WarSclerotic

ISIS, Syrian Conflict ‘Not Containable’ in Middle East Bipartisan report calls for greater American involvement abroad

BY: Morgan Chalfant Follow @mchalfant16
May 17, 2016 5:00 am

Source: ISIS, Syrian Conflict ‘Not Containable’ in Middle East

Threats emanating from the Middle East, including those caused by ISIS and the Syrian civil war, cannot be contained and therefore require the United States to significantly ramp up its military commitments in the region, according to a new report.

A group of scholars, strategists, and former government officials from Republican and Democratic administrations convened to develop the study, which was released by the Center for a New American Security on Monday.

The report, which has been endorsed by a number of ex-Democratic officials including a former Clinton administration aide, implies that the Obama administration’s policies toward Syria and the Middle East in general have been weak.

“Despite recent American misjudgments and failures in the Middle East, for which all recent administrations, including the present one, bear some responsibility, and despite the apparent intractability of many of the problems in the region, the United States has no choice but to engage itself fully in a determined, multi-year effort to find an acceptable resolution to the many crises tearing the region apart,” the report states.

“The key point is that the dangers emanating from the Middle East, including both terrorism and the massive flow of refugees, are not containable. They must be addressed at the source, over many years, using a combination of local actors and American power and influence.”

The report calls for the international effort against ISIS to be “scaled up substantially,” a move that would include sending more U.S. special operations forces to help root out the terror group from Iraq, Syria, and newly-established footholds in countries like Libya.

“The United States should show a new resolve by increasing significantly its military contribution across the board, including providing more unique air assets, additional intelligence assets, and a larger contingent of special operation forces capable of identifying and destroying high value and other critical ISIS targets,” the report states.

President Obama’s efforts against ISIS, which he once compared to a “JV team,” have long been criticized. Just one day before the group launched deadly coordinated terror attacks in Paris last November, the president declared during a nationally televised interview that the terror group had been “contained.”

The Obama administration, which began air strikes against ISIS in 2014, has sent modest contingents of special operations forces to Syria and Iraq in order to provide “advise and assist” support for Syrian Arab, Kurdish, and Iraqi troops fighting the terror group in the region. It has also green-lit limited operations directly targeting leaders of the terrorist group.

The administration has insisted that American troops are not in combat operations against ISIS, even though three American service members have died at the group’s hands in Iraq.

The report released Monday indicates that the administration has not done enough to thwart a terrorist group that could pose a greater threat to American and Western security than al Qaeda.

“The terrorist assault on Paris this past November and on Brussels in March were stark and painful reminders of the many ways instability in the Greater Middle East can come home to countries in Europe. The mass shooting in California in early December 2015 also demonstrates why ISIS potentially poses a greater threat to the United States and its allies and partners than al Qaeda,” the report states, citing the terrorist attack on a San Bernardino, Calif., holiday party carried out by a radicalized couple.

“With so many ISIS-inspired terrorists holding Western passports, counterterrorism has become significantly more difficult. Nor can one discount the possibility that just as ISIS has emerged to compete with al Qaeda for leadership of the jihadi forces, there will be other groups seeking to take the mantle.”

The CNAS project is co-chaired by James Rubin, a former State Department official during the Clinton administration, and is endorsed by CNAS co-founder Michèle Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration. The project was established to develop a bipartisan consensus about the role America should play in the world, and the report was deliberately rolled out ahead of the 2016 election to shape the national conversation.

While the experts do not go out of their way to criticize the current administration’s foreign policy agenda, the report offers implicit rebukes of the administration’s efforts abroad, particularly in the Middle East. It calls for making a political solution to the five-year Syrian civil war dependent on the departure of Syrian leader Bashar al Assad—a point the Obama administration has appeared willing to concede in recent months.

The report also calls for an overhaul of the Pentagon’s “inadequate” program to arm and train the Syrian opposition forces, who have faced brutal resistance from Syrian government troops emboldened by Russian and Iranian intervention in the conflict. The Defense Department was forced to shutter its failed program to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels, which cost American taxpayers $500 million, in favor of a less ambitious initiative last October.

“Syrian government forces have regained considerable territory and momentum especially in and around Aleppo, primarily as a result of coordinated Russian-Syrian-Iranian operations backed by heavy and often indiscriminate Russian bombardment from the air,” the report states.

“At a minimum, the inadequate efforts hitherto to arm, train, and protect a substantial Syrian opposition force must be completely overhauled and made a much higher priority.”

The report also proposes the establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria where displaced Syrians can relocate out of harm’s way and where opposition forces can arm, train, and organize.

More generally, the experts make the case for boosting American engagement in the face of Chinese economic growth and military buildup, Russian aggression, and continued destabilization in the Middle East. The maintenance of post-World War II international order, the report explains, is dependent on strengthening U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military power and boosting spending on defense and national security.

“The greatest challenge to the preservation of this order today may be here in the United States. The bipartisan consensus that has long supported America’s engagement with the world is under attack by detractors in both parties,” the report states.

“Responsible political leaders need to explain to a new generation of Americans how important this world order is to their well-being and how vital America’s role is in sustaining it.”

America’s Outrageous Ultimatum: Syria as the Libya of the Levant

07.05.2016 Author: Tony Cartalucci

Source: America’s Outrageous Ultimatum: Syria as the Libya of the Levant | New Eastern Outlook

How the United States presumes to possess the authority to determine the fate of a sovereign nation thousands of miles from its own shores in the Middle East is never explained by US Secretary of State John Kerry when he recently announced a new ultimatum leveled at Damascus. Nor is it explained why Syria should capitulate to US demands to begin a political transition that has demonstrably left other nations across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) divided, destroyed, and safe-havens for state-sponsored terrorism years after “successful” US-backed regime change has been achieved – Libya most notably.

Yet despite all of this, according to the Associate Press (AP) in their article, “Kerry warns Assad to start transition by Aug. 1  or else,” the United States fully expects Damascus to concede to a “political transition” engineered by Washington, leaving the nation in the hands of verified terrorists linked directly to the political and militant forces currently laying waste to Libya and those nations that put them into power.

The article reports:

Secretary of State John Kerry warned Syria’s government and its backers in Moscow and Tehran on Tuesday that they face an August deadline for starting a political transition to move President Bashar Assad out, or they risk the consequences of a new U.S. approach toward ending the 5-year-old civil war.   

AP would also claim:

…it’s unlikely that the Obama administration, so long opposed to an active American combat role in Syria, would significantly boost its presence beyond the 300 special forces it has authorized thus far in the heart of a U.S. presidential election season. More feasible might be U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia giving the rebels new weapons to fight Assad, such as portable surface-to-air missiles.

Again, the US is making demands of “Syria’s government and its backers in Moscow” while it is openly allied with Saudi Arabia who is admittedly backing US State Department-listed foreign terrorist organizations including the Al Nusra Front – quite literally Al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq.

This point has inconveniently surfaced even across the West’s own media, including the Independent in an article titled, “Turkey and Saudi Arabia alarm the West by backing Islamist extremists the Americans had bombed in Syria.” In it states that:

Turkey and Saudi Arabia are actively supporting a hardline coalition of Islamist rebels against Bashar al-Assad’s regime that includes al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, in a move that has alarmed Western governments. 

The two countries are focusing their backing for the Syrian rebels on the combined Jaish al-Fatah, or the Army of Conquest, a command structure for jihadist groups in Syria that includes Jabhat al-Nusra, an extremist rival to Isis which shares many of its aspirations for a fundamentalist caliphate.

Despite superficial attempts to portray Al Nusra at “arms length” from Saudi Arabia, and thus from Saudi Arabia’s closest and most valuable ally, Washington, the inseparable nature of those the US and Saudi Arabia are supporting and those they claim not to support is documented fact.

America Essentially Demands Syria’s Surrender to Al Qaeda

Considering the verified nature of the so-called “opposition” in Syria and the verifiable nature of what US foreign policy has done to Libya – leaving it to this day in the hands of state-sponsored terrorist organizations including the notorious “Islamic State” or ISIS – what the US is essentially demanding of Syria and its allies is capitulation to Al Qaeda.

It is a surreal full-circle US foreign policy has made, from first creating Al Qaeda in the late 1980’s jointly with Saudi Arabia and elements within the Pakistani government, then claiming to have been struck egregiously by the terrorist organization on September 11, 2001 triggering over a decade of very profitable war, before finally arriving in Libya and Syria beginning in 2011 where once again US politicians found themselves standing shoulder-to-shoulder with literal commanders of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, waging proxies wars against their collective enemies.

Indeed, US Senator John McCain would find himself in a Libya utterly devastated by NATO at the end of 2011, shaking hands with the commander of US State Department-listed foreign terrorist organization, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) – literally Al Qaeda in Libya. The LIFG commander, Abdelhakim Belhadj, had at one point been arrested by the US before being handed over to the Libyan government and imprisoned for his terrorism.

Syria’s Clear Course of Action

Syria is undoubtedly being overrun by heavily armed and extremely dangerous terrorists backed by foreign powers. These are terrorists that have proven already in Libya, that upon coming to power, they will first carry out genocide against their ethnic and political enemies, then transform Syria into a devastated wasteland and springboard for terrorism and proxy war elsewhere in the region – likely Iran and then southern Russia.Syria’s only clear course of action is to resist and defeat these terrorist factions and restore order within the nation’s boundaries. It must do this by interdicting terrorists and their supplies along the Turkish-Syrian border in the north, and the Jordanian-Syrian border in the south. It is abundantly clear that the terrorists operating within Syria cannot sustain their fighting capacity without significant and constant logistical support from their foreign sponsors beyond Syria’s borders. This fact alone, undermines the legitimacy of the so-called “uprising” and “civil war” in Syria that upon closer examination is clearly a proxy invasion.

The US’s Clear Course of Action

The US itself, in its own military manuals (MCWP 3-35.3) regarding combat operations, states in reference to defeating terrorism that:

In countering this threat, [it should be determined] whether it is internally or externally directed terrorism. Terrorism rooted externally must be severed from its roots. Against internal terrorism, [attempts should be made] to penetrate the infrastructure and destroy the leadership of the terrorist groups.

The US has already boasted of having struck hard at the leadership of various terrorist groups in Syria it claims to be at war with, yet these groups appear unfazed. This is precisely because the terrorism is being direct externally, from Turkey and Jordan where the US itself has based its forces for its ongoing Syrian operations. The clear and obvious course of action for the US is to identify the “roots” of this externally directed terrorism and “sever” them.

However, the US refuses to do this. Instead, even as it continues its feigned war against terrorism in Syria, it is doubling down on support for its proxies, including Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, who in turn, are harboring, arming, funding, training, and directly supporting the very terrorist groups the US claims to be fighting.

US Secretary of State John Kerry threatens a “new approach” by the US in Syria, if Syria does not capitulate to what is essentially the end of its existence as a functioning nation-state. The “new approach” is likely simply the continuation of existing plans to incrementally invade and occupy Syrian territory, particularly in the east through the infiltration of Iraq-based Kurds operating under US proxy Masoud Barzani, as well as to trigger a cross-border incident north of Aleppo by using their ISIS proxies to attack Turkish targets – reminisced of staged attacks Ankara had planned earlier during the war to justify the invasion and occupation of northern Syria.

Warning the world of the “success” America’s previous “political transitions” have wrought in Libya or Iraq, and raising awareness of the current nature of US-Saudi support for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Syria today, is essential in undermining the legitimacy and authority upon which the US is attempting to base its demands directed at Damascus. The demands are illegitimate and the authority they are made with constitutes not principles nor rule of law, but naked and unjust aggression that must be resisted today lest it succeed and set a precedent for further acts of injustice against other nations tomorrow.
http://journal-neo.org/2016/05/07/america-s-outrageous-ultimatum-syria-as-the-libya-of-the-levant/