Report:TwotimesasmanyBritishMuslimsfighting

Report: Two times as many British Muslims fighting for ISIS as with U.K. armed forces

posted at 7:21 pm on August 20, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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Americans were made acutely aware of the threat posed by Western jihadist fighters joining the ranks of ISIS in Syria and Iraq when a man with a London accent beheaded James Wright Foley as part of a taped ultimatum to President Barack Obama.

Inexplicably, President Barack Obama chose not to even abstractly address the nature of that threat, even though he plans to personally chair a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on precisely this subject next month.

A July intelligence estimate suggested that up to 3,000 ISIS militants were of European origin and 1,500 of those are young British Muslims, according to Birmingham MP Perry Barr. Framing the problem of Europe’s failure to assimilate its Muslim minorities perfectly, a new report indicates that there are more British Muslims fighting with Islamist militants in the Middle East than there are in the British armed forces.

According to the Ministry of Defense, there are only around 600 British Muslims currently serving in the Armed Forces, making up approximately around 0.4% of total personnel. 4.3% of the British population are Muslim.

The UK Foreign Office said that they believe over 400 individuals have travelled to Syria since the uprising began, but said that they could not give exact numbers.

However Mahmood described such low estimates as “nonsense” and said that the British government was failing to deal with the problem of home-grown extremists. “We’ve not concentrated on the prevention work, we haven’t invested enough in de-radicalisation. It’s tragic, somebody’s got to wake up to it.”

It is not an unfounded concern.

In August, 2013, two homegrown disaffected British Muslim men took to the streets of London where they beheaded a U.K. solider.

“We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you,” said Michael Adebolajo, a British citizen of Nigerian origin, with a thick East London accent after attacking the solider.

While the threat of homegrown terror may be diminished for now as the most critical front appears to be in Syria and Iraq, Western governments are smart to prepare for the worst. If ISIS cannot be stopped in the Middle East, the worst is almost certainly on its way.

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AddressingJamesFoley’smurder,Obamaspeaksloudlyand

Addressing James Foley’s murder, Obama speaks loudly and leaves the stick at home

posted at 2:41 pm on August 20, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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On Wednesday, President Barack Obama addressed the nation regarding the brutal slaying of an American journalist by Islamic State militants. After conducting that gruesome deed, James Wright Foley’s assassin warned the president that his organization planned to kill yet another American unless the West surrenders Iraq and Syria to the Islamic State’s inhuman designs.

Many of the words Obama deployed in his rhetorical front in the war against ISIS were quite nice and even refreshingly blunt. “No just God would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day,” Obama said after a brief list of the atrocities committed by ISIS militants. “ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt.”

“People like this ultimately fail,” the president added. “They fail because the future is won by those who build and not destroy.”

History is, indeed, replete with examples of barbaric forces bent on delivering the world back into darkness. Some have failed. Some did not. Those that did fail did so because they were resisted by the armies of civilization. None of history’s dark crusades ever failed in a vacuum.

Obama expressed how “heartbroken” he was at the murder of an American, and he pledged to “extract this cancer so that it does not spread.” But this metastatic tumor has already been allowed to spread. And, even in a fashion that maintained a sufficient level of operational secrecy, the president failed to inform the American people how he planned to excise it.

Just prior to Obama’s address, CNN reporter Barbara Starr reported that American officials now believe that the video of Foley’s assassination was taken inside Syria, where the United States has no military presence and cannot conduct operations in the air without incurring the serious risk of encountering resistance from Syria’s sophisticated, Russian-made anti-air batteries. Obama failed to make note of this.

Nor did the president, perhaps understandably, mention the fact that another American journalist – Steven Sotloff – will be killed next if the president does not give up the ongoing air campaign against ISIS in Iraq. It makes sense that the president did not want to endanger Sotloff’s life further by antagonizing ISIS. Nor does the President of the United States gain anything from appearing to respond directly to ultimatums issued by a loose band of militants in the Middle East. But these are subjects that can be addressed in a cautious manner that also treats the American people like adults.

Where was the status update on the ongoing airstrikes against ISIS position in the north of Iraq which, judging only from press accounts, appear to be relatively effective? Why did the president fail to address rumors that his administration was aware of the threats to Foley’s life prior to his execution, or that unconfirmed reports have suggested that his killer may have been a former Guantanamo detainee?

For that matter, why did the president not address the fact that a significant number westerners are apparently fighting alongside ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and Foley’s executioner may have been one of these western jihadists? It is, again, perfectly understandable for the president to not want to get ahead of the facts of this still developing event, but Obama is set to chair as United Nations Security Council meeting in September which is focused entirely on that very threat. He has yet to publicly address this forthcoming UNSC meeting, and this incident would have been a perfect time to broach that subject.

Instead, he leaves it up to his surrogates and the media to inform the public about how this war is being prosecuted. The latest development, breaking just minutes after Obama spoke, is an apparent proposal administration officials are considering to send 300 additional troops to Iraq. Even the member some of the members of Obama’s own party are now strongly suggesting that the president come to Congress with a request to legally authorize this application of force in Iraq. When does the president plan speak honestly about the scope of American involvement in the Middle East?

So many members of the media remarked that Obama appeared “shaken” or “pissed” over the execution of an American, which is a commendable and appropriate emotion to experience under these circumstances. The equally appropriate response from those concerned about national security, America’s position in the world, or even the quaint notion of avenging great wrongs would be, “So what?”

The president’s emotional state at any given moment is utterly irrelevant, unless that provides a window into his decision making process while American service personnel are in harm’s way. To many in the press, the study of Obama’s fluctuating emotions is its own virtue. As thought this was some reality show. Save it that for the confession booth.

What is the plan, Mr. President? Or do we have to wait to read about it in the papers tomorrow?

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EverythinghaschangedaftertheexecutionofJames

Everything has changed after the execution of James Foley by ISIS

posted at 8:01 am on August 20, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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The execution of the American journalist James Wright Foley by Islamic State militants and their threat to do the same to another U.S. citizen has changed the West’s approach to the threat posed by this fundamentalist group occupying portions of Iraq and Syria. The tempo of officials in the West has quickened as preparations to address this threat take on a new urgency.

President Barack Obama will return to Washington today to give a statement on the gruesome execution of an American at the hands of an Islamic militant who appears to have been British-born. Obama will be unable to satisfy the concerns of a nervous and wounded nation if he merely reprises his threadbare role as America’s “comforter-in-chief.” The country demands a plan of action aimed at rolling back ISIS from Iraq and a longer-term strategy to suppress the Islamic State threat in Syria.

In the U.K., Prime Minister David Cameron, too, announced his intention to end his vacation early and return to London after pressure mounted on him to recall Parliament for an emergency session aimed at crafting a plan to confront the threat posed by ISIS.

The language Americans are using to describe the ISIS threat has also changed. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a 2016 hopeful who has positioned himself as among the hawkish in the field of GOP presidential aspirants, minced no words in his statement on Foley’s execution.

“Just as Al Qaeda’s initial killings of Americans abroad foretold the carnage they would unleash within our borders, this barbaric beheading of a defenseless hostage is the clearest indication to date that ISIL has declared war on the United States, on the American people, and on freedom loving people everywhere.

“For more than a year, ISIL has been murdering civilians, raping women and young girls and enslaving them, and carrying out a systematic genocide of anyone who does not share their warped and extremist Islamist views. ISIL cannot be reasoned with, they can’t be negotiated with, and their view of the world is irreconcilable with civilized society.

And, on CBS This Moring, Obama’s former acting CIA director Mike Morell warned the public to mark the date as it was the first time ISIS had attacked Americans directly.

“I think what ISIS is trying to do here,” he began, “is intimidate the United States into backing off of the attacks that we’ve done in the last several weeks.”

“And I think our response should be, and our response will be, to not do that,” Morell continued. “In fact, we should pick up the pace here.”

Morell makes a sound point. From all appearances, the Western airstrikes on ISIS positions in Iraq’s north have successfully dislodged the Islamic State from key positions like those they occupied around Mt. Sinjar and the Mosul Dam. An even more energetic operation would likely enjoy even more successes.

If the president’s concerns about expanding operations in Iraq were political, that Americans would never be prepared to risk U.S. blood and treasure in Iraq again, he can probably rest easy knowing that he has the support of the public behind his actions. In public opinion polls, bipartisan majorities have expressed support for airstrikes against the medieval ISIS threat. Today, in the wake of this barbarism against an American journalist with threats of more of the same to come, the American people are likely willing to go even further to neutralize this new enemy.

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Unexpectedly:ISISleaderfleestoSyriawhereU.S.

Unexpectedly: ISIS leader flees to Syria where U.S. insists he will be safe

posted at 4:01 pm on August 15, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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No one could have seen this coming.

In early August, President Barack Obama revealed that he had approved targeted airstrikes on ISIS targets in Iraq. The strikes were aimed at both halting the Islamic State’s advance on cities like Erbil and Baghdad, where American diplomatic and military assets were stationed, and to relieve the pressure on Iraqi minority groups targeted by ISIS for extermination or displacement. Some military analysts noted, however, that the president will be unable to achieve the objective of eliminating the ISIS threat, rather than simply disrupting the group’s operational tempo, unless he expanded the theater of operations to include Syria.

“After all, Syria is where ISIL developed into the fearsome jihadist juggernaut it is today, seizing vast swaths of territory, piles of heavy weapons and even oil fields,” former CIA counterterrorism analyst Aki Peritz wrote in Politico Magazine. “And it’s where much of ISIL’s thousands-strong fighting forces are still based.”

But the president remained steadfast in his determination to limit American operations to Iraq. Having determined that airstrikes on ISIS positions around the western Iraq’s Mount Sinjar, where the encircled Yazidi minority had been trapped for weeks, was a success, the president determined (dubiously) that the American rescue mission in Iraq had completed its objective. He revealed that, with the exception of continued strikes on ISIS positions which threaten American military and diplomatic personnel, the latest American contingency operation in Iraq had been completed.

It seems Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi has been listening to the president. A Kurdish official reportedly said on Friday that the Islamic State leader has left the Iraqi city of Mosul and has returned to Syria.

According to a report in the London-based Arabic news outlet Asharq al-Awsat, al-Baghdadi fled Iraq along with a convoy of ISIS militants.

“According to our intelligence sources, Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi traveled to Syria as part of a convoy of 30 Hummer vehicles after fearing being targeted by US airstrikes,” [Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) spokesman Saeed Mamo] Zinni said. He added that Kurdish Peshmerga forces have been able to kill a number of ISIS senior leaders.
…
An informed source in Mosul, speaking to Asharq Al-Awsat on condition of anonymity, said that ISIS had killed all Yazidi men in the villages it had besieged around Sinjar after a deadline for them to convert to Islam expired. “[ISIS fighters also] raped the women and girls, and took the children to Mosul,” he added.

The source claimed that ISIS had recruited several young men from Mosul, and that many of the new recruits were sent to fight in the arid Jazeera region in Syria.

Al-Baghdadi’s flight from Iraq may seem like welcome news, but that ISIS fighters have not abandoned their assault on Iraqi targets. As Ed Morrissey flagged on Friday, the Islamic State remains as ambitious as ever.

“The United States believes that while the group remains largely focused on its brutal takeover of large areas of Iraq, there is also an ‘expansion of its external terrorist ambitions,’” CNN reported.

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PoliticspreventingObamafromdealingwithIraqas

Politics preventing Obama from dealing with Iraq as experts recommend

posted at 1:21 pm on August 14, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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The Associated Press suggested on Thursday what everyone knows to be true, but is impolitic for some to say outright: President Barack Obama is not engaging the threat posed by ISIS in Iraq in the aggressive manner it deserves because it is politically inconvenient.

The AP revealed on Thursday that the administration has no illusions about the nature of the ISIS threat, and is resigned to the fact remains that a military solution is the only solution to the increasingly dangerous situation in the Middle East. Moreover, despite assertions to the contrary from some administration officials, the threat to the American homeland is real.

While the strategic approach to dealing with ISIS is relatively obvious, confronting the political obstacles that Obama himself has erected which prevent him from doing so is less clear.

Smashing the Islamic State, military and intelligence analysts say, would require a sustained campaign of American airstrikes, combined with a U.S.-backed ground force of Sunni tribesmen – the same approach that rooted al-Qaida in Iraq out of the Sunni tribal areas in 2008.

But such a campaign would be “orders of magnitudes more difficult” than Yemen because of how well-armed and well-trained Islamic State fighters are, said Peter Mansoor, a retired army colonel who helped oversee a turnaround in Iraq in 2008.

“We have a mismatch between our goals and our strategy at the present time,” said Mansoor, now a professor at Ohio State. “The goal eventually is to eliminate (the Islamic State), but the president has laid out a very restrained military option which can’t accomplish that goal.”

“A strategy to destroy the Islamic State would not require large numbers of American ground troops, but it would amount to a significant escalation from the recent air operations, analysts say,” the AP reported. “It might also require military action in western Syria, where the group has its headquarters in the city of Ar-Raqqah.”

Obama’s critics rightly fear that the president will be unable to address the ISIS threat in Iraq because it would mean introducing a significant American troop presence back into that country. This would also herald the collapse of a favored White House talking point that president successfully ended the Iraq War. Almost no one believes the president will conduct strikes inside Syria, where Obama declined to engage in military action in 2013 following the negotiation of a Russian-brokered deal which allowed Bashar al-Assad’s forces to surrender some chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, ISIS continues to advance even in spite of American airstrikes on militant positions.

JUST IN: ISIS advancing to south and west of Kirkuk -@NPWcnn

— Vaughn Sterling (@vplus) August 14, 2014

In spite of this advance, media outlets are reporting that the United States is backing off a plan to conduct a rescue mission of the Yazidi minorities, saying that airstrikes on ISIS targets have forced the fundamentalist militants to retreat and abandon checkpoints surrounding Mt. Sinjar.

Moreover, based on the assessment of U.S. Marines and special forces on the ground on that mountain in western Iraq, the number of Yazidis who remain trapped are fewer than previously estimated. This, the Defense Department says, makes a rescue mission “far less likely.”

MSNBC’s Luke Russert reported on Thursday that, even though many of the Yazidis could evacuate from the mountain if they wished, many prefer to stay there because they continue to fear for their lives.

That makes perfect sense.

Call me conspiratorial, but the fact that multiple reports continue to indicate that the White House is at least as concerned with the political implications associated with taking “American involvement to another level” as they are with Iraqi security and the safety of this imperiled religious minority.

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‘They’recoming’and‘another9/11isimminent’

‘They’re coming’ and ‘another 9/11 is imminent’

posted at 8:01 pm on August 13, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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Ali Khedery is the chairman and chief executive of the Dubai-based Dragoman Partners. He negotiated Exxon Mobile’s entry into Kurdistan as an executive with that company. Before that, he worked with the U.S. State and Defense departments, and was the longest serving American official in Iraq from 2003 to 2009. Khedery served as the special assistant to five U.S. ambassadors and a senior advisor to three commanders of U.S. Central Command.

Ali Khedery knows the Middle East, and Iraq in particular.

It is important to know Khedery’s background because when he sounds the alarm, and he is sounding the alarm with all the fury of a man witnessing an irreversible tragedy unfolding, the world would be well-advised to listen to him.

In an open letter to President Barack Obama in Politico Magazine, Khedery chided the president for his commitment to a policy of “benign neglect” toward the Middle East. He advised the president to give up on his current team of advisors, who have not served him well leading up to and during this present region-wide crisis, and surround himself with new voices.

“One former aide from your White House team recently told me: It’s not just that they don’t understand. It’s that they don’t want to understand what’s happening in the Middle East. They just want it all to go away,” Khedery wrote. “But it’s only going to get worse.”

Khedery advocated for the establishment of a “Middle East Czar,” though in an age in which there is an executive branch czar for everything from cars to copyrights, the term seems a frivolous one. What Khedery is advocating is something quite distinct from the role Steve Rattner played during the automotive industry bailout.

“Just as Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) transformed our extraordinarily capable but diffuse covert elements by fusing military, intelligence, diplomatic and law enforcement resources under one roof, a Supreme Allied Command for the Middle East and North Africa would act as an all-of-government fusion cell,” he wrote.

In other words, you need a modern-day Gen. Dwight Eisenhower—circa 1938—to help contain and quell separate conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq before they merge into an all-out regional conflagration and before jihadis orchestrate a second 9/11.

Khedery a rather serious fellow. Which is why his warning to CNN host Jake Tapper should be that much more disturbing. Unless the United States gets its head around the fact that what is occurring in Iraq has the potential to become a full-fledged regional war (in many respects, it already is), America can expect that “another 9/11 is imminent.”

“I know they don’t take the threat of transnational jihad seriously enough,” Khedery said when asked for his assessment of how the Obama administration is handling the current crisis. “ISIS represents, in fact, the most virulent form of transnational jihad the planet has ever seen.”

“By referring to them as the jayvee team, by sitting back and watching them rise over the three years despite the genocide in Syria, by watching [former Iraqi PM Nouri] Maliki’s sectarian policies create an environment where ISIS could again come into Iraq, and then by doing nothing about it for months now, despite repeated warnings from the intelligence community, what’s happened now is the cancer has metastasized and we have a major problem on our hands,” he added.

“I consumed a lot of CIA and NSA products over the years,” Khedery warned. “But you don’t need access to CIA and NSA products to know that they are coming and that another 9/11 is imminent unless we act decisively, and quickly, and do it right now with our allies in the region and around the world.”

…Well. That’s heartening.

The problem for Obama is that to accept Khedery’s suggestion is to confess that his approach to Iraq over the last five years has been a failure. Obama cannot even bring himself to tell the country the truth about the nature of the American mission in Iraq (yes, Virginia, there are boots on the ground).

Obama is in the midst of a scramble to handle this grave military threat as he would a political crisis. That is a scarier prospect than anything Khedery warned of in this clip.

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Report:U.S.SpecialForceshavebeenonMount

Report: U.S. Special Forces have been on Mount Sinjar for days

posted at 6:01 pm on August 13, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Maybe “boots on the ground” only applies to the ground at sea level? I’m spitballing here.

A team of US marines and special forces landed on Mount Sinjar in Iraq on Wednesday to assess options for a potential rescue of of 30,000 Yazidi civilians threatened by Islamic extremists and worn down by hunger and thirst.

The forces flew in on V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft that can land vertically. They joined a small number of American special forces who, the Guardian has been told, had been on the mountain for some days. That team had been assessing the military and humanitarian situation and guiding US air strikes against Islamic State (Isis) fighters encircling the mountain…

Fleeing Yazidis have reported seeing small teams of American soldiers high on the northern flank. “We weren’t allowed to go near them,” said a man from Sinjar who was airlifted from the former base. “They were being guarded by the Kurds.”

Their mission: Find a way to get tens of thousands of weak, dehydrated, and dying people off a mountaintop (where the temperature’s well over 100 degrees, by the way) when there are well-armed barbarians waiting below. One option is to lead them down the mountain on foot and into Kurdistan by land, but that’s tricky. ISIS is down there, of course, and the road south to Kurdish territory would take them through territory held by the jihadis. Who’s going to do the fighting if U.S. “combat troops” aren’t available and there aren’t enough Peshmerga to shoulder the load? Another option is to forget the route into Kurdistan and go north instead — but that would take everyone into Syria, where U.S. troops would be reluctant to go for political reasons. Could the Peshmerga handle that alone or would they, as one U.S. official told the NYT, need Marine support?

Option two is to simply airlift everyone off the mountain. There are four Ospreys stationed nearby in Irbil plus some unknown number of U.S. and British helicopters. That’s complicated too, though. Someone would have to set up a security perimeter on the mountain for aircraft to land, and each aircraft would probably need a combat aircraft to accompany it in case it came under fire. The sheer volume of people needing rescue is another logistical challenge. An Osprey can carry 24 people; a typical Chinook can carry around 34, although apparently some models run bigger. Assuming everything broke right — a big, secure landing area, all aircraft loaded to capacity, and, say, 10 Chinooks participating in the mission — you’d need just shy of 70 trips to get 30,000 people down. Let’s hope there are still enough physically able Yazidis on the mountain to load the weak onto the aircraft too, or else you’ll need even more troops to help carry the infirm.

Total American troops inside Iraq at the moment, by the way: 1,000 and counting.

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Tags: Iraq, iraqis, ISIS, Kurds, Marines, ospreys, peshmerga, sinjar, special forces, Syria, Yazidis

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Troubleinparadise:HillarycallsObamatoheal

Trouble in paradise: Hillary calls Obama to heal rift over Atlantic interview

posted at 4:01 pm on August 12, 2014 by Allahpundit

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She didn’t mean to attack him, you know. That razor-sharp line about how “Don’t do stupid stuff” isn’t an organizing principle was aimed at some other administration that takes “Don’t do stupid stuff” as its organizing principle.

“Secretary Clinton was proud to serve with President Obama, she was proud to be his partner in the project of restoring American leadership and advancing America’s interests and values in a fast changing world,” said the statement, shared with POLITICO.

“She continues to share his deep commitment to a smart and principled foreign policy that uses all the tools at our disposal to achieve our goals. Earlier today, the secretary called President Obama to make sure he knows that nothing she said was an attempt to attack him, his policies, or his leadership.”

It added: “Secretary Clinton has at every step of the way touted the significant achievements of his presidency, which she is honored to have been part of as his secretary of state. While they’ve had honest differences on some issues, including aspects of the wicked challenge Syria presents, she has explained those differences in her book and at many points since then. Some are now choosing to hype those differences but they do not eclipse their broad agreement on most issues. Like any two friends who have to deal with the public eye, she looks forward to hugging it out when she they see each other tomorrow night.”

In fairness to her, I’m surprised at how much Team O has pushed back. His foreign policy rating is in the toilet; she’s the nominee-in-waiting. Of course she’s going to draw some distinctions between them, and it’s to the party’s benefit that she does so. Instead you’ve got Obama grumbling about “horsesh*t” criticism, Axelrod publicly calling her out on Twitter, and unnamed administration officials whispering to the Times that she was oddly quiet about some of these big international challenges back when she had the means to influence them.

But at the time of the Obama administration’s internal debate over that decision, several officials said, Mrs. Clinton’s advocacy was far less thunderous: The United States had tried every diplomatic gambit with Syria, she said, and nothing else had worked, so why not try funneling weapons to the moderate rebels…

At the end of her tenure, for example, Mrs. Clinton wrote a memo to Mr. Obama recommending that the United States lift its half-century-old trade embargo against Cuba. It was not a position that she seriously advocated while at the State Department, officials said.

In the interview with The Atlantic, Mrs. Clinton said she had always been in the camp of those who believed that Iran had no right to enrich uranium. Yet in December 2010, she was one of the first American officials to acknowledge publicly, in an interview with the BBC, that Iran could emerge from a nuclear deal with the right to enrich.

When forced to choose between protecting their own legacy and making life easier for the next Democrat to lead the ticket, the Hopenchange boys have made their choice. If this ship is destined to sink, they’re going to make sure that Hillary takes on some water too. Excellent.

Now she has her own choice to make. Having seen how hard the White House is willing to tug on her leash as she tries to walk away, does she tone down her criticism of them on foreign policy or risk making enemies of them by keeping at it? I’m thinking she’ll probably accentuate the positive: Now that he’s bombing ISIS, she can communicate her own hawkishness to voters by cheerleading for that. Liberals might tolerate her being a loud-and-proud interventionist but asking them to tolerate it while she’s tearing down a president they voted for twice, who himself is a bit more hawkish than some of them would prefer, might be too much. Frankly, I wonder if she needs to ostentatiously brand herself a hawk at all at this point. She’s eager to do that, I assume, because she’s worried that some voters won’t trust a woman to be commander-in-chief (especially given that her biggest government role was in diplomacy, not at the Pentagon), but her reputation as a hawk is well known among people who follow politics. It’ll be well known to low-information voters too after she spends a year on the trail. There’s no need to pick a fight with Obama right now. Especially when his team is as willing to fight back as they are.

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Obama:CriticismofmySyriapolicyis‘horses**t’

Obama: Criticism of my Syria policy is ‘horses**t’

posted at 8:41 am on August 12, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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President Barack Obama does not like being criticized, particularly when it is criticism that he deserves.

Obama has had to spend an inordinate amount of time recently explaining to the press why his approach to the Syrian civil war in 2012 and 2013 was a sound strategy. The rise of ISIS in Syria, which is now fighting on fronts in at least three Middle Eastern nations, has prompted many prominent voices to second guess that policy.

And who could blame them? The president spent the first bloody year of the Syrian civil war simply hoping that geopolitical crisis would go away. He was forced to address that conflict its second year when it became characterized by the battlefield use of chemical weapons on rebel and civilian targets. Obama threatened the use of force against Syrian government forces for their egregious violation of international norms in August of 2012 and only began to make good on his threat the following year when it became clear that the combatants were flagrantly ignoring America’s warnings. Finally, loathe to back his threats of force with action, Obama took the easy way out when Vladimir Putin offered him a face-saving off ramp which would address the chemical weapons threat but keep Russia’s client in power. Obama declared victory while the crisis in Syria metastasized.

This policy of dithering and indecision has led to a crisis which is of an order of magnitude greater than the disaster in Syria which the world opted to ignore from 2011 to 2013. Not being critical of this dismal policy failure would be an exercise in intellectual dishonesty. But Obama’s role in the rise of the Islamic State is not so much being lamented by Republicans – they have never stopped being critical of Obama’s Syria policy. No, the ISIS crisis has induced the dam holding back Democratic criticisms of the president’s Syria policy to burst.

In just the last several days, a variety of former members of Obama’s administration tasked with crafting a Syria policy have undercut the president, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said of Obama’s reactive foreign policy doctrine.

Many congressional Democrats with foreign policy chops and a hint of integrity have said the same. “I just don’t get a sense that we have a strategy,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Robert Menendez (D-NJ) lamented as early as October of last year.

“I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if we had committed to empowering the moderate Syrian opposition last year,” the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s leading Democrat Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) wistfully pondered in an interview with The New York Times. “Would ISIS have grown as it did?”

The deluge of criticism from Democrats is forcing members of the press to debrief Obama on his approach to the Syrian civil war.

Well, Obama has just had it with this Monday morning quarterbacking from his supposed allies. According to a report in The Daily Beast via Josh Rogin, Obama thinks all this criticism of his approach to that once localized conflict which conflagrated into the region-wide sectarian war in which Obama now has now committed the U.S. to intervene is, frankly, “horses**t.”

Just before the congressional recess, President Obama invited over a dozen Senate and House leaders from both parties to the White House to talk about foreign policy. According to two lawmakers inside the meeting, Obama became visibly agitated when confronted by bipartisan criticism of the White House’s policy of slow-rolling moderate Syrian rebels’ repeated requests for arms to fight the Assad regime and ISIS.

According to one of the lawmakers, Sen. Bob Corker asked the president a long question that included sharp criticisms of President Obama’s handling of a number of foreign policy issues—including Syria, ISIS, Russia, and Ukraine. Obama answered Corker at length. Then, the president defended his administration’s actions on Syria, saying that the notion that many have put forth regarding arming the rebels earlier would have led to better outcomes in Syria was “horseshit.”

White House officials confirmed the charged exchange between Obama and Corker but declined to confirm that Obama used the expletive. The interaction between Obama and Corker was a tense moment in the otherwise uneventful meeting.

In August alone, Obama has been forced to defend his snakebit approach to the Syria conflict to reporters with The New York Times and The Atlantic, neither of which caters to a particularly conservative audience. It is not the criticisms which are beginning to irritate the president, but the source of those criticisms. Obama’s allies are losing confidence in the president’s ability and instincts, and it’s getting to him.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, ISIS, Syria

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Surprise:CIAbeginsquietlyfunnelingweaponstoKurds

Surprise: CIA begins quietly funneling weapons to Kurds to repel ISIS

posted at 1:21 pm on August 11, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Just a “trickle” so far, per WaPo, because for the moment we’re still observing the polite fiction that there’s a functioning central government in Baghdad. If Maliki digs in and the new prime minister isn’t allowed to take power, I assume that fiction will finally be dropped.

The weapons are being supplied by the CIA, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the Obama administration has not publicly acknowledged the spy agency’s involvement.

“They need everything, especially heavy weapons,” said the former U.S. official, who is working closely with Kurdish leaders. While arms have started flowing to Kurdish forces near the city of Irbil, the official said Kurds in the vicinity of the key city of Sulaymaniyah have yet to receive any U.S. support…

A U.S. military official said the Pentagon and State Department were discussing other possible ways to deliver weapons to the Kurds via open channels, but that they would need special legal authorization. Normally U.S. arms sales are restricted to sovereign or central governments.

Legal authorization shouldn’t be hard. There are no heavyweight factions in either party who are anti-Kurd or (giggle) pro-Maliki at this point, are there?

Speaking of quietly arming jihadi nemeses, here’s a tasty leftover from the weekend. I know Noah touched on it earlier but I want to highlight this bit:

JG: Do you think we’d be where we are with ISIS right now if the U.S. had done more three years ago to build up a moderate Syrian opposition?

[Hillary Clinton]: Well, I don’t know the answer to that. I know that the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.

They were often armed in an indiscriminate way by other forces and we had no skin in the game that really enabled us to prevent this indiscriminate arming.

I don’t know how seriously to take that. Maybe it’s simple political math. She needs to distance herself from Obama’s foreign policy + she wants to polish her brand as a hawk = in hindsight, we should have done more to arm the “moderates” in the Free Syrian Army, who might have quashed the nascent threat from ISIS on the battlefield in Syria before it could spread to Iraq. Assuming she means it, though, I don’t know why she thinks an FSA backed by American arms would have been appreciably better at filling the vacuum in Syria than ISIS was. It’s easy to say in hindsight “we should have hit ISIS harder before they had time to establish themselves”; in reality, had Obama made that case at the time, he would have been scoffed at by war-weary lefties and righties. And with good reason: There’s simply never been compelling evidence, the way there is with an America-friendly battle-tested force like the peshmerga in Kurdistan, that an FSA armed by Uncle Sam would have been equal to the task of stopping the jihadis, let alone Assad. Michael Dougherty:

The U.S. was arming Syrian rebels. This was reported throughout 2012 and 2013. Sometimes the reports even made the effort to describe those America was arming as “moderate,” to try to distinguish them from the black-flag flying beheaders. But the distinctions can be blurry. Some of the “moderate” Free Syrian Army members have been defecting to Islamist groups like al Nusra, and presumably ISIS — at least those members who haven’t given up and retired to Turkey.

Relatively early in the Syrian conflict, back when the U.S. was still waiting for the discouraging messages from the British parliament and a discouraging op-ed from Vladimir Putin, ISIS and other Islamist groups were growing at the expense of our beloved “moderate” gun-wielders. This dynamic wasn’t hard to predict, as the opposition to Assad was concentrated in Sunni Muslim groups who detested the Alawite dictator. Money and materiel flows up from Gulf states to radical Sunnis.

Committing to the “moderate” Free Syrian Army exclusively would have meant creating a civil war within a civil war, getting into a proxy war with Saudi Arabia, and risking humiliation — all while getting a lot of innocents killed. If the stated objective was that once the U.S. went in big with anti-Assad forces, then Assad’s fall had to be assured, the result would have been similar to Egypt, where once the U.S. let Mubarak’s regime fall, the Muslim Brotherhood was the only organized option on the ground.

We armed the Iraqi army to the teeth, notes Dougherty, and those arms are now being used against the Kurds by ISIS forces who confiscated them from Iraqi troops. What reason is there to think the same wouldn’t have happened in Syria? If anything, arming the FSA might have accelerated ISIS’s takeover in Iraq by opening a new stream of weapons to the group. But I think we’re overthinking this. As I say, Hillary’s hawkishness here is foremost a political gesture, aimed partly at voters who think a woman wouldn’t be “tough” enough as commander-in-chief, partly at voters who worry that electing Obama’s top diplomat as president means four years of Hopenchange foreign policy, and partly at ardent Republican hawks who will be looking to bail on the party if Rand Paul ends up being the GOP’s choice. But I also think she would be more hawkish as president than O is, which means more early-stage interventions in places like Syria (and Ukraine?). Depending upon who we nominate, we could end up with a Republican who feels similarly, who’s considerably more dovish (Paul), or who’s probably even a bit more hawkish (Rubio). Foreign policy typically doesn’t influence presidential votes heavily, but this time it should.

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Tags: 2016, democratic, Free Syrian Army, hillary, intervention, ISIS, obama, primary, Syria

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Itbegins:IraqcrisispromptsDemstodump

It begins: Iraq crisis prompts Dems to dump on Obama’s foreign policy

posted at 8:41 am on August 11, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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The Wall Street Journal observed on Sunday that President Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy is drawing awful reviews from the critics. What critics? “James Steinberg, formerly the President’s Deputy Secretary of State, and Robert Ford, formerly his Ambassador to Syria,” and, delivering the unkindest cut of all, “Hillary Rodham Clinton, formerly his loyal Secretary of State.”

Steinberg said Obama’s decision to provide just limited support to the Kurds, and to direct all other aid through the Iraqi government which has intentionally dragged its feet, “just leaves you scratching your head.”

“Nothing we can point to that’s been very successful,” Ford said of Obama’s approach to the Syrian civil war.

President Barack Obama continues to lack a foreign policy doctrine which guides his approach to crises as they arise. With the best of intentions, the president’s admirers routinely try to rectify this oversight by crafting a doctrine for the president, leading to a variety of aborted experiments and unintentionally humorous episodes. One such attempt to define the Obama doctrine recently resulted in this gem: “Don’t do stupid s**t.”

JFK had “support any friend, oppose any foe,” Reagan had “peace through strength,” Obama has “don’t do stupid s**t.”

Over the weekend, the former secretary of state took a long overdue swing at this imbecilic attempt to construct a doctrinal approach to the practice of foreign relations. “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Clinton told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

Clinton accurately called this doctrine a “political message” and “not his world view.” She’s half right: it is a political message – the president’s approach to foreign affairs has always been first and foremost focused on how any action abroad plays at home. But this may just as well be Obama’s worldview as well; he never displayed much interest in statecraft.

It’s not just former administration officials who are dumping all over their old boss. Even The New York Times, which devoted its page one today to an exhaustive look into the crisis in Iraq, cannot but muster a perfunctory implied nod to the “Blame Bush” crowd. The Times’ sources would not play along.

“I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if we had committed to empowering the moderate Syrian opposition last year,” House Foreign Affairs Committee’s leading Democrat Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) said. “Would ISIS have grown as it did?”

If you forgot, the president backed off a policy aimed at containing the crisis in Syria just one year ago, even after delivering a prime time address to the public designed to shore up domestic support for the move, when Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to mediate the civil war with the aim of keeping his client Bashar al-Assad in power. Assad remains in control of Damascus and, one year later, Putin is now in control of the Crimea.

There will be no parachute out of this crisis for Obama, and his Democratic allies know it. As the ship sinks, Obama’s erstwhile allies are saving themselves. It’s an ugly sight, but also a predictable one.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, ISIS, Syria

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