Finally a studied intelligent look at what is going on in the Middle East and what our President can do about it. Retired Four Star General Wesley Clark spoke to this situation over the weekend and his clear facts and lack of political BS were incredibly refreshing. The problem is that people like Ash Carter and all the Republicans have been trying to politicize their way around the real issues. A perfect example was when Carter refused to answer a straight question from John McCain about when we would be invading Raqqa. All he had to say is we aren’t, but he lacked he guts and the honesty to do so.
The reality is that we are spending $11 million a day on the fight against ISIS. That is a total of $5.2 billion since August of 2014. The Pentagon acts like money grows on trees, when it really comes from programs that would benefit the American people far more than this fight; programs like infrastructure, education, help for the homeless, etc.
Clark states; first we have to get more eyes on the ground if we are going to bomb effectively. He also explains that we should not be fighting on the ground; the ground war should be conducted by the countries from the region; but such a plan is difficult because no one in the region wants to fight outside their own borders. The Kurds don’t want to fight outside Kurdish areas, the Saudis don’t want to fight at all but certainly not outside Saudi Arabia or Yemen and the Iraqi’s don’t want the Turks fighting in their country! So it’s almost impossible to put together a coherent force with which to attack ISIS in all the areas that it occupies.
In Iraq we now have the Iraqi army, some militias and some Sunni forces all surrounding Ramadi.
Clark points out that ISIS is the result of a conflict between Sunnis and the alliance of Iran and Assad in Syria. So until we can work out a functioning arrangement between those parties we have no chance of stopping ISIS. The problems of the Middle East are not military; they are political. That is the mistake that our Right leaning pundits don’t seem to understand. Ending a war there is not the solution. Until we solve the political and religious problems, other wars will pop up all over the region and we will be playing whack-a-Arab ‘till hell freezes over.
Clark states that he would be doing exactly what the President is doing. He would be working behind the scenes to bring the respective parties together to work against ISIS. This is not easy because none of them trust or get along with each other. One has to get the Iranians and the Turks to agree to cut off funding for ISIS. We have to get Assad to get the oil for his nation from someplace other than ISIS. We have to destroy ISIS oil infrastructure, thereby cutting off income to them.
Money is a major aspect of this, or any, war. ISIS needs huge inflows of money because, unlike al Qaeda, it occupies large expanses of territory and must provide all the goods and services that successful occupation demands. They have been doing that by grabbing the banks in places that they occupy and by selling oil. We have set up a system of stopping their monetary transfers but we need other countries to cooperate. That is a big deal because these other countries are making a lot of money by laundering ISIS funds.
We had not been bombing ISIS oil trucks, or their oil fields, due to a major concern about civilian casualties. Lately we have been hitting the trucks, the theory being that if the drivers don’t want to get killed they should abandon the trucks and walk away. This is a reasonable approach and one source reports over four hundred trucks destroyed in the last month.
Clark further points out that we have to come up with a plan for a regional structure that will allow all the parties to live in peace before we destroy anyone. Destroying Saddam didn’t help Iraq; it destroyed it. The same goes for Libya and the same will go for Syria. If we take out Assad, and ISIS is the only existing form of government left in the country, Syria will collapse just as Iraq and Libya did before it.
This practical, intelligent approach is exactly what the Right in this country does not get. They love to attack Obama but they have no solutions except an abstract, comic book picture of ACTION! That’s what got this region into the shape it’s in, in the first place. It started out with greedy religious fanatics killing each other off for centuries; then the European nations moved in and sucked every last drop of profit out of the region before abandoning it. Eventually, that was followed by George Bush and his war mongering sycophants, starting a war we should never have fought, with no plan on how to finish it, and thereby leaving a wasteland where a country had once stood. So we have been dumping money and lives into this open pit seemingly forever. There are no easy solutions. If there were we would have nuked the whole area years ago. That’s what Rumsfeld wanted to do but didn’t have the stones to pull off.
The raving big mouths like Rush Limbaugh, Joe Scarborough and the various GOP presidential candidates who are screaming for Obama to be more pro-active just don’t get it. They aren’t intelligent enough to understand that action is more than dropping bombs and killing our kids. They aren’t smart enough to see that Obama is doing the only productive thing that can be done with this cage of snakes.