generalspeaking

The U.S.-Islamic State Strategic Vision

The Obama administration finally saw fit to commit to an American-led campaign to "degrade and ultimately destroy" the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham. This would be accomplished by leading the way in airstrikes, along with yet another 'coalition of the willing', allied nations and countries of the Middle East who agreed they too would do their utmost to destroy the capacity of ISIS to plunder, destroy and slaughter in its rampage across Syria and Iraq.

The "boots on the ground" would be those of Arabic states [with no mention of Iran's Al Quds brigade of the Revolutionary Guard], but definitely not American military. The American military would lend itself to re-training the Iraqi military which suddenly lost all its previous U.S. mentoring in best-practise-conflict with the Iraqi Shia government releasing the Sunni commanders from duty with the military. And the Syrian rebels, their cause so long ignored, would be vetted for future training.

If this doesn't bespeak the labyrinthine, convoluted, conspiratorial essence of the Middle East, it's hard to imagine what would, with Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey all covertly supporting, funding and supplying Sunni Islamists, but yet agreeing with the U.S. that the Islamic State jihadis whom they also supported must be defeated in their nihilistic rampage across Iraq and Syria with future plans to expand. Turkey willing to lend itself to enterprise only if the U.S. would return to its original threats against the Syrian regime.

But this is just how entangled and Byzantine alliances are in the Middle East, and the manner in which they inveigle and entrap meddling countries from outside the Mideast, that the U.S. which once threatened the 'red line' of American military response should Bashar al-Assad use chemical gas weapons of mass destruction on his people, is now constrained from following through. First Russia used the dissuasion of reason; that it is better to negotiate than to fight.

And now there is an unspoken but secret pact between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran to divide the response to Islamic State; the Shiite Revolutionary military has its representative boots on the ground fighting alongside the shattered Iraqi military, and the United States of America, Iran's avowed enemy for decades, has its warplanes in the skies; a binary arrangement that hopes democratic America and its allies and Islamist Iran and its functionaries including Hezbollah will destroy the Sunni psychopaths.

Pick your style and type of psychotics; in the Middle East they abound. Crucifixions and beheadings, mass slaughter, rape, enslavement, torture, terror and looting they are all so commonplace among tribal, sectarian and ideological retinues of barbaric leaders that it becomes difficult at times to distinguish them from one another. Some are heads of state, others are their non-state militias answerable to the call to Islamist duty.

Bashar al-Assad spoke of his Syrian Sunni critics as being 'terrorists' and members of al-Qaeda; his response to their protests for equal treatment with the Shia-Alawite Syrian minority merited their arrest, torture, murder. And then because the Sunnis gathered themselves into militias to oppose the murderous intent of Syria's president, all the Sunni civilian areas of the country became ripe for military assault from helicopter gunships to chemical attacks and barrel bombs, leading to millions of displaced Syrians.

Untouchable now that his actions have sparked the Sunni reaction of jihad against the Shia-Baathist leadership of a now-destroyed Syria. For with that secret alliance between the U.S. and Iran, Syria's regime has become off limits. The support that Russia gives it in exchange for a port for its Mediterranean fleet, and as a client-state of Iran has the U.S. in a very uncomfortable position.

Challenging Iran over its nuclear program and its inexorable journey toward nuclear warheads, and Russia's decision to use military might over diplomacy with Ukraine after all, has the Obama administration divided.

The new coalition supporting the U.S.-led airstrikes targeting ISIS have also directed fire on other Islamist jihadists not allied with ISIS but with al-Qaeda, battling the Assad regime. Out of the mission to defend Iraq from the Islamic State rampage, it is Iran, and Iraq, one of its Shiite assets, and Syria, another Iranian Shiite asset that are benefiting. How soon are sides to be changed in the Middle East; the United States' intervention veering away from its traditional support of the majority Sunni countries to support of the minority Shiite nations.

A witches' brew of confusion, wretchedness and bloodshed, with no solution in sight, merely the prospect of an enlarging conflict drawing in other countries as the geography's traditional paranoia, suspicion, hatred and violence explodes here, there and everywhere in tribal and sectarian hatred.

Labels: Iraq, Islamic State, Middle East, Syria, Terrorism, United States

posted by Pieface @ Monday, November 24, 2014