... functioned as its Carthage. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, the United States seemed poised to dominate the world for the foreseeable future and the... ... Since then, it has failed to effectively deal with conflict in Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, all within or near its periphery. The situation in Syria has led to refugee and... ... pressures of EU policy, as racial, ethnic, and religious tension, fears of Islamic terrorism, nativism, and demagogues become ever more commonplace, it is terrifying to...
... clear and provable beyond any reasonable doubt. Ultimately, Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki's policies and the dynamics of Syria's raging civil war are the clear catalysts and drivers behind current crises with ISIS both in Syria and Iraq.
... ... if Maliki had treated the Sunnis and Kurds more fairly, the Iraqi government—Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds united against terrorism as they were back in 2007—would have been in a strong position to fend off any ISIS incursions coming into Iraq ...
... positions/villages—part of a series of Russian bombings in recent days that have targeted Turkmen—on the border area of Turkey and Syria. Turkey is supporting these Turkmen rebels against Assad that Russia is bombing, and had previously asked Russia not to ... ... to harm Russia’s interests more than those gains would help them: Russia is particularly vulnerable to Sunni extremist terrorism for a number of clear reasons and its moves in Syria, as I have written before, are only going to expose Russia to further ...
... are some sort of moral equivalent. Drones involve precision weapons, and strikes target those are terrorists or involved in terrorism. There are civilian deaths in these attacks quite often, but with no evidence to the contrary we cannot legitimately ... ... you believe.
To those who think the only solution to this is simply more use of force and would blame Obama for not invading Syria and Iraq today like Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, please, just go away and stop talking. There are many complex factors in ...
A Sensible Grading of Obama’s Middle East Strategy: The Syrian Civil War
Grading Obama on what has—and has not—been done by his administration regarding the Syrian Civil ... ... conflict—it killed about 1,400 people—and confirmed publicly by several major Western governments (including that of the United States), Human Rights Watch, and later by the United Nations. As to who was the culprit, as I pointed out at the time, ...
... 21st, 2015
Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse here and also published by Stupidparty Math v. Myth thanks to Patrick Andendall and by Tuck Magazine.
Other articles in this series:
Grading Obama’s Middle East Strategy (Sensibly): Part II: Syria
The cocks who crow “failure” every time the sun rises about the Obama Administration’s overall Middle East strategy—and we will be hearing their mindless crowing at its highest decibels since the competition within the ...
... and investing in the region.
2.) America’s involvement in the Arab Spring will likely remain limited.
Even in situations like in Egypt, for many years one of the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid, Obama and Americans, as was/is the case in Syria and Iraq, seems to prefer a “don’t do stupid shit” (to quote the president) approach.
Obama has—correctly—realized that it is immoral, ineffective, counterproductive, and far costlier for the U.S. to default to forcing ...
... “Sunni Awakening” with its “Sons of Iraq.” The combination of increased U.S. military effort and increased political effort towards enlisting Sunni Arab Iraqis to fight extremists, especially in Iraq’s western Anbar province on Syria’s border, saw the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia and similar extremist Sunni groups that had alienated local Sunnis with their brutality and extreme form of Islam; sure, the old Baathists were still there, ready to fight the Iraqi ...
