The Democrats debated Friday night and the first topic was our place in the Middle East. In fact we really have no place in the Middle East mainly because we are looking to lead a coalition of countries that want no part of fighting there. In fact no one in the world, including us, with the possible exception of Russia, wants to get its kids killed to stop ISIS. Unfortunately someone is going to have to. Despite that, it really shouldn’t be us. All the American Right speaks to the fact that Obama has no set strategy. If the Gulf nations were willing to do their part we wouldn’t need a strategy. The Gulf nations and Turkey have over five million troops ready to fight. Where the hell are they? Why haven’t they been engaging ISIS? Saudi Arabia has troops fighting in Yemen. Why? Why aren’t those troops fighting somewhere where it counts? Saudi Arabia is the big question here. We say they are our allies. They pose as such, but the reality is that they are anything but, and while they have been accepting arms and money from us, it’s the Wahabbi Saudis who led the 911 attack and it is the Wahabbi led, Sunni based, Saudi government that doesn’t want to fight another Sunni force. ISIS is a Sunni force so if we can’t depend on the Saudis we must either abandon them or find a way to convince them that their only route to survival lies with us.
If ISIS wins in Iraq and Syria, their next target will be the wealthy oil fields of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis know this but they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they attack ISIS they will be declaring war on their fellow religionists, something that will bring the religious elements, which means all Saudis, against the Kingdom, the Saudi leaders.
On the other hand if they abandon the fight, hoping that we will step in as we always have, and win the war with ISIS, they are taking the chance that we may not step in. If that happens and ISIS wins, their next target as stated above will be a Saudi Arabia that is defended only by a professional army made up of mercenaries. We all know how long mercenaries fight when things don’t look good. Patriots will defend their soil to the last drop of blood but mercenaries will flee at the first sign of trouble and the first heads that will roll will belong to the al-Saud family, all five hundred of them.
Of all the nations in the Middle East, the only one that has done the right thing is Jordan. They are helping in the fighting and they are accepting tens of thousands of refugees, but they can’t do it alone. The Kurds are willing and eager to fight but every time they create a new offensive the Turks turn purple and try to undermine them. That’s our fault. We have to man up to the Turks and tell them that if they aren’t going to help fight ISIS they should, at least stay away from the Kurds who are doing their job. This is complicated because we want to keep bases in Turkey and we want Turkey to stay as secular as they can; so while stepping on their neck we also have to support them for military and religious reasons.
Yes the U.S. should lead this mess but by manipulating the nations involved, not by putting our kids in the fight. We have no skin in this game but we are the world’s premier power and therefore we should organize and use our strength and our wealth, not our kids, to get this job done. In fact we give money to every state that we need to have in that fight. We are chiefly responsible for the Saudi Army which has the third highest military budget in the world. Why do they need a military budget if they aren’t going to fight?
Putting our kids on the ground in these useless Muslim lands is bad for our kids but it is also bad for the concept of bringing peace to the region. As soon as we arrive anywhere we are regarded as invaders. This is natural. If someone landed troops here we would regard them as invaders. If you don’t think Germany and Japan felt that way after WWII you are dead wrong. It was only when those countries came to realize how much money we would bring to their economies that some, not all, of their outlooks changed.
Right now the Middle East isn’t worried about how much money we will bring to their economies. That won’t happen until they stop worrying about a bomb knocking their roofs into their kid’s bedrooms. The Muslim extremists are more interested in using our occupation to stir up their fanatic base. If we really hope to get anywhere in our search for peace in the Middle East, we have to keep our troops out of these countries. We have to abandon the concept of nation building, a practice at which, we are very bad.
Our history in the last sixty or so years, is one of getting involved in other nations politics with a goal of regime change. We did it in Vietnam in the sixties, in Central and South America and in Iran from the fifties to the seventies and now we’re doing it in the Middle East and North Africa. We have to stop, instantly, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t push our so-called allies to help themselves.
You want the Saudi’s to fight for, themselves? You stop buying their oil, you stop giving them military aide and you tell them and Turkey that unless they get involved in the fight, all that money and hardware is going to go to the Kurds. You do the same with all the rest of the Sunni nations of the area. Iran is already fighting and they will continue to fight because they are Shiite and ISIS is a Sunni cult.
Though it was a horrendous occurrence, the attacks in Paris this weekend could have a functional effect if they spur our NATO allies to get into the fight with ISIS. A NATO force of forty or fifty thousand well armed, well organized troops plus the air supremacy that would come from those assembled nations could easily rout the military aspect of ISIS This would take away a great deal of their appeal to the disenfranchised Islamic youth that now see them as a beacon of strength and the culmination of a goal that could lift them up from their hopeless futures and give them some kind of life. But once the beacon is extinguished those same Islamic youths will abandon it as just another false hope. They will be available to the kind of nation building possibilities that are carried out, not by western governments, but by International relief agencies that understand what has to happen in these countries to make the people whole again.
This blog has stated over and over that we cannot win against ISIS without putting our kids in danger until we get the nations of the region involved in the fight but I may have been very wrong about that. It is looking more and more like those nations will not, for religious reasons, ever join that fight. The governments may want to, but the people will not go along with them. So it is the western nations along with Iran and Russia led by the U.S. that must carry the torch. Yes we may have to contribute a token force made up of Special Forces personnel, along with our considerable air power but the bulk of the fighting force should come from the 28 countries that comprise that assembly. At this point the rest of Europe should appreciate the fact that they are as much a target as Paris and the Russian air fleet. At this point they should all be prepared to get their feet wet and do something to help, themselves. If not, all we have to do is wait for the other shoe, in the form of Islamic suicide bombers in Belgium, Holland, Italy or Germany, to drop. When, not if, it does, it will probably be a lot easier for us to illustrate the logic of a unified force to fight the Islamic terrorists on their ground, rather than on ours.