Trump's three years of miscalculations

A version of this was published in the Winter Park Times, January 9, 2020
https://winterparktimes.com/opinion/columnists/trumps-three-years-of-miscalculations/

 Donald Trump was elected in part because he made promises that were popular, and he pointed to his successes in business to convince voters of his ability to make great deals in our nation’s interest. While the state of the economy is, without doubt, his greatest win, Trump's three years of miscalculations have serious implications for promises kept on national security and domestic well-being. The top three on my list of his miscalculations with the greatest impact: a promise to end forever wars in the middle east that instead is resulting in renewed involvement and nuclear re-armament, his managing a"perfect" Ukraine policy deal that resulted in his impeachment, and a failure to make  a domestic health insurance policy deal affecting over 140 million that resulted in GOP’s  loss of the House majority.

• He gravely miscalculated how easy it would be to leave our military involvement in the Middle East. He had to reinsert troops after withdrawal from Syria because the vacuum he left allowed ISIS to reemerge in Syria and Iraq.per a recent  Pentagon inspector general report. His initial miscalculation leading to the current  Iran crisis was to make good on a campaign promise to end forever wars by his pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. That deal was working as intended and it at least kept the lid on their nuclear weapons and an arms race and gave us more leverage in communications and threatening sanctions for lack of compliance. Trump calculated he could force Iran to negotiate a better deal by inflicting the pain of renewed economic sanctions on the country. Instead, the resulting economic damage motivated even more hostile acts with a sudden increase in Iran's proxy force numbers beginning in 2017.  Trump's order to assassinate  Iran’s General Soleimani in Iraq, the architect of Iran’s aggressive actions by the use of proxy groups, the next most powerful man to the Ayatollah in Iran and a public official, may or not have been justified in stopping an immediate threat. Nonetheless, we are in danger of being less safe in the long term. Iran was getting restless under crippling sanctions, but the assassination has united a nation of 80 million in seeking revenge as well as uniting fellow religionist Shiites throughout the region in common cause to get rid of US military presence.  Iran has a deep leadership bench still able to carry out hostile acts through its proxies. We harmed our relationship with Iraq whose parliament immediately voted for a resolution to expel all US troops. We need their support to fight Isis. At best, we now are assured of indefinite years of stepped-up violent actions by proxy groups, with revenge and counter revenge in the entire region  Iran itself immediately withdrew from any nuclear deal that had been honored by the other countries involved, freer to pursue their nuclear ambitions, and triggering a regional nuclear arms race. 

•  Trump’s deal-making acumen backfired in Ukraine. Trump thought he could pressure a newly elected president of Ukraine to do some political dirty work for him in return for a visit to the White House and restoration of the funding of critical military aid Trump himself had ordered frozen. This aid approved by Congress was deemed to be in our national interest in stopping Russian encroachment into eastern Europe  He never calculated a damning phone call with Ukraine's president would see the light of day or that one little word “though” would make the deal he was negotiating look like extortion to execute a deal to benefit himself instead of national security and US policy. When caught in the act, he never calculated anyone would defy his order to ignore subpoenas issued in the House inquiry, and testify anyway.  Both first-hand direct witnesses and others  provided corroborating evidence that his intent was not to end corruption in Ukraine in general but to focus on only one case involving his chief 2020 political opponent.

• His promise to provide health care insurance that was to be better for Americans than Obamacare went down in the flames of miscalculation. He relied on a GOP dominated Congress to come up with one. He had no plan himself and still does not have one. The plan Congress proposed, yet defeated by one vote, was the repeal with no replacement of Obamacare,  leaving millions without relief from bankrupting medical bills and threatening everyone in the US who had health insurance with loss of required affordable coverage of pre-existing conditions. That one issue resulted in an epic loss of GOP seats in the House of Representatives in 2018.  It will prove to be the single greatest domestic public policy millstone around Trump’s neck for in November 2020.

https://www.businessinsider.com/dod-says-us-military-killed-top-iranian-general-qasem-soleimani-2020-1?utm_source=notification&utm_med&fbclid=IwAR0ctQYN9AZ6rwdvzYMpgBO_P5JrLk87suyC5YnDdbEKzFs6EJyYpa0w4P4

https://www.businessinsider.com/iraqi-parliament-passes-resolution-to-end-us-troop-presence-2020-1?utm_source=notification&utm_m

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/iran-pulling-out-nuclear-deal-following-u-s-strike-killed-n1110636

https://www.csis.org/war-by-proxy

https://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-blames-trump-for-return-of-isis-syria-and-iraq-2019-8

https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/obama-didnt-give-iran-150-billion-in-cash

The issue: war more or less

There is an undercurrent in the presidential campaign that has gotten little attention.  It loosely falls into the category of  war  or not.  Among my circle of friends and relatives are those supporting Bernie Sanders. Their reasons are fear of blundering into another Iraq.  On the other hand, there is the most likely GOP  candidate for president, Donald Trump . He has no rational  foreign policy but instead gins up hatred of a religion with 1.5 billion Muslims that contains exactly the allies we need to fight ISIS.   

For the record, I have not felt the Bern because I think his domestic policies, while identifying the right issues, are not realistic enough to make it through the legislative process and to get agreement on tax increases to pay for them. I still have questions whether a self-defined Socialist would get the moderate partisans and independents to vote for him needed  to win the White House.   On the other hand, some of his supporters have given some good  reasons for supporting him.

 The Sanders enthusiasts with whom I have spoken think that Sanders would be the least likely to get us into that repeat disaster of Iraq of any of the others vying for the Presidency since he was the only candidate now in the race who voted against the Iraq invasion. He saw the consequences that we may crush the opponents with military might at the beginning, but what happens after that is the issue. Hillary Clinton’s approach is to avoid inserting  massive ground troops to fight ISIS,  softer, but  more acceptable than others in the GOP.

One feeling the Bern is my 21 year old grandson who fears that more of Iraqs in Syria and Libya would mean that the draft would have to be instituted since fighting a two front war with ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan exhausted our volunteer military forces.    The other are several retired military who are veterans of Viet Nam through the Cold War and after. They do not want another Iraq either. They have seen too much of the futility of such wars. Have we learned nothing from Iraq and Afghanistan? Kill one monster and another rises from the ashes fed on the mess and hate we leave behind.

Donald Trump seems ready to order US troops to kill family members of ISIS and advocates reinstating the use of torture.  His newest line is that most followers of Islam hate us, as if  more bombing them would make them like us. Furthermore, such rhetoric has already made himself persona non grata with Europe  and the very allies we need to help us on the ground, Muslim  Sunni Arabs . We would be spending  our own  blood and treasure.

 Most frightening is Trump’s willingness to violate both US  and international law to do it. His answer in the March 10 debate regarding currently illegal actions:  change the laws. That would make America a pariah on the scale of the very worst actors on the planet. Any moral authority would be gone with the wind .  It would give tacit OK  that any other nation could conduct their wars that way with impunity.  That would make America strong again, but hardly great, and no longer  a “"shining city on a hill." 

Observing Veterans Day with more prospects of wounded warriors

Observance of Veterans Day November 11 should serve as a reminder that there is a human cost to combat. On Memorial Day last May, we honored those who died. On Veterans Day we honor those who came home, including the wounded. There are those who advocate more robust military combat to stop our current threat, ISIS. Are we, the American public, ready to add another war to the list of those generating veterans and seeing  the heartbreaking  images again on TV  of wounded warriors returning home?

The US finds our forces again in Iraq, continuing in Afghanistan, and now making raids into Syria, albeit in a reduced numbers and very limited combat roles. Reality has begun to set in: more US dead and wounded can be expected.

That the American public is “war weary” is a given. Almost no politician on the left and right is advocating an Iraq style invasion and occupation. No wonder. Over six thousand US troops have returned in body bags and caskets since 2003. But the numbers who died are only a small part of the total casualties, thanks to modern battle field medicine saving lives that would in the past have been lost. Those wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq total over 18,000. Some estimate a million. What we have to show for it is war without end, the rise of ISIS and resurgence of the Taliban and post conflict governments that have failed to stop either.

A political firestorm erupted with the announcement that the Obama administration is sending fifty more special forces have been added to the estimated 3500 US troops in northern Iraq and the 10000 forces in Afghanistan.  Politicians are quick to opine whether there are too many or too few or they are jeering at broken promises and blaming premature withdrawal or parsing the definition of boots on the ground and combat, while providing no alternatives that have not failed in the past.

The only hope to limit mission creep is to bring an end to the conflicts that threaten our own security before there is no other Iraq style alternative left. Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations on recent Morning Joe (November 2)and Fareed Zakaria’s CNN GPS (November 1)  advocates realistic goals regarding Syria and Iraq, understanding that we neither have allies within Syria we can train nor the will for extensive combat ourselves to defeat ISIS there or to overthrow Assad.  Instead, we need to buy time to get Sunni tribes and Kurds in northern Iraq strong enough to stop the advance of ISIS and to reach a realization among combatants that further violence is futile. At that point a political solution of dividing Syria into ethnic enclaves might work. His approach appears to be the administration strategy.

 The hope is that while every combatant group that has its own agenda, many of Syria’s neighbors also fear an ISIS/Al Qaeda dominated Sunni control of the region. We should be applauding the US diplomatic initiative to seek a political solution in Syria, including Secretary of State John Kerry’s negotiations that involve Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kurds and the sending of more US special ops to help what effective allies we have.

For more, see prior  posts of 10/19/15, Why military intervention does not work;  6/14/15, Time to Dust Off Joe Biden’s plan?; 5/9/15, Musings on differences between Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day

A version of this was published in the www.skyhidailynews.com  November 5, 6 ,2015

Fareed Zakaria brings a different view  and makes the parallel between the Obama policy and US mission creep in Viet Nam.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-dangers-of-incrementalism/2015/11/05/22aad1de-83f9-11e5-9afb-0c971f713d0c_story.html

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/security-military/us-military-casualty-statistics-costs-war-iraq-afghanistan-post-911

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccaruiz/2013/11/04/report-a-million-veterans-injured-in-iraq-afghanistan-wars/

Time to dust off Joe Biden's plan to end the Iraq conflict?

 The GOP is hooting with glee that President Obama has no plan to stop ISIS.  Hooting back, neither does the GOP have a plan except for the few who want us to interject thousands of boots on the ground with no exit strategy. These same GOP accusers take no responsibility to vote in Congress for any authorization or propose their own plan. They are happy to let Obama take the fall and to lob political rocks at him.  It may be time to dust off Joe Biden’s plan.

Those stone  throwers took out of context   comments  the President made at the G7 Summit that he had no complete plan to defeat Isis. They ignored the rest of the statement in which the President shifted part of the blame to the Iraqi leaders who needed to make commitments and be more inclusive.

We once had   a plan, but it blew up, and the fault lies mostly in Baghdad, not Washington.  The reason we fully withdrew our troops was that the Baghdad government refused to sign a status of forces agreement with the Bush administration to keep our troops from jeopardy of being prosecuted locally by Iraqis for breaking laws. The Bush administration compromised on that point and the final agreement included removal of all troops.  Worse, the Shia dominated government in Baghdad refused to be inclusive of Sunnis and Kurds as promised.

The result is that Iraq has fallen apart and so has our post Iraq plan.  The Sunnis refuse to fight for a Shia government and the newer Shia government, even with more promises of inclusiveness, still maintains its Shia identity and domination.  The Iraqi Shias are loyal to Baghdad. Special Iranian forces are effective against ISIS, as well.  At least their guns are pointed in the same direction as ours.    However, it is not in the interest of US allies for Iran (backers of Hamas and Assad’s Syria) to gain more influence over Baghdad, either, scotching US direct coordination.

 The Obama Administration is now supporting  a Sunni uprising against ISIS . The insertion of 450 trainers and front line “advisors” were added to the already existing 3000 US forces there.  More could be coming.   There have been successes in a strategy of establishing “lily pad” fortresses housing our advisors and Sunni troops positioned in forward conflict areas.

What could a strategy to exit Iraq look like?  One plan, authored by then Senator Joe Biden, would have divided Iraq into its various ethnic/religious divisions, maybe in a federal system, much like the Bosnia solution.  Both Bosnia and Iraq were all or part of countries formed post World War I.  Antagonistic ethnic groups were lumped into one country defined by artificial boundaries.   In Bosnia, 1990’s civil war stalemated thanks to NATO air attacks against Bosnian Serbs and US advisors helping Croats. De facto ethnic cleansing was a reality. All sides were ready to agree to the Dayton Accord.  We are not there yet in Iraq. Maybe the best plan is for stalemating the conflict with enough of our trainers and supplies until all parties are ready to negotiate the breakup or federalization of Iraq.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12572371/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/biden-proposes-partitioning-iraq-regions/#.VX36fPlViko

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12572371/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/biden-proposes-partitioning-iraq-regions/#.VX36fPlViko

A reader, Eric, commented on this posting, and provided some excellent sources of alternative views. We can continue to debate whether there were WMD, but the rationale for invasion of Iraq is generally considered a mistake and the unintended consequences were to give rise to Iranian domination over the region.  However, reality is reality, and Eric presented two very credible views of the role the general's advice to keep residual forces in Iraq and the negotiations with Maliki over the immunity of residual forces. Maliki said he could bypass his parliament to give assurances and Obama said it would only work if parliament agreed.  That may have been a missed opportunity, but nonetheless it did not resolve Baghdad's unwillingness to be inclusive and the conflict would have erupted anyway.  That is why I called the problem "mostly Baghdad's fault" because the Obama administration was determined to withdraw troops and did not put more pressure of Maliki or take him up on his unilateral offer.  Nonetheless, the fact remains, the Bush administration set up the compromise on the status of forces.  Amb. Chris Hill's role  is laid out in his memoirs "Outpost", and I invite readers to read his book.  Eric's two sources, from Foreign Affairs, and Politico are worth reading and I will replicate his links here.  I keep wondering how many secular Iraqis were left in Baghdad after the conflict. Obviously not enough to offset Maliki.  I still think Biden's plan will eventually happen de facto without federalism and yesterday it appears from Pentagon comments  that Plan B if the lilly pad strategy fails is to continue US support of the Sunni tribes and Kurds.  I also note that the generals' recommendations were to leave residual forces of 10 K US troops there, we will eventually meet that total there anyway, I do not oppose it. However, to say that 10K troops...or even 24,000  could have stopped ISIS's blitzkrieg is a leap given Baghdad's unwillingness to address the inclusiveness.  of the Sunni tribes
4. Withdrawal Symptoms: The Bungling of the Iraq Exit (link) by OIF senior advisor Rick Brennan.
5. How Obama Abandoned Democracy in Iraq (link) by OIF official and senior advisor Emma Sky. 

  

All presidential candidates should be asked these questions about their Iraq policy; answers should not be simple

With the presidential marathon race now off and running, there are  questions  we should demand every candidate to answer.   Top of my list is what to do about  Iraq and ISIS.  Most fascinating so far are the polar opposite views of GOP candidates jockeying for their party’s nomination, ranging from Sen. Lindsey Graham, the ultra hawk, v. Rand Paul, the ultra anti interventionist. There are no simple answers.

Assuming  the establishment wings of the Republican party manage to quash Paul’s candidacy, the likely successful GOP candidates will call for more aggressive policies there.

Recent polls are  showing that the US electorate is still opposed to sending massive  troops,  but more support a limited increase of boots on the ground. Expect the GOP to continue to scare  the wits out of the American public that ISIS is a personal threat to their safety, that the US is incapable of stopping ISIS’ attacks on the homeland, and that they have a solution that  will keep us safe.

Opposition to massive re-invasion of Iraq lags in popularity because many  Americans have not forgotten that  the US deployed 2.5 million troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  400,000 of them were deployed three or more times. The Iraq war alone cost a conservatively estimated $1.7 trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money. As of April 2014, 6800 US troops had been killed in Iraq.

Where the hawks have an advantage is a message of simplicity.  Send more troops. Never mind even  Graham is only talking about 7,000 special ops and trainers in addition to the 3,000 already there. While forcefully criticizing Obama’s policies, all he proposes is to increase the numbers some. Pres. Obama at the G7 summit Monday indicated he had asked the Pentagon for proposals. Perhaps they are not that far apart.  Still the question lingers,  Would this be a forever intervention with continuing mission creep?

However, the situation in Iraq is not simple.   Unlike 2003  there is now a full blown three way civil war to fill a power vacuum left after the fall of Saddam and the US departure.  ISIS threatens the power of  the Saudi Royal family that has their own caliphate founded on  similar theology, yet the Saudis are usually an ally of the US.     There is  a full scale  religious  civil  war in Islam playing out in Iraq  between the Sunnis (the Arab Muslims) and the Shia, the Iranians.  The Shia dominated  government in Baghdad, closely connected to Iran by a shared religion,  is our ally, but their Sunni troops that had not already joined ISIS,  are not loyal to Shia leadership.  Iranian troops are already engaged fighting ISIS .  Simultaneously,  the Kurds , our most effective allies, hope their participation leads to independence, , which no one else involved wants.

 So the GOP hawks want us to get more involved in this mess and train and arm whom? As a friend of mine says,” How is the everyday Joe supposed to understand this? “ and that is the advantage the GOP hawks have in beating the war drums.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/18/politics/lindsey-graham-iraq-not-a-mistake-election-2016/index.html

http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2015/03/08/iraq-opinion-polls/24276663/

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/4/lindsey-graham-dont-vote-for-me-if-youre-worn-out-/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_media
http://time.com/3912543/barack-obama-isis-strategy/

http://www.costsofwar.org/iraq-10-years-after-invasion

Critics of Obama's foreign policy fill empty bags full of hot air or worse

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, March 2, Sen John McCain made statements regarding the President’s policy toward Russia and Ukraine.   He dismissed actions the administration had already taken as if nothing had been done but proclaimed loudly we should do more but not go to war. That is not unlike the attitude many of the President’s critics claiming administration foreign policy failures who distort, criticize, glibly dismiss both invasion and occupation, but only propose to do more of what we are doing already.  To quote Woody Allen as a restaurant critic: “The food here is terrible, and the portions are too small”

Other critics of the Administration’s foreign policy are either empty bags full of hot air devoid of alternatives, or they propose alternatives that put us in worse shape than we are now.

The Woody Allen type critics advocate just to send a few more ground troops to Iraq or beef up NATO support of countries near Russia. More troops of some sort (combat boots or advisors or special ops) are either not off the table per Secretary of State John Kerry before a December Senate committee or are already being done as part of our war against ISIS. NATO countries are being beefed up militarily and NATO operations centers are being set up from the Baltics to Romania. A Western propaganda campaign has been launched to counter Russian propaganda  beamed at residents’ of future territory they may want to control.

The issue is by how much to increase  the portions:  Mission creep in our war against ISIS is indeed a danger,  but the GOP Congress wants the decision of how much  creep to be the monkey on this and the next Administration’s  back by giving  them no limits.  Heaven forbid Congress should  take any blame for failures in the future if we ooze into another Iraq war.

Giving Ukrainians  heavier weapons can be easily matched  in an arms race with  the ante upped by Russia. Where that ends is a risk.  Do we want to go to war with Russia in the future over their direct control  of or  Anschluss with parts or all of the Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia?  There are some non-military alternatives already undertaken by the Administration of increasing the portions of economic sanctions against Russia or propping up the Ukraine economy so it does not collapse while weaning Europe from Russian petro energy. These are not short term strategies. It will take time until the Russian people have enough of economic hardships to offset their national pride in a restoration of their country’s past glory and territorial buffers against the West. 

Then there are the proponents of an empty bag approach that would leave us worse off than we are now. This includes rejecting a nuclear treaty with Iran. As Fareed Zakaria writing in the Washington Post March 5 noted the threats to Israel are not fiction. Reality though, is the failure to agree on a treaty either in the past or now has and will give the Iranians free rein to develop as many centrifuges as they want with no inspectors or time limits. He could have added that this risk is also of concern of our Arab allies.

http://www.stripes.com/news/kerry-obama-administration-wants-option-for-ground-troops-in-iraq-1.318270

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/netanyahu-enters-never-never-land/2015/03/05/2f279c3c-c372-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html

http://ukraine.setimes.com/en_GB/articles/uwi/features/2015/02/24/feature-02

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31142276

Peace on earth, goodwill to men sorely needed this Christmas season but so hard to achieve

Peace on earth, goodwill toward men, one of the messages of Christmas, is sorely needed in our troubled world. This year has been less about major wars, but more about individuals gone berserk and sudden rise of terrorist jihadists acting in regions or as lone wolves anywhere.  Modern media has been both the messenger and the tool of the perpetrators that give acts of violence world-wide impact. We have yet to find a consensus for the best response.

 In the United States there are two schools of thought. One is always to meet violence with violence and the other is to search for peace. President Obama seems determined to leave office with a more peaceful world by resolving some nagging conflicts and addressing recent explosions of violence both at home and abroad, but he faces some tough challenges.

 Since he cannot run for re-election, he at least is freed from the consequences of a political backlash if he takes controversial measures. Using his executive powers, he is burying the hatchet with hostile regimes and bringing together those who feel they have been treated unfairly.

Beginning with dialogues with Iran and historic reverse of a fifty year policy toward Cuba, Obama has taken steps to bring Peace on Earth.  Obama had already stopped torture of prisoners immediately when he took office and he is consistent in condemning past torture practices brought to light by a Senate report.

Our country is plagued by riots and police assassinations from Ferguson to the boroughs of New York, heated by racial tensions and angry speech from by both sides of the racial divide. The violence is an accumulative effect of high profile incidents of apparent racial profiling by police  ending in death of Black men and youth.  Obama is threading the needle between empathy with minority communities and finding ways to bring communities and policing together.  It is a delicate balance, but it is a uniquely credible opportunity given he is the first Black president.

The case for peace is as much a matter of pragmatism as it is a moral imperative. Violence begets more violence. One kind of violent action becomes a template used by others who are, or who are not, fighting political causes. Some fueled by personal revenge, hate, or mental health issues copy the latest violent techniques so they, too, can go down in a blaze of publicity.

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Abroad, we have learned that using military force works only in the short term.  Our ultimate goal should be to win over hearts and minds so that jihadists lose fertile ground in which to plant their flags. Otherwise we will be involved in a never ending or reoccurring warfare. Sadly, Iraqi villagers seem willing to exchange ending strife for ISIS order no matter how cruel and oppressive.  Oppression eventually breeds revolt and a search for a better way. The very difficult challenge for Obama is to craft policies that appeal to the better angels in the long term while helping Iraq halt ISIS’ military advance and doing it without our full military engagement. 

Iraq air strikes: too little, too late or will it work?

President Obama, the reluctant warrior, showed flexibility in using military force when US interests and overwhelming humanitarian needs were at stake and he authorized air strikes against ISIS in northern Iraq.  His critics, the same who had urged him to take more military action in nearly every crisis, are left to whine that he does not have a consistent overall foreign policy. News flash:  He does.  The more pertinent questions should be is this action too little, too late, or will it work?  

First, does President Obama even have a foreign policy?  Yes.  It is just not the one hawks like, but it is one for which he was elected.  The list:  Avoid more ground wars and withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan.  Use diplomatic engagement and other means to forward American interests, provide humanitarian aid, or to protect national security, with military engagement a last resort.  Bring in neighbors, allies, and others.  Promote self-governance that is inclusive, effective, and no springboard for terrorists to attack the West.  Much of this was restated in his interview with Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times on August 8.

Are Obama’s strategy and tactics consistent with that policy?  Obama did not wait for a slaughter to happen first as President Clinton did in Bosnia.  Instead, he used military action to head off ethnic cleansing of minority Christians, Kurds, and others. He has involved the UK and France to deliver humanitarian aid.

Should he have intervened in Syria to cripple ISIS’s rise?  If the US had supplied weapons to Syrian rebels, they most likely would have found their way to ISIS, which was also a major part of the rebel force. Sometimes no action is wiser than action.

He is pressuring Baghdad regime change to promote an inclusive and effective Baghdad.  It is a work in progress. Prime Minister al-Maliki had laid the seeds for ISIS when he became a Shia despot, persecuting and excluding Sunnis from government.  The result: ISIS was welcomed by Sunni villages and Sunni members of the Iraq military, enabling the rapid advance nearly to the gates of Baghdad.

Obama has forsworn a ground war while he was decisive in ordering air strikes.  The old truism, air strikes alone do not win wars, holds water if there are no boots on the ground to fight.  Air superiority has worked before when there were other armed forces fighting the ground war.  In the early 1990s in Bosnia and in Kosovo, President Clinton belatedly authorized US airpower through NATO to give support to Muslims fighting the Bosnian Serbs and Serbian Kosovars, bent on establishing a greater Serbia cleansed of Muslims.  It resulted in a diplomatic resolution.

The Kurds are the best fighters in Iraq.  With US weapons, training, and air support, the plan is for Kurds to get time to gather strength and slow down ISIS’s advance to Baghdad, giving an opportunity for Baghdad to get its act and resolve together and fight its own war.

A version of this blog appears as a column in the August 14, 15 various editions of the www.skyhidailynews.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/opinion/president-obama-thomas-l-friedman-iraq-and-world-affairs.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

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Some old columns I wrote regarding political solutions in Syria and Iraq are haunting forecasts of events to come

Much of the finger pointing for the Iraq meltdown has been directed at Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia Prime Minister of Iraq,  who failed to create a government that included the Sunni, and in fact, set out to disenfranchise them and persecute them. In 2006, then Senator Joe Biden proposed partitioning Iraq as a way to deal with the religious conflicts.  The issue came up again in finding a way toward a political solution in Syria.  Here are two columns I wrote about the approach, published both in the Sky Hi Daily News and on my web site (www.mufticforum.com) or the blog.

Will Iraq be another Bosnia?

Sept 8 2010

Civil war blood bath, a healing self-governing country, or a purgatory? What will become of Iraq with our withdrawal of U.S. combat forces and eventually even the 50,000 left there? No one knows for sure, but our experience in Bosnia could give us an idea of what is likely to happen. We may be in for a long term headache.

Between 1992 and 1995, a bloody civil war raged in Bosnia until ethnic cleansing was completed, minorities were purged of geographic areas, and the population grew weary of the killing fields. The Dayton Accord brought the active fighting to an end. NATO and the United Nations nursed the country through some of the immediate post-war times. European Union troops serve as peacekeepers to this day. Pre-war population was 4 million. It is estimated that as the result of the war there were 240,000 casualties, mostly Muslim. The United Nations reports that there were 2.2 million refugees of which only 1 million have returned and still 113,000 mostly elderly reside in the country as internally displaced refugees.

The Bosnian federal government does not function well, ethnic conflict continues within ruling bodies, corruption abounds, and the country is threatening to break apart with elections scheduled this coming October. Serbians in their nearly purified, semi-autonomous state of the Srbska Republika are threatening to negate the Dayton Accord; Croats are demanding their own autonomous region; Muslims demand more power, too.  

Louise Arbour, former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, writing in a recent issue of Foreign Policy Magazine, fear a political, social and economic meltdown. They applaud the NATO foreign ministers agreement this spring once again to give guidance to Bosnia and to bring the country closer to NATO, perhaps future membership.

There are some striking similarities between Iraq and Bosnia. Each contains three sectarian groups large enough to fight against domination by another group. In Bosnia, it is the Croatians, the Serbs, and the Muslim Bosniaks. Iraq is split among Shia and Sunni Muslims and Kurds. In both countries strong dictatorships kept the lid on ethnic conflict. In Bosnia, Tito suppressed any ethnic nationalism; in Iraq, Saddam did likewise though he also brutalized Shia and Kurds, favoring his own Sunni ties. When the lids were removed, the cauldron of hatred boiled over as groups jockeyed and fought for supremacy or to protect their status. Third parties, whether NATO or western coalitions, attempted to let the steam out to give them time and room to get their governing acts together.

Bosnia's ability to govern itself is still questionable 15 years after the war, and the process has a weak and fractious beginning in Iraq which is still struggling to form a government.

Where Iraq gives us more hope is a tradition of unified national identification and the proud heritage of the cradle of civilization. Bosnia, however, never considered itself a nation. Instead, its ethnic factions looked to bordering states containing similar ethnic groups for leadership. Bosnia was only a state carved within a Yugoslavia, patched together with borders artificially drawn after World War I.   Iraq has a national military tradition of army discipline, while Bosnia partisans perfected guerilla warfare tactics to fight the Nazis and others in World War II. Iraq has also found unity in wars against their long time enemy, Iran.

It is this difference, national identification, that gives some hope that Iraqi self governance will be more successful than in Bosnia. The Obama administration seems to be cautiously optimistic that Iraq will not come unglued.

Always an unspoken question is whether the West would ever intervene actively again to head off a bloodbath in either country. If experience in Bosnia is any guide, it may be a long time before we can stop worrying about Iraq.

- Felicia Muftic has been a frequent visitor to the Balkans since 1959.

A version of the following post  appeared  in the Sky Hi Daily News during the week of May 8, 2013.:

 Syria’s civil war  is emerging as a  US foreign policy crisis  and there is a gnawing feeling  of “been there, done that in Iraq and Afghanistan”.  While it was probably a  mistake, last year Pres. Obama drew a red line that would trigger greater US involvement if  Syrian Pres. Assad’s used  chemical weapons. There is some evidence Assad did.  

Empty threats risk future threats not being taken seriously and the president has been under pressure to make good on his threat. At least Obama is right in being cautious now. All of his options carry risks. Ethnic  civil wars like the one in Syria are the tar sands of  outsider intervention; easy to get into and  difficult  to get out of , and risk  spreading conflicts beyond borders.

The New York Times reported Israel  wiped out Syria’s main chemical weapons facility and long range missile storehouses last week.   While the strikes served Israel’s purpose to take out Syria’s arming  Hezbollah in Lebanon, it  may  also have made the chemical weapons redline  issue  moot.     No  one is claiming Israel’s strikes were a proxy for making good on a US threat, but  it served that purpose, too.

Military aid to the rebels and no fly zones should still be on the table because they promote an end that serves our national interests. . Israel’s airstrikes demonstrated the weakness of Syria’s air defense and the feasibility of enforcing no fly zones. Boots on the ground have wisely  been ruled out by about everyone in the US. We learned some hard lessons  in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The situation on the ground has changed since last year,  with Al Qaeda- like organizations  hijacking many of the rebel groups and with few  moderate  forces left to arm.     Our weapons could fall  into the wrong hands, making the situation more dangerous. We can only hope our intelligence assessments are accurate.

 Giving military aid  and enforcing no fly zones could   be the catalyst to get  Russia to force Assad to step down, since  military aid to the rebels could tip the stalemated conflict against Assad. The final outcome is still mostly in Russia’s hands. Assad is their client.   Russia’s reluctance to force Assad out is understandable. The fall of Assad could put Al Qaeda like rebels in charge,  closer to their borders.

Russia may be gambling that our  reluctance to get involved  will not change. Beware. We found ourselves eventually caught up in the Balkan Wars in the 1990’s as the former Yugoslavia broke up.   Media coverage of  ethnic cleansing , fleeing refugees, and the shelling of Dubrovnik  and Sarajevo  turned  US public opinion around  to support intervention.  Western countries also   feared Bosnia could become a stronghold for Al Qaeda Europe.  

During  the Balkan conflict NATO put only peacekeeper boots on the ground, but they enforced   no fly zones and  bombed Serbia  during the Kosovo  conflict.  Military aid flowed freely to all parties, with Russia supplying Serbia and the West backing Croatia.  

The conflict  in the Balkans  was ultimately  resolved by diplomats and the agreements  contain models that could benefit both Russia and the West in Syria.   Croatia and Serbia were carved from   the former Yugoslavia.  These new nations  were left with even fewer ethnic minorities  though these were already   areas with  historical cohesiveness.  Croatia joins the European Union this July  and last month Serbia agreed to enter in negotiations to resolve Kosovo’s status.

 Bosnia, still balanced  demographically  between Muslims, Croatian Catholics, and Serbs,  is a less successful result of the settlement. Ethnic factions are hunkered down in cohesive geographic sectors,  barely working together cooperatively on a national level.   At least the shooting, ethnic cleansing  and threat to Europe was  stopped. 

 Syria  also has  some  religious cohesive regions . A Balkanized solution just might work for Russia and the US.   

For Felicia Muftic’s  Balkan background, visit www.mufticforum.com
Column translated into Croatian is also posted at www.mufticforum.com

Iraq: the neocons are the definition of insanity, but others are delusional about the alternatives.

  Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, attributed to many including Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein.    So, the neocons want   us  to do a repeat of our involvement in the Iraq war and expect the same results.  Yesireee.  How do we like that outcome today?

Let us face it: We are and have been involved in a centuries old Shia v Sunni civil war ,whether we intended to do so  or not. We had cast our lot with the Shia except when we harnessed a Sunni uprising  to win the war against Saddam Hussein . Such religious based conflicts are  far beyond our control, but  we  played the factions off to suit our own single minded determination to find WMD, protect oil interests,  or get regime change.  Policies set in motion by the Bush administration and  the subsequent  Obama administration’s attempt to extricate ourselves from it have now come to bite US interests in our posterior. The threat is worse than Saddam ever was.

If we do not repeat the previous Iraq strategy, what are  the alternatives? All bad. Obama is making some tough decisions and whatever he does will be criticized. Leaving ISIS (the advancing Al Qaeda extremists) in position to do us real damage is no option .

 Ultra  Obama critic  Sen. Lindsey Graham(R-SC) called  Pres. Obama delusional as he himself  skirted a call  to put boots on the ground. Graham  deludes himself. Graham on CNN Sunday AM  advocated  to get involved with Syria, blast ISIS  with air power, and   get rid of al-Maliki, forcing a new government to be inclusive, as if ISIS  already at Baghdad’s gate would want to accept a deal while they are ahead..

  Iran  will likely  enter the civil war because there is  an  opportunity  to realize their long standing desire to dominate  the entire middle east. Graham’s solution? Sit down and ask Iran pretty please not to take over Iraq. Give me a break.  Iran will do what Iran wants. We have few

 bargaining chips.

Involvement in Syria? The reason the US did not intervene fully in Syria was precisely fear our aid would land in the hands of ISIS, who had hijacked the opposition to Assad

The danger with air intervention is that ISIS imbeds itself with the  local population. One mistake causing civilian collateral damage  and we would turn the entire Sunni population against the US forever, destroying our ability to make peace..   The unintentional US air  strike killing friendly Afghan troops  this month should be instructive to the starry eyed. .Mistakes will happen.

  Short term, there are  some steps that make sense:   turn Baghdad into a fortress  as  Iran and the Kurds  get involved, pretty please or not.  It may be a risk we have to take. Long term, ISIS could overplay its hand, imposing extreme Sharia law on a culture whose traditions are  so  secular.

  

 The very best  outcome  could be  a  long,  bloody stalemate, or even a  fear of it , that  could motivate  a  political settlement. One was  first proposed by then Senator  Joseph Biden in 2007:  partition the warring groups in a federal system, similar to the Bosnia solution. 

This column was published 6/15/14.  Thomas Friedman's NYT column 6/18/14 takes his thinking in the same direction.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/opinion/thomas-friedman-the-conundrum-of-a-unified-iraq-and-a-unified-syria. What is discouraging is that Bosnia has not yet gotten so desperate, it has unified in spirit, though in name it is still one country. Bosnia, too, was ruled 500 years by the Ottomans and then governed after two world wars by Tito, a dictator, whose death left  a vacuum, followed by the bloodiest conflict in Europe since WWII, that was only ended by NATO intervention and the Dayton Accord, that divided Bosnia into 3 ethnic states with a federal government, now corrupt, gridlocked, and ineffective.  As imperfect as it is, it is better than the alternative of continued bloodshed..  

A version of this  post appeared in all editions of the www.skyjhidailynews.com  June 20, 2014

Romney tilts at mythical dragons

My column in the newspaper this week:
Figures of St. George slaying the dragon decorate many European towns, yet the victim of his sword is the stuff of fiction. Less entertaining, but every bit as ubiquitous in U.S. media is Mitt Romney's defining himself as riding in on his white horse to save us from some beasts.

Like the dragon, some of his beasts are also mythological.

Reading the text of Mitt Romney's acceptance speech, in the calmness of black and white print, away from the feel good parts and the cheers, I was struck by the myths he proposed to slay.

Top among them was the disappearing $716 billion that President Obama was taking away from Medicare. Aside from the fact that Romney's running mate Paul Ryan had advocated the same cuts because they were waste, and even the fact checkers had agreed, Romney perpetuated the tale. As some fact checkers pointed out the cuts were a reduction in the future growth of Medicare and nothing was taken from benefits. As others noted, the savings gave eight more years to the life of Medicare soundness, closed the donut hole in drug coverage that had been costing seniors on the average of $600 a year, and removed the co-pay requirements for cancer screening and annual checkups.

The most fanciful myth of all was the GOP's reassurance that there would be no changes to those of us over 55, but the GOP plans would restore the donut holes and the co-pays.

The dragon of the tax hike to the middle class was another one Romney set himself up to slay. Strangely, Obama has also pledged not to raise taxes on the middle class. The difference lies in their definitions of middle class. To Obama it is those making under $250,000 per year; to Romney the middle class appears to begin with those making more than a quarter million a year.

The tax plan he embraced, per independent and respected analysts the Urban and Brookings Institutes, would raise taxes by $2,000 per year on those making less than what you and I would consider middle class families.

The myth of the apologetic foreign policy is another GOP concoction. Romney hit hard at Obama's Cairo speech in which he made an eloquent case for the principles of American democracy, the right to vote, freedom of the press and so many of those fundamentals that the Arab Spring that followed embraced as their own. In a most ironic twist, Romney claimed it was the U.S. muscle of yore that had liberated people from the shackles of dictators and we would in the future. But if they could, the rulers of Tunisia, Lybia, and Egypt and now Syria had no doubt wished the forces of democracy as defined by Obama had been kept tightly corked in the genie lamp. The U.S. lost no warriors in unhorsing those ogres; but to unseat Saddam Hussein by force in search of the mythical WMD, Bush cost us at minimum over $800 billion, 4,400 troops killed, and another $400 billion plus in the future to treat the 23,000 plus wounded.

Leading by finesse or behind as Obama has done has its infinite value.

The debt is not a myth. The GOP's myth has to do with the cause and the weapon used to slay it. Romney claims the cause of the debt is the undertaking of government expansion of health care, and Ryan says the way to get us out of debt it to take the sword to the social safety net. The Congressional Budget office looked at both the Ryan plan and Romney's pledge to kill Obamacare and concluded that doing either and both would increase the debt, not decrease it.

The tip of the GOP's weapon is pointed in the wrong direction.