Category Archives: defense policy

Of Course the President Knows This

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President Obama’s determination to train Syrian rebels to serve as ground troops against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria leaves the United States dependent on a diverse group riven by infighting, with no shared leadership and with hard-line Islamists as its most effective fighters.

It’s a fantasy.

The Syrian rebels in which President Barack Obama has become so interested of late—those former doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth”—are scattered in the Syrian west and disorganized. His efforts to train and arm them so far have been…unreliable.

The Obama administration’s plans to arm Syrian rebels have been troubled by false starts since April 2013, when Mr Obama first authorized the CIA to begin a secret training mission in Jordan.

Months after the authorization, the White House still had not delivered details to Congress about the CIA’s plans, and it was not until September 2013 that the first American-trained rebels returned to Syria from Jordan.

To date, the CIA mission in Jordan has trained 2,000 to 3,000 Syrian rebels, according to American and Arab officials.

Those 3,000 (to take the generous side of the estimate) would go against 20,000-32,000 ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq combined.

These Syrian rebels, though, say their mission is to toss Bashar al Assad and set up an entirely different government for Syria; there’s no room for engaging additional foes.

Now see this map, adapted from the one in The New York Times article at the first link above.SyriaMap

The labels are hard to read: the Red squares are Syrian government held locations, Blue squares are opposition forces other than ISIS—including Obama’s “good” rebels—Purple squares are ISIS. The major circles are, from North to South, Aleppo, Homs, and Damascus.

The “good” Syrian rebels are in the Syrian west. ISIS forces are in the Syrian east, where they’re contiguous with their forces in Iraq. The rebels would have to figure out how to disengage from al Assad’s forces in the west, quitting their mission; boogie on over to the east; and then engage ISIS. Which, courtesy of the Iraqi “army’s” glide step south, away from ISIS, has lots of American equipment, weapons, and ammunition.

Of course Obama knows this. But he gave a speech, and now he expects the problem to fade from the public’s attention.

Terrorist butchery may not let Obama have his way.

 

Aside for Fox News‘ Julie Banderas and Catherine Herridge, the latter of whom especially should know better: these, now three, men were not murdered—that’s a criminal act. No, these three men were butchered—acts of evil.

Obama Gave a Pretty Speech

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As he often does. But what did President Barack Obama really say? I’ll elide his bald claims regarding his having “consistently taken the fight to terrorists who threaten our country.” Threats like ISIS; like the terrorists who destroyed our Benghazi consulate and butchered our Ambassador there, along with three of his security detail; like al Qaeda in the Maghreb and al Qaeda in Yemen; like the Taliban in Afghanistan, from which—and whom—we’re retreating; …. Yes, yes, we’ve killed a few key players in some of those gangs, but we’ve not damaged the gangs themselves in any material way. But enough of that.

Obama said,

ISIL is not “Islamic.” No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.

But Islam does condone the killing of innocents, when they’re unbelievers, infidels. Oh, wait—Islam doesn’t consider them innocents.

Obama said,

…following consultations with allies abroad and Congress at home, I can announce that America will lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat.

And again,

America will be joined by a broad coalition of partners.

But who are the members of this broad coalition? Who will lead the surface forces? Who will lead the air forces? Who will lead the economic forces? Oh, wait—

…in the coming days [Secretary of State John Kerry] will travel across the Middle East and Europe to enlist more partners in this fight, especially Arab nations….

There isn’t a coalition, after all. What’s he going to do, then, if the coalition doesn’t materialize? Walk away from the problem? Again?

Obama said,

I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

I’ll ignore the fact that this is the Bush Doctrine. I do note that he said this in the context of contesting with ISIS. But it’s also a broad, uncaveated statement. Is Obama now saying that he’ll attack al Qaeda in the Maghreb? That he’ll step up his attacks on al Qaeda in Yemen? That he’ll resume attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan? Or is this just more of Obama’s muddled messaging?

Obama said,

[I]n Syria, we have ramped up our military assistance to the Syrian opposition. Tonight, I again call on Congress to give us additional authorities and resources to train and equip these fighters.

What assistance? He’s been resistant all along to arming those whom he derided as recently as August as being “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth.”

He’s also maintained all along that he needs no “authorities” from Congress to deal with the al Assad régime or to work with the Syrian rebels (although having Congressional comity would be nice, he’s also said). What’s changed?

And then there’s this. Obama opened his speech thusly:

I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and allies to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL.

What does he mean by “degrade?” We “degraded” ISIS with the limited air strikes we made to help free the Yezidis, to help the Kurds retake the Mosul Dam, to help the Sunnis (!) defend the Haditha Dam.

What is his definition of “destroy?” Rome “destroyed” Carthage, and the Allies “destroyed” NAZI Germany. Within Obama’s penchant for treating terrorists as common criminals, the Federal Courts have, more or less, “destroyed” the lives of a couple of terrorists brought to trial.

What, exactly, are Obama’s victory conditions? He’s always provided his exit conditions, even to the point of announcing in advance when he would exit. He’s always said what he won’t do to achieve “victory,” or an enemy’s “degradation,” or an enemy’s “destruction.” But he’s never said what, in his mind, constitutes winning.

There’s also a subject he chose not to address Wednesday night: funding. In many respects this is the most important: no conflict (Obama still won’t call this a war, and Kerry, the day after this speech, told CNN that we’re not at war with ISIS; it’s a “significant counter-terrorism operation”—so, what, the FBI will be the lead agency?), regardless of the conflict’s national life-or-death importance, can be fought for free. Just ask the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

How will this conflict be funded? What spending will be reallocated, what taxes imposed, what borrowings engaged?

Certainly, most of these questions need not have been answered in Wednesday’s speech, but we’re already two days later without answers. He must answer these questions in the next few days. If answers are not quickly forthcoming, Obama’s claims in his pretty speech will be shown to be of a piece with another of his claims in that speech:

From Europe to Asia…we stand for freedom, for justice, for dignity.

Just like his administration has stood for the freedom, justice, and dignity of Russian-occupied Ukraine.

A transcript of Obama’s speech can be read here.

In a World without US Leadership

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…still more PRC aggression.

Crews from the PRC’s boats cruising around the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, islands claimed by Vietnam while the PRC claims all of the Sea including the Paracels, have attacked Vietnamese fishing boats and assaulted their crews on three separate occasions since August.

In addition, on those occasions the Chinese have seized various items of equipment from those Vietnamese vessels.

In denying these accusations,

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying called the accusation groundless, saying that on Aug 15 a Vietnamese vessel trespassed into China’s maritime territory. She said Chinese authorities confiscated explosives on the vessel.

“We urge the Vietnamese side to better manage its fishing activities and stop trespassing on Chinese territory,” Ms. Hua said.

Notice that. In denying the accusations, the PRC’s Foreign Ministry confesses to the equipment seizures—those explosives. In denying the accusations, the Foreign Ministry admits to the Chinese sea grab, repeating its claim that the South China Sea is a Chinese private lake.

It’ll only get worse over the next couple of years, or more.

Careful What We Ask For

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President Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor was in the People’s Republic of China earlier this week. Among other things, Susan Rice broached the idea that the PRC’s help in dealing with ISIS would be useful.

There’s always a quid pro quo, though. The PRC is likely to want our help in dealing with the separatists among the Uighurs in western China and in Tibet. It’s also unclear what practical use the PRC could be against a terrorist group in the Middle East that’s targeting Western security and not Eastern.

Getting the PRC involved here doesn’t seem a good idea.

With Whom Among the Kurds Should We Work?

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How about with all of them?

President Barack Obama appears, finally, to be agreeable to arming the Pershmerga of the Kurds’ Iraqi Kurdistan in northern Iraq and to be working a little more closely with them in where the US takes its potshots against ISIS forces—the Mosul Dam effort comes to mind in this context.

But that can’t be all of it, if ISIS is to be destroyed. That will require attacking ISIS in Syria as well as more serious efforts against ISIS in Iraq. That more serious effort in Iraq also will require working along the Kurds’ Iraq border with Turkey in addition to working with the Peshmerga to the west of Iraqi Kurdistan.

There are two other groups of Kurds, then, that come into play. One such is

a Kurdish force inside Syria called the Democratic Union Party [the PYD].

We need to deal more closely with this group, too, at least in the context of destroying ISIS. The PYD has been actively fighting ISIS and other jihadist terrorists in Syria for some years, as well as fighting the Syrian government. The US has been reluctant to deal with the PYD because of alleged difficulty telling the good Syrian rebels from the bad ones. Something about needing a scorecard. It’s not that hard, though, except in the minds of the Obama administration.

The other group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, is the group of interest along the Turkish border of Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turks object to the PKK, and so the US has too, because of the violent nature of the PKK’s objections to Turkish treatment of them. However, the PKK appears to have greatly moderated its violent techniques (though this isn’t certain), even if they are still zealous partisans for their autonomy. That they still have autonomy arguments with Turkey need not concern us here given that apparent temperance, and given Turkey’s open support of terrorists elsewhere—like on Israel’s southern and eastern borders. In addition to this, the Turks are working an accommodation with the PKK, so Turkish relations with the PKK is rapidly becoming a non-entity as well as merely irrelevant.

In the end, the enemy of our enemy certainly can be our ally, and at least one of those enemies of our enemy can be an outright friend, and at least one of those other enemies of our enemy can continue to be an ally.