in Iraq will break down and Iranian-backed militias could begin targeting US forces there.
"Iranian leaders have told supporters in Iraq not to attack US bases, but that detente could dissolve if the war in Syria expanded to take on Mr. Assad, U.S. officials say.”
The United States formerly compared Assad to Hitler. Now it seeks the permission of Goering — Qassem Soleimani — to pursue its own policy in Syria.
This transformation merits closer scrutiny than it has so far received. Note here, too, the acknowledgement that our hoped-for ally in counterterrorism could easily turn on US soldiers again in Iraq if the commander-in-chief doesn’t do as he’s told by Iran.
Entente cordiale with the Revolutionary Guards Corps comes at an increasingly high cost. It means tolerating the immolation of whole Syrian families in their homes by the Soleimani-built National Defense Force — while continuing to hear that only ISIS is so barbaric as to burn people alive.
It means watching Samantha Power tweet fecklessly for two more years against the continued barrel bombing of Syrian civilians by the Syrian Air Force as if her continued service for a president who would rather tinker on his BlackBerry than be bothered with such inconveniences is not itself a testament to the cold indifference of the “world.”
It means listening to Marie Harf dodge questions about the ethnic cleansing of villages and hamlets in Diyala or the kidnapping and assassination of Awakening Council members by Shiite militiamen, who, despite being gainfully employed, still resort to activities that can only be described as “extremist” in orientation.
It also means witnessing the decline in strategic communications. The Pentagon has come out with a self-evidently ridiculous forecast of its plans to retake Mosul starting in April of this year, with 20,000 to 25,000 newly-trained Iraqi soldiers and peshmerga fighters. Leaving aside the desperation in telegraphing a far-off operation to the enemy — no doubt in the hope that this will somehow convince ISIS to quit Mosul in advance — the military prescription has manifold problems.
First, only a fraction of the trained Iraqi soldiers currently exists: 3,400 as of this writing, and that’s assuming that this contingent will perform more competently than prior US trainees.
Second, 25,000 still isn’t enough to take a city as large as Mosul, as Iraq observer Joel Wing has noted; the true number is closer to 40,000.
Third, the peshmerga have absolutely no intention of fighting in what promises to be incredibly gruesome urban warfare in the Sunni-majority regions of western Mosul, complete with IED attacks and suicide bombings.
Fourth, the heavy lifting of any ground offensive against ISIS will be performed by the very Iranian proxies discussed above, which means most Sunnis of Iraq’s second most populous city will not be viewing even a hypothetical invading army as a force for liberation but rather as a sanguinary sectarian conqueror.
As one Badr Corps militant told the New York Times, “collaborators” with ISIS — a category that encompasses most Sunnis currently or formerly under ISIS rule — are to suffer “punishment … more severe than Daesh’s.” Iraq’s best hope is truth and reconciliation a la Robespierre.
It’s hard to overstate the sense of anxiety American allies in the Middle East now feel about the course American policy has taken in their neighborhood as the result of a president who wants only one thing before he leaves office: to bring America’s regional nemesis in from the cold.
Even allies whose support the current administration deems uncontroversial feel abandoned or short-changed. An official in the Kurdistan Regional Government told me recently that while he applauds US airstrikes, which kept ISIS from storming Erbil, most of the rest of the advertised effort to beat the jihadists is false advertising.
“The weapons we have to fight them are [expletive] ridiculous,” the official said, noting the stark contrast with the heavy-duty materiel such as Abrams tanks and Humvees which both ISIS and the Shiite militias have stolen from the United States. “We should have blown ourselves up or beheaded some soldiers. Then we would have gotten weapons.”
Michael Weiss is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a fellow at the Institute of Modern Russia. He recently coauthored ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. He tweets @michaeldweiss
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