Yes, Obama's Policies Helped Create ISIS, and Bush's Helped Too

The latest hard-hitting journalism from the campaign trail is once again related to Donald Trump. The happy news is that there's at least a kernel of truth in the latest remarks, and better still, it's about foreign policy. Unfortunately, the bad news is that, as usual with Donald Trump, he doesn't have many details to back it up, and the few details he does offer, are wrong.

First, here's what he said, at a campaign rally last week:

He is the founder of ISIS. He is the founder of ISIS, okay? He is the founder. He founded ISIS. And I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.

Since then, Trump has alternated between doubling down on this formulation and downplaying it by saying the obvious--namely that sarcasm is, in fact, a thing.

Ratings challenged @CNN reports so seriously that I call President Obama (and Clinton) "the founder" of ISIS, & MVP. THEY DON'T GET SARCASM?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2016

As the tweet above suggests, the whole episode led to a series of apparently serious journalism explaining that Obama is not literally the co-founder of ISIS. For instance, CNN's self-styled terror expert Peter Bergen wrote this rebuttal. Among its winning lines were the following:

Like so much else that Trump has said, these claims are false. The founder of ISIS is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a shadowy Iraqi cleric who President Obama is doing everything in his power to kill.

Wait, so you're telling me that Obama doesn't moonlight as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Glad we got that cleared up, since I'm sure that's how most people interpreted Trump's remarks. After all, he's not prone to exaggeration.

Also, incidentally, the second part of Bergen's statement is wrong. In fact, President Obama is doing everything within his power and quite a few things that are beyond his power in an attempt to kill him--in particular, waging a war without Congressional authorization.

But I digress. While these various literal refutations seem merely inane at first glance, they actually serve an important purpose. By focusing the argument along the most narrow lines possible, the broader debate about America's interventionist foreign policy is avoided. The real question is whether America's interventions this century--in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere--have produced greater stability and security, or greater chaos. Any honest observer must conclude it is the latter.

In one sense, Trump is right: The blame for the ongoing, unquestioned disaster does rest on Barack Obama and on Hillary Clinton--who headed the State Department when the worst decisions were made. But it also rests on George W. Bush, and Trump was wrong to omit him.

With that framework in mind, let us briefly make note of the most salient policy disasters that helped lead to the creation of ISIS, which now has a presence in Iraq:

• Bush - Invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2003 based on the false pretense of weapons of mass destruction.
• Bush - Occupying Iraq after the regime change, ultimately serving as a security force for a new Iraqi government, no matter how corrupt and authoritarian it became.
• Obama (and Clinton) - Overthrowing Ghadafi in Libya in 2011, based on a false pretense of an impending genocide in Benghazi.
• Obama - Backing the substantially non-moderate opposition in Syria starting around 2012, based largely in the east of country. This invariably strengthened the budding rebellion among radicals in neighboring Iraq.

Although all of these policies are awful, the last is particularly striking based on what we know now. An internal intelligence document from the Defense Intelligence Agency was recently declassified. Written in August 2012, it noted the following key things:

• That Al Qaeda in Iraq and similar extremist groups were dominant players in the Syrian rebellion
• That the Western powers, Turkey, and the Gulf States were supporting the rebellion anyway
• That the current trends could lead to the establishment of a "Salafist principality" in Syria and Iraq, but that could be useful for weakening Assad and, by extension, Iran.

In other words, Obama's own government intelligence predicted that backing the opposition in Syria risked strengthening extremist groups so much that they could eventually establish a de facto state. And in spite of this risk, he directed the CIA to do it anyway. 

Now, obviously that doesn't mean al-Baghdadi was hired by the CIA or that President Obama was trying to create a terror group that had far more power and influence than the ones that preceded it. So too, President Bush probably wasn't aspiring to light the entire Middle East on fire with the invasion of Iraq and inspire more terrorism for years to come.

But if we are going discuss foreign policy seriously, we must look beyond intentions and consider actual results.

Presidents Bush and Obama both overthrew secular dictators on false pretenses, in Iraq and Libya, apparently in the hopes that a better government would follow. Chaos followed instead. Similarly, whatever his precise intent, President Obama's policy of backing the opposition in Syria had the predictable result of strengthening extremist groups, ultimately culminating with ISIS holding substantial territory in Syria and Iraq, and Al Qaeda in Syria holding territory elsewhere in Syria.

There's no reason to think that Trump had all this history in mind when he suggested that Obama and Clinton "founded ISIS". In the remarks I've seen, the Trump camp has preferred to blame ISIS on Obama's decision to pull out of Iraq too soon. This is foolish, since the withdrawal timeline for Iraq was actually set by President Bush, and was not really the fundamental cause. One wonders what the media would do if Trump had the knowledge and guts to explain the real causes of ISIS's rise, but I doubt we'll get the chance.

Still, even if Trump himself doesn't know how America's foreign policy facilitated the rise of ISIS, it doesn't change the reality. And the reality is that we can draw a clear causal chain between the reckless decisions of the Bush Administration through to the reckless decisions of President Obama and Secretary Clinton, which ultimately helped create ISIS and the pervasive instability that reigns in the Greater Middle East.

Captain Khan Controversy Should Help Third Party Candidates, Not the One That Helped Get Him Killed

Source: Vocativ.com

Trump's rude remarks about Khizr Khan remain in the news cycle yesterday as they have ever since the weekend. You'll recall that Khan's son was a Muslim US soldier who died in the Iraq War, and his father gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention to condemn Donald Trump's various appalling proposals about Muslims.

President Obama spoke out against Trump's criticism yesterday, noting that "no one has given more for our freedom and our security than our Gold Star families," referring to families that have lost loved ones in the armed forces. Republican Senator John McCain took a similar tack to condemning Trump. However, given that Trump's success was not at all imperiled when he deliberately mocked McCain for being a Prisoner-of-War--which would seem to be at least as taboo as the present situation--it's not clear that McCain's comments will have much impact.

The context that remains missing in all of this, however, is that Khizr Khan's son Humayun did not die for the "freedom" and "security". He died in an aggressive, senseless war that should have never been fought--which McCain and Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton both voted in favor of. Meanwhile, Obama has resuscitated the same war, and carried out other harmful interventions in Libya and Syria.

Bottom line, this episode ought to be the clearest possible illustration that both major party presidential candidates are awful. Trump implicitly accuses a grieving father of oppressing his wife (amongst other things), and Hillary Clinton helped cause the father's grief in the first place. It remains unclear which of those is worse, but it is clear that the prominent third party candidates, Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, did no such thing. That should count for something.

Iraq's Impending Collapse and the Man Behind the Protests

If you've followed the news much lately, then you'll know that the Iraqi government is on the brink of collapse. This may sound a bit odd at first, given that the country is currently known three less-than-desirable things:

• Having an openly sectarian government that has disenfranchised Sunnis to the point where a group like the Islamic State could take root
• Enjoying endemic governmental corruption and political patronage systems that include thousands of "ghost soldiers"
• Being a constant reminder of the spectacular failure of US military intervention to create stability, over any time horizon

Iraq hasn't been a success story for quite some time. But lagging oil prices and the war with the Islamic State have matters even harder for the struggling central government. Now the increasingly desperate people in Baghdad are calling for change, and things are likely to get worse before they get better. Indeed, protesters in Iraq's capital recently managed to push their way into the heavily fortified Green Zone.

You could be forgiven if this all seems a bit familiar. Two years ago after the major city of Mosul fell to the Islamic State, Iraq's government found itself in a similar leadership crisis under then-Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki. Leading members of the Obama Administration and other world leaders made it known that they were dissatisfied with the Iraqi government and ready for a change. In combination with domestic unrest, this led Al-Maliki to step down in August of 2014.

Al-Maliki's replacement, Haider Al-Abadi was supposed to be the solution. Despite being from the same party, he had a reputation for being a moderate, and it was hoped he would finally be able to end some of Iraq's corruption and incompetence in the face of the Islamic State. Two years later, the war rages on and the corruption has not been cured. Al-Abadi's efforts have been sincere, by most accounts, but they have proved insufficient. Iraq is as unstable as ever.

Given Iraq's rather arbitrary national origins at the hands of the British after World War I, this instability might have been inevitable after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. But even so, it's worth noting how US policy sabotaged any chances for Iraqi nationalism during the early days of the occupation.

Shortly after the invasion, the US found itself waging a counterinsurgency campaign against Sunnis in the northwest and Shiite factions in the southeast. Since Iraq's population is overwhelming Shiite, it was clear that the new leadership of the country would eventually be drawn from the ranks of the Shiite leadership. Broadly speaking, there were two dominant factions. One was led by cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr, the same man who is leading today's protests, and who, at least rhetorically, tried to bridge the Shia-Sunni divide. The other faction was more explicitly sectarian in nature and heavily influenced by Iran.

Then as now, the US's relationship with Iran was quite openly hostile. Thus, Al-Sadr would seem to be the obvious favorite. The problem was that Al-Sadr seemed to really believe in Iraqi nationalism--which meant he wanted the US out of Iraq and refused to work with the occupation. So the US went with the Iranian-backed faction that was willing to work with them instead. In effect, the US chose to empower a sectarian, subservient client state instead of allowing a (potentially) unified and independent Iraq to emerge in the post-Saddam era. Today, as Al-Sadr leads throngs in protest of a defunct Iraqi regime, the destabilizing effects of this fateful choice are hard to miss.

For more on Al-Sadr and his outsized role in recent Iraqi history, read Dan Sanchez today at Antiwar.com:

Who is the Man Leading Iraq's Green Zone Protests?

Obama Administration Breaks Ground on Breaking Promises

You don't have to observe American politics for very long to understand that politicians routinely break their promises. This is especially true and obvious when it comes to US Presidents. In some cases, the promises seem to be sincere and the president may have even really tried to get them implemented, only to be blocked by political obstruction in Congress. In other cases, it's more clear that the promise was nothing more than a rhetorical flourish in the first place.

Of course, our political campaign system is very much structured to produce this effect. In the primary, Democrats usually run to the left on everything; in recent years, this has meant advocating more for peace and civil liberties. Then in the general election, they walk many of these ideas back and try to prove they're just as tough as the Republicans are. For Republicans, this works in the opposite direction. The primary typically sees them take more extreme and awful positions on foreign policy, torture, etc., and then they try to pretend to be a little less inclined toward violence in the general election. The inevitable result is that the same candidate will often take different, and contradictory, positions as they move from the primary to the general election. And if they get to the White House, they often change their another time, either in response to political realities they confront or because they no longer need to appeal to the American people, at least for the time-being.

So campaign promises get broken all the time, and it's pretty much par for the course at this point. Ambitious declarations immediately upon winning an election or taking office can basically be seen in the same way. Thus, although President Obama declared that Guantanamo Bay would be closed within a year of taking office, this went the way of most promises--unfulfilled.

Recently, President Obama has taken the usual political art of breaking promises to an entirely new level. Back in 2013, the Obama Administration suffered a devastating defeat in its first push for initiating a major war with Syria. They intended to let Congress weigh in on the proposal, and when it became clear that the pro-war side was going to lose that vote, it was promptly canceled.

In the aftermath of this, the Administration realized it needed a better and more subtle approach to get the American people to accept another military intervention. The rise of ISIS certainly helped provide a more compelling rationale for US involvement than President Assad of Syria ever could. But that alone probably wouldn't be sufficient to justify another US war in the Middle East, when none of the others have worked.

Thus, to mollify American fears of an extended conflict and more Americans getting sacrificed for an obviously counterproductive policy, Obama pledged that there would be "no boots on the ground". With each escalation in Iraq and Syria, this refrain was offered. And now, with the regular announcements of more troops in Iraq and Syria, it's been proven false.

It's tempting, of course, to see this as just another broken promise from a politician. And in some ways, it is. But it's also different and worse in two important respects.

First, this wasn't a campaign promise. President Obama made this pledge repeatedly while he was president. He knew all of the political realities. And since it's in the realm of foreign policy, where the president has near-complete discretion (in the modern era), this was entirely within his own power. Congress barely has enough initiative to pass a budget; it certainly doesn't have the wherewithal to start (or even declare) a new war. Thus, this is an area where President Obama basically cannot be forced to take an action he disagrees with. Yet, he did it anyway. And he did it in spite of no ISIS- or Syria-directed plot on American soil. (The reader will recall that the San Bernardino attack occurred relatively recently, after the pledge had already been broken, and was not organized by ISIS anyway, though the attackers did sympathize with their cause.)

The second way that the Obama Administration's conduct is now unique and tragically worse is the way it has tried to deny their dishonesty. At first, this meant trying to change the meaning of "no boots on the ground" to mean no large battalions on the ground. And now, they appear to have pivoted to outright denying the pledge ever occurred in the first place.

In a recent press conference, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby denied that anyone ever said there would be "no boots on the ground" in spite of the fact that this can be disproved in all of three seconds with a Google search. It's tough to imagine John Kirby actually believes this, given that it's his whole job to know and defend the Administration's / Pentagon's talking points. So instead, we must assume it's a deliberate PR decision to openly troll the American media and public to see just how quickly we are all willing to forget things that even the most casual observer has to still know. Every President and politician tries to rewrite history in their favor, but the Obama Administration appears to be breaking new ground by trying to do it so quickly and blatantly. It remains to be seen whether many people will notice and care. Given that it's on an issue as important as war and peace, let's hope the answer is yes.

For more on this, and to read the funny-if-it-wasn't-sad exchange where Kirby tries to deny reality, check out Justin Raimondo's write-up at Antiwar.com:

Orwell's Ghost Is Laughing

More Troops and Weapons to Iraq, Still Just As Futile

US participation in the War in Iraq continues to build this week with the announcement of 200 more troops, Apache helicopters, and $415 million in new aid for the Iraqi Kurds in the name of battling ISIS. Additionally, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said that American troops will now be moved "closer to the action," though the US appears to still be committed to describing them as "advisers".

Naturally, the move is a reminder of how far we've come from President Obama's oft-repeated promise of "no boots on the ground" in the latest Middle East war. Now, not counting Special Operations forces, there are officially around 4,000 troops in Iraq, and The Washington Post has reported that the actual number is close to 5,000.

The new announcement is also a good time to remember that the war against ISIS remains thoroughly illegal. Congress has not passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force, let alone a formal declaration of war. Instead, President Obama is still relying on the legal authority passed in the aftermath of 9/11 to go after Al Qaeda and associated forces. This rationale is absurd, not only because of how long ago it was passed, but also because Al Qaeda and ISIS have had a very public split and are in no way "associated forces". Still, the escalation continues regardless, as most Democrats refuse to break step with their President on foreign policy and most Republicans can't bring themselves to oppose a war, no matter how futile.

All of which brings to the question of effectiveness, "Will it work?" In part, the answer depends on one's definition of success. If the goal is to merely unseat ISIS from Mosul, that goal is certainly within reach if the US is willing to throw enough money and bodies at it. However, if the goal is to create a sustainable political outcome in which a group like ISIS cannot gain a foothold, there is virtually no conceivable way in which the US's growing intervention will succeed.

Unfortunately, there's good reason to believe that Obama is operating on the first definition. In a recent interview cited in the Reuters piece, he said this: 

My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall.

Clearly, Obama is not concerned about the all important question of what comes next. Instead, he is only concerned about his own political legacy, and, perhaps, the electoral chances of his party in the upcoming election. But neither of those require a long-term strategy. All they require is a well-timed victory moment sometime this year and a relative pause in hostilities that is long enough to give the impression of stability where none exists. Then when chaos invariably resumes, it will be someone else's problem.

That's the current trajectory we're on. Perhaps the Iraqi Kurds, with their additional funding and support from the US, will launch an assault on Mosul. Perhaps the US will have to send significantly more troops to ensure it goes according to plan. Either way, there is no solution for the day after. Neither the Kurds nor the US Marines are likely to welcome in Mosul for any period of time after the invasion ends. Both would be all but certain to face a low-level insurgency for as long as they stayed.

Returning Mosul to the formal control of the Iraqi government is unlikely to prove successful either. After all, Mosul fell to ISIS in the summer of 2014, due in part to the fact that much of the local Sunni population was sufficiently fed up with the corrupt central government in Baghdad that ISIS didn't seem to be an obviously worse alternative. While any romanticism of ISIS has probably been crushed out of the local population over the past two years of ISIS rule, the corruption of the Iraqi central government endures. Thus, the idea that Baghdad could successfully govern a liberated Mosul essentially relies on the assumption that Sunnis will be excited to trade the devil they know now, for the devil they used to know.

The tragic circumstances above are why nonintervention remains the only appropriate position on Iraq. It's not an endorsement of the status quo, but merely a recognition that there are limits to US military power. The latest announcement from the Administration suggests President Obama is not willing to recognize this yet.

(More) Boots on the Ground in Iraq

Today in bad news, the US has announced its intentions to send more troops to Iraq. The exact number hasn't been specified yet, but the unit that will be deployed has approximately 2,200 members in it. Thus, this could be viewed as the maximum that is going to be sent to Iraq in this latest round of escalation. This amount is on top of the roughly 3,600 existing in the country currently.

Interestingly, the US seems to be abandoning the notion that these latest troops will be merely advisers to Iraqi forces. US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter first hinted that the US troops will need to be involved directly in combat in January, and similar sentiments were expressed by the leading US general in Iraq in February.

Admittedly, it's unclear just how important the distinction is between advising on combat operations and directly engaging in them. This latest decision comes on the heels of another US servicemember being killed over the weekend in fighting with ISIS, in what officials attempted to downplay as a "lucky strike". Another soldier was killed back in October while assisting in a prisoner rescue operation in Iraq.

What is perhaps most interesting about this latest development is what's not being said. There's no discussion of any end goal to speak of, and even though it seems to be a complete repudiation of President Obama's oft-stated promise of "no boots on the ground," it's unlikely that any meaningful political opposition will rise against it. Democrats don't want to call attention to the fact that their leader is restarting another war that he supposedly ended, and most Republicans have no interest in stopping such a war, no matter how futile or blatantly unconstitutional it may be.

On that last note, it's worth noting that the ostensible legal justification for this war remains the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that was passed in the wake of 9/11 to go after the perpetrators of that attack (Al Qaeda) and their associates. Given that ISIS didn't even exist at that time and is in open conflict with Al Qaeda, it's hard to see how they fit this description. It gets even more absurd when one realizes that many of the people the US is fighting today in that country were probably adolescents when the authority to attack them was granted.

Lack of legal authority notwithstanding, the war seems likely to continue escalating anyways. As this latest batch of troops is being sent in response to the rocket strike that killed a soldier, so having more soldiers in the country could provide the excuse for future troop increases. More soldiers means a greater probability they will get killed. And when they do, generals will complain that they have a lack of resources for the task at hand, even though none of us can define what succeeding at that task would really entail. And all the while, the heightened presence of US ground troops will be a boon to ISIS recruiting efforts in Iraq and their efforts to recruit sympathizers around the world. Expect to see this situation get much worse before it gets better.

Iraqi Kurds Move One Step Closer to Secession

As the Republican Debate last night proved sadly uneventful, we'll be discussing a different topic today. The Iraqi Kurds have decided to hold a referendum on seceding from Iraq and becoming an independent state. Of course, it's big news any time a group is attempting to declare independence, but it's especially important in this case. If the Iraqi Kurds do in fact secede, it will have major implications for the US's undeclared war on ISIS, the stability of the Iraqi government, and several neighboring countries. But before we get there, first some context.

Background
The Kurds are a distinct ethnic group of people that reside mostly in adjacent areas of present-day northeastern Iraq, northwestern Iran, southeastern Turkey, and northeastern Syria. In case your geography is a little rusty, here's a slightly dated map that shows the region we're talking about:

At present, some of the highlighted region, especially in northern Iraq is under the control of ISIS, but it still gives you the general idea. The only Kurds that will be participating in the referendum on independence are the ones located inside Iraq. The Iraqi Kurds have had significant autonomy within Iraq for a long time, but they have also aspired for outright independence. Many of the Kurds living in the other countries also aspire to independence. Thus, there is a legitimate possibility that if the Iraqi Kurds successfully secede from Iraq, that will fuel similar secession movements in the adjacent countries in an attempt to create a united Kurdistan. In the short-run, this could potentially lead to further instability in a region that has plenty already.

Adding to these general complications is the fact that the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds are viewed as some of the most reliable allies on the ground in the fight against ISIS. Indeed, many of the high profile victories against the Islamic State have been won by the Kurds--including at Kobani in Syria and Kirkuk in Iraq. But when we use the term reliable here, it's important to note that we're using a pretty low standard. We basically mean, least likely to give their weapons to Al Qaeda or commit obvious atrocities; two things we can't say for most of the other rebel groups in Syria (or in Libya before that).

And yet, recent evidence has emerged that casts some doubt on the Kurds' reputation for being reasonable partners in the region. Specifically, a new report from Amnesty International indicates that the Iraqi Kurds have had a policy of expelling Arab residents and deliberately burning down the towns that they liberate from ISIS. This, in turn, creates more suffering in Iraq and likely increases the appeal of ISIS for people in the region. It also helps illustrate just how convoluted the broad civil war in Iraq and Syria truly is. 

Our Take
Returning to the question of secession, some US politicians anticipated this move and have called for the US to openly support Kurdish independence. Others see the "territorial integrity" of Iraq as sacrosanct and believe the US should focus on trying to restore Iraq to its initial borders.

But ultimately, the answer is that the US should do neither. Like all people, we can privately hope that the Kurds get the chance to exercise self-determination, which may mean they decide to stay in Iraq or formally secede. But given the aspirations of adjacent Kurdish groups for independence of their own, it would be irresponsible to openly back the broader movement for independence with anything more than rhetoric. What if the Kurds in Turkey want to secede as well and Turkey objects? Should the US be committed to waging a war against its ally to enforce our position? Clearly, this is absurd, and such a policy is likely to lead to more tension in the region, not less.

That said, this does not mean we should be backing the Iraqi government's objections to Kurdish independence either. We already support government oppression in several other Middle Eastern nations; we don't need to formally add another. In addition, we happen to have a history of supporting the Iraqi government against the Kurds back when Saddam was a US ally. It did not turn out well.

In short, this is the perfect example of a complicated regional dispute that the US should not be involved in. It's not at all clear how we could make the situation better, but there are many ways we could make it worse. So instead of picking sides, the US should employ the Hippocratic Oath: First do no harm.