Letter 2 America for October 10, 2014

Dear America,

With three books criticizing the Obama administration and The President himself for diffidence in the area of foreign affairs coming out within the past year or so--one by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, one by presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, and now one by former White House Chief of Staff and Director of the CIA Leon Panetta--credence is growing for the rampant notion that President Obama is responsible for the intractability of the ebola epidemic, and for the rise of ISIL.  But we are putting more money into the ebola epidemic than any other nation, and we will be putting men and women in the way of that harm shortly.  As for the Rush Limbaugh types who aver that "...we elected people in positions of power..." , which I read as President Obama given Rush's proclivities, "who think this in terms of this country being responsible" (that we owe it to Liberians to let them into the United States because the country was created in response to the manumition of the slaves we held and thus we are responsible for ebola), there will always be nuts like him around and acolytes to carry his message far and wide, but the effect of the lunatic fringe is marginal fortunately.  On the issue of ISIL however, people like Gates, Clinton and Panetta may be opportunists, but they are not on the fringe of our body politic at all.  They are mainstream figures whose opinions on the subject gain credence when they are repeated, as they have been in the media in all three cases.  But through the prism of recent history, it is easy to see that ISIL didn't come to be during the Obama administration in any way but name.  ISIL is just the latest iteration of the reactionary Islam advocated by Osama bin Ladin, whose terrorist sway among Muslims inclined his way didn't start even in this century.  His hegemony among jihadists goes back at least as far as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Congressman Charlie Wilson, who circumvented the CIA policy of letting the Afghan Mujahideen and the Soviets wage a war of attrition from which we could only benefit, and he arranged to arm bin Ladin's army through third parties, which arms they have used subsequently against us.  From that era sprang al Qaeda, the Nusra Front, and now ISIL in consequence of our refusal to leave the middle east alone by invading Iraq and Afghanistan in two failed efforts to seed the Levant with American values.  But all that aside, the chickens have come home to roust on the Turkish border, and this, not those other occasions is the turning point in the war against terror and reactionary Islamism.

There is a small Kurdish enclave on the Syrian border with Turkey that has been in the news lately.  Kobani is the latest discreet target of ISIL's expansion in the reason, and it is virtually under siege now.  Meanwhile, Turkish military assets...tanks in particular...are arrayed along the border in positions from which the conflict around Kobani can actually be observed, but the Turks still refuse to intervene, or even to allow Turkish Kurds to cross the border to join the battle in support of their fellow Kurds.  The arguments for the Turkish policies is first that the Kurds are a recalcitrant minority in Turkey, as they are in Syria and Iraq as well, and assisting them to gain strength, or even survive, is inimical to Turkish suzerainty over Kurdish areas within Turkey, and lately, that Turkish intervention in Syria would be like Russian intervention in Ukraine.  Thus, the Turks sit and wait as if they have impunity from the ISIL goal of a single Islamic caliphate.  But first, both arguments are absurd in that helping the Kurds in Syria could not do anything but redound to the improvement of relations between Turkey and its Kurdish minority.  And second, if Turkey were to ally with ISIL, that would be analogous to the Russian activities in Ukraine, whereas smiting ISIL could only be seen as a friendly act to Syria's regime in that ISIL is a common enemy.  So the real issue is whether the Turks fully appreciate their current policy of non-intervention in Syria, and I don't see how they could given the price they may well pay for those policies.

The Turkish army may be formidable, but so was Hussein's Iraqi army, and so was the army we left behind in Iraq.  And the Syrians have a military establishment that has managed to hold off an adamant insurgency for three years, but neither they nor the Iraqi legacy army that we equipped and trained has been able to resist the ISIL onslaught, so the dubious belief that tanks on the Turkish border will be sufficient to stop ISIL from advancing across it seems like whistling in the dark.  For that matter, the idea that Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and even Israel, whose military has failed to subdue once and for all the Islamist resistance to its very existence in Lebanon and Gaza, are exempt from the ISIL threat of a single caliphate subject to Sharia law and brutal enforcement thereof.  This is President Obama's moment, and he has seized it.

Unlike George W. Bush, President Obama has refused to be roped into doing the dirty work for the sybaritic and hostile regimes of the middle east, and has instead volunteered to help them cope with their menace, but not to invest American blood and lucre in it.  The inception of ISIL occurred under other names long ago, and our campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have only driven the movement to its current, abominable and abhorrent form.  We are long past the nascency of reactionary Islam, and blaming The President for it is irrational and misguided.  For the moment at least, Turkey is the nation with the fate of the middle east in its hands, and fortunately, that country is contemplating a "buffer zone" between ISIL in Syria and Turkey, which could function as a natural barrier between ISIL and further conquest in Turkey's direction, for that matter, Iran's, Jordan's and Israel's as well if such tactics become the modus operandi for nations in the area.  If it works in Turkey, the concept might spread, and the Obama Doctrine, as I call it, will pay off not just in American withdrawal from the area, but Arab self-reliance when it comes to radical threats.  That's the goal, I would think, and thanks to President Obama, it may be in sight.  But it is the Turks who will be responsible for the world-wide caliphate if it emerges, not our president.

Your friend,

Mike