Here’s Everything Wrong With the White House’s War on the Islamic State

[G_j]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/181844/heres-everything-wrong-white-houses-war-islamic-state

Here’s Everything Wrong With the White House’s War on the Islamic State

Peter Certo and Foreign Policy In Focus on October 2, 2014 - 5:45 PM ET

This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus.

If Barack Obama owes his presidency to one thing, it was the good sense he had back in 2002 to call George W. Bush’s plans to go to war in Iraq what they were: “dumb.” (The war was many other things too—illegal, cynical, not to mention disastrous—but “dumb” was pretty good for a guy running for Senate back when both parties had largely lined up behind the war.)

Since then, Obama’s had his ups and downs with the antiwar voters who delivered his 2008 nomination and subsequent election. But throughout the arguments over drones, Afghanistan, Libya and NSA spying—among other issues—Obama could always come back to these voters and say: Hey, at least I ended the war in Iraq. What do you think the Republicans would have done?

But now, with scarcely a whisper of serious debate, Obama has become the fourth consecutive US president to launch a war in Iraq—and in fact has outdone his predecessors by spreading the war to Syria as well, launching strikes not only on fighters linked to the Islamic State (IS, or ISIS) but also on the Al Qaeda–linked Nusra Front and Khorasan.

This was no minor escalation. According to The Washington Post, the United States and its Arab allies dropped more explosives on Syria in their first engagement there than US forces had dropped over all of Iraq in the preceding month. It was the largest single US military operation since NATO’s intervention in Libya was launched back in 2011.

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And we should do something. But not this.

We’ll come to regret this war, potentially long before it’s had three years to run its course. Here’s why.

...more...

[malaise]

1. No need to read beyond this

This War Is Illegal
So, first thing’s first: this war is unmistakably illegal.
Under international law—at least as defined by the UN Charter, to which the United States is a founding signatory—one country can only legally launch attacks inside another under one of three conditions: if the intervention is authorized by the UN Security Council; if it’s a cut-and-dry case of self-defense; or if assistance is requested by the other country’s government.

[G_j]

2. true

and that's the absolute bottom line.

[Dreamer Tatum]

3. Can a Nobel prize be revoked? nt

[Thinkingabout]

4. Does anyone here have a better answer to solve the problem?

[CJCRANE]

5. Honesty.

Let's be honest about how we got into this mess.

[randome]

6. Honesty means recognizing that events do not happen in a vacuum.

It's somewhat 'fashionable' to claim we're doing all this for oil but I think that's too simplistic an explanation, especially as we're exporting oil out the wazoo.

The Islamic world is going through its own painful Reformation Period. Just like the European one, it includes polar opposite results: the Arab Spring and ISIS.

Bombs are not the answer to every problem, of course, but I don't think you can assume that the last 4 administrations all just happen to feel the same towards Islamic countries. And neither do I think some ultra-secret military cabal is forcing everyone to do this.

The Islamic world is joining the 21st century but it's a very slow and messy transformation.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Where do uncaptured mouse clicks go?[/center][/font][hr]

[G_j]

7. well, this is offered in the article

There Are Other Options

War, in short, is a terrible option.

But the fact remains that IS is a determined and brutal threat to millions of people on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian border (and beyond, if you believe the ambitions expressed in some of its more fanciful maps). And given IS’s origins in Al Qaeda in Iraq—a group born and nourished in the chaotic years following the 2003 US invasion—the United States bears no small share of responsibility for the current state of affairs. That means Washington should shoulder some of the responsibility for fixing it.

There’s plenty that the United States can do to weaken IS on the more technocratic front. To start, it can freeze the bank accounts of IS’s funders, negotiate partnerships with villages where oil pipelines run to cut IS’s oil revenues and work with partners in Europe and Turkey to stem the flow of Western fighters into the conflict. The United States should also dramatically increase its support for the UN’s badly underfunded humanitarian assistance programs in Syria, and send support to neighboring countries like Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey that have absorbed millions of refugees.

More fundamentally, the White House must recognize that IS flourishes not simply because of its resources—and much less on account of its ideological appeal—but because of political breakdown on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian border.

<snip>

The answer, then, is political. But the current campaign of airstrikes and arms peddling threatens to deepen the political crises in Iraq and Syria, not resolve them. Instead, the Obama administration should work to ameliorate political conditions on each side of the border.

In Syria, it should convene rebel groups, the regime, civil society activists and regional players like Turkey, Iran, Russia and the Gulf States to restart negotiations for a political solution to the war. If there’s a silver lining to these latest airstrikes, it’s that the administration can use them as leverage to get Assad and the rebels to the table.

In Iraq, it should condition all further assistance on the development of a more inclusive political order that protects the country’s minorities—not just smaller groups threatened by IS like Christians, Turkmen and Yazidis, but also the country’s millions of Sunnis. The administration could also link its nuclear negotiations with Iran to the political crisis in Iraq—quietly exploring, for example, an agreement to allow Iran to enrich more uranium for peaceful nuclear power generation in exchange for a pledge from Tehran to rein in the Iranian-backed militias most likely to sow sectarian discord in Iraq.

These are tall orders, and they’re unlikely to see quick results even if pursued aggressively. But given the horrendous legacy of US wars in the region—and not to mention America’s failure to destroy even a single terrorist group after over a decade of continuous military mobilization—diplomacy is a much better option than the guaranteed failure we’re currently embarked on.