Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria has created a new situation that leaves most U.S. presidential candidates’ policy proposals, looking weak and misdirected if not irrelevant.
American politicians tend toward simplistic and moralistic coding of countries as allies or enemies with little subtlety or room for maneuver. For example, all candidates agree that Israel is an ally, although Israel can do very little, beyond intelligence sharing, to aid the U.S. in its fight against ISIS and Al Nusra, the Al Qaeda offshoot in Syria.
On the other hand, all candidates take for granted that Iran is an enemy, even though Iran has been fighting the same enemies as the U.S. in virtually every conflict since 9/11. Iran was strongly against both regimes the U.S. overthrew by invasion: the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Furthermore, Iranian-supported parties in both countries joined the U.S.-supported governments in the aftermath of those invasions. In Iraq, pro-Iranian parties predominate. Pro-Iranian Shiite/Alawi fighters, whether government armies or party militias, constitute most of the armed opposition to Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq.
Thus, in the war against Sunni jihadists, Iran is a de facto ally of the U.S. in the region, but not one of the nearly two dozen candidates has the boldness that Nixon had in 1971 of reimagining a long-term enemy, then the People’s Republic of China, as a potential ally. Likewise, after the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, both conservative Churchill and liberal Roosevelt had the good sense to recognize that Joe Stalin was a necessary ally, despite being one of the world’s most savage dictators and a believer that history would bury the capitalist West. Compared to Stalin’s violent anti-imperialism and Comintern subversion, ritualistic Iranian chants of “death to America” should seem mild.
Yet the campaigners’ foreign policy rhetoric, steeped in the self-righteous moral rectitude and cowboy toughness, lacks the flexibility to seize opportunities the way the more ideologically agile Putin has done.
Putin’s intervention in coordination with the governments of Iran, Syria, and Iraq exposes the uselessness of the major initiatives of American Middle Eastern policy since 9/11. American politics codes Iran and Syria as enemies and Iraq as an ally, but the Russians recognize what American politics does not: that all three are allies against America’s most threatening enemies, the Sunni jihadists of ISIS, Al Qaeda and Al Nusra. Such Sunni fundamentalists did attack America on 9/11 and have been kidnapping and sometimes beheading Westerners ever since. Putin can do what the U.S. seems unable to imagine: work actively with all three allied Shiite/Alawi governments most threatened by Sunni extremism: Iran, Syria and Iraq.
The U.S., on the other hand, is pursuing a self-defeating policy of fighting a three-way war, simultaneously opposing the two sides that are fighting each other. Of all the candidates, only three even hint at ironies of this and thus advise caution or nonintervention: Donald Trump, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), and Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.).
Until 9/11 the U.S. was more concerned with the “death to America” chants in Shiite Iran than with the growing threat of militant Sunni terrorists. America’s obsession with opposing Iran may have induced neglect of the seemingly more nebulous threat from Al Qaeda, leading to the costliest attack on the U.S. homeland since World War II. Prior to this Al Qaeda attack on America, the U.S. was actually courting Al Qaeda’s protectors, the Taliban in Afghanistan, as a potential ally against Iran. No wonder 9/11 was such a surprise. But Washington has not yet learned the lesson. As a superpower, it can afford misdirected action without suffering obvious defeat.
After 9/11 the U.S. decided to overthrow the Taliban. Iran supported that and pushed its Shiite allies in Afghanistan to join the anti-Taliban coalition that gained power with the U.S. invasion.
The overthrow of Saddam in 2003 unleashed both militant Sunnis, such as Al Qaeda and eventually ISIS, and their “heretical” enemies, the Shiite militias of Iraq. Although the U.S. had wanted to pass power to moderate exiled politicians better known within the Beltway than in Baghdad, the Shiite majority in Iraq instead elected a government dominated by Shiite sectarian parties long aligned with Iran. Official Washington has a hard time admitting that the success of American arms in ousting Saddam has largely benefited Iranian influence among Iraq’s Shiite majority and extremist Sunni sectarians among the militant armed opposition, now led by ISIS. Putin has proved this point by uniting Iran, Iraq and Syria around his effort to crush ISIS and other opponents to the Syrian regime.
Originally published at The Street on October 7, 2015 – What Putin Understands About the Middle East That U.S. Politicians Don’t