“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
It’s an old adage, and one that takes on new relevance in the complicated statecraft of the contemporary Middle East.
We like to think of things in simple terms. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, bad. Russia’s support for Assad. Bad. Iran, another supporter of Assad. Bad. Syrian armed opposition to Assad. Good. Then come the military faction now known as the Islamic State, ISIS or ISIL, in armed opposition to Assad. Also a threat to U.S. interests. Suddenly, not so good.
It’s mind bending for those who depend on the mainstream media for our “take” on the region.
The Wall Street Journal, no liberal enclave, recently reported that “old enemies” are finding that the threat of the Islamic State is reordering their priorities (“Brutal Rise of Islamic State Turns Old Enemies Into New Friends“).
These countries and movements may be at odds over nearly everything else, but nothing focuses the mind like a mortal threat, say some analysts and former top security officials. Given not only Islamic State’s savagery but its potential to overthrow regimes and spill over borders, they all seem to agree on only one thing: It needs to be stopped.
Lacking a coalition of the willing, the Obama administration should muster up a sort of alliance of the unwilling, these analysts argue. Whether that is possible, and whether the U.S. has the guile and clout to unite such disparate forces—either formally, or more likely in a combination of overt, covert and arm’s-length arrangements—is an open question.
“It has to be patched together, somewhat ad hoc, with maybe some sort of informal and even clandestine agreements on who does what,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. national-security adviser.
In a region where states such as Iraq and Syria are literally fragmenting, Mr. Brzezinski urges an approach focused on the handful of what he categorizes as truly “viable” states—Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia—to confront Islamic State, which also is known by the acronyms ISIS and ISIL.
Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, has been urging such “unpalatable options” for some time (“Assad Is the Least Worst Option in Syria“).
Crocker…has long argued that the Assad regime may be bad, but it doesn’t pose nearly the same threat compared with the Islamic State, which previously called itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
“I am no apologist for the Assad regime. I was there under father [Hafez Assad] and son [Bashar Assad],” says Crocker, who served as ambassador to Syria from 1998-2001. “They are a brutal bunch of bastards, without question. But in terms of our security, ISIS is by far the largest threat.
U.S.-Iranian cooperation?
Most likely. For example, see Juan Cole, “Top 5 Signs the US is de facto allied with Iran versus ISIL,” and from Newsday, “U.S. takes help in Iraq from where it can, regardless of source.”
And there’s been more disturbing reading to remind us that ISIS, or ISIL, is to a large degree the unplanned product of American actions.
Tom Engelhardt, “How America Made ISIS: Their Videos and Ours, Their ‘Caliphate’ and Ours”
William Astore, “The American Cult of Bombing”
Noam Chomsky, “The Sledgehammer Worldview“
And so it goes on this Sunday morning in Kaaawa.