Category Archives: Sunni

by | September 6, 2014 · 7:32 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 151

POLICY TO DEFEAT ISIS

Outlining a policy to defeat ISIS is not hard. Implementing the policy is much harder, especially when the government is run by a bunch of radical left wing lawyers and ideologues.

To begin, the president needs to recognize the problem. It is not workplace violence as the Obama administration stills labels the murder of soldiers at Fort Hood by a radical Islamist shouting Muslim slogans. With that mindset, this administration will never defeat ISIS with a law and order approach or a “management approach.” Wars are not won by lawyers spouting law and order sound bites: “We’ll bring them to justice.”

What kind of insanity is that? We need to destroy them with our military power. Our warriors need to be in charge of the battle. Keep the lawyers out.

Speaking of lawyers, who do you think has made it mandatory to ship all our weapons to the Kurds through the Shiite government in Baghdad? It has to be the Obama lawyer group. The government in Baghdad is useless. They are and have been a Shiite-dominated government. They are not going to pass weapons on to the Kurds. They don’t want the Kurds to have effective weapons. They have no intentions of helping the Kurds establish a Kurdish nation. And the Kurds will not again put themselves under a Shiite government in Baghdad or anywhere else. The Obama administration has lied again to Congress and the people. The Kurds are not, repeat not, receiving weapons to defend themselves and perform as “boots on the ground” in their area.

Our legalistic Obama administration just can’t grasp the fact that Iraq is no longer a nation. The  American troops in Baghdad are primarily there to defend the embassy. For we are still pretending Iraq is a nation that we should continue to recognize and support. Baghdad will fall and the American embassy will be another R&R facility for the victors. Our second policy principle must be recognition that the borders in Iraq, drawn by the Western powers after WWI, are gone. Kurdistan has all the ingredients of nationhood and should be recognized and supported. The enemy does not recognize the border between Syria and Iraq. It is meaningless unless you are an Obama lawyer or diplomat. Our military and political efforts to defeat ISIS must ignore the old border.

The third principle is that we once had a working relationship with the Sunni tribal leaders. That relationship needs to be re-established. We will need to convince the Sunnis that we will keep our word and support them in their own autonomous region, independent of the Shiite government. They will fight for their own land, if supported with U.S. weapons and Special Forces operatives. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, and the Gulf States will support a Sunni homeland in what was part of Iraq. The lawyers will never support this shift. Therefore, it is time for President Obama to surrounded himself with operatives who have a grasp of the real world, instead of the ideologues now occupying the White House.

The fourth policy principle is the president must turn over the management of the war to the Defense Department. If he keeps the White House legal team, the UN, and the State Department out of the war business, we can defeat ISIS. John Kerry always makes everything he touches worse and the Obama lawyers and ideologues have absolutely no real-world experience. The UN has no love for America and is useless in serious peace keeping operations.

I do not expect the Obama administration to leave their progressive ideology to adopt these sensible principles. But they should!

Written by the author of “Insights: Transforming America — Is This What We Fought For?” available now as an ebook, in paperback or hardcover on Amazon.com or BN.com. Follow the author on Twitter @factsfictions80. If you think this message is important, please share it.

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by | August 20, 2014 · 7:30 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 141

KURDS AND ISIS

However he got there doesn’t matter. It is rare that President Obama gets policy and action together to do the right thing. So let’s give him credit for helping the Kurds rescue thousands of minority religious followers and begin pushing ISIS back into traditional Sunni tribal areas. Without U.S. airstrikes and weapons delivered to  the Kurds, the Mosel Dam and Christians and other minorities would still be in the hands of ISIS. There is absolutely no question that ISIS is capable of genocide against any people who do not believe in sharia law.

Unfortunately, this is not a short-term problem with a quick answer. The right thing is to support the Kurds. Their army, the Peshmerga, can and will fight to protect their homeland and people. All they need is an American commitment to supply needed weapons and some economic support. They can be a pillar of stability in the region and a military balance to the ISIS. The Kurds will not, unless forced, ever put their fate in the hands of a Baghdad Shiite or Sunni government. They have suffered under successive Baghdad regimes. The Kurds also have no love for Iran or Turkey.

Over the last five-plus years, the world has seen that our word cannot be taken at face value. Therefore, the problem for the Kurds is deciding whether they can trust our commitments. They are in a very dangerous position with few options. America will get another chance to show the world if our word means anything. The president has broad powers in foreign policy and armed conflict issues. But in this case it would help if he could involve Congress in long-term support for the Kurds. This is an issue he should not use to attack his opposition. There has to be some kind of a line between progressive political goals and something as serious as building a area of stability in the wreckage of Iraq that is friendly with America.

We can not expect the Kurds to trust us if we show intent of putting them back under a Baghdad regime. The president and Congress need to accept that the idea of a Shiite government ever being trusted by the Sunnis or the Kurds is gone. In fact, it was never a viable option. The borders of the Middle East have been changed de facto. A smart foreign policy would accept the change and move on. Please, Mr. President, keep Secretary of State,  John Kerry out of Kurdish policy issues. You and we cannot afford any more bumbling by your Department of State.

Read my non-fiction book, “INSIGHTS: Transforming America –Is this what we fought for? “

 

 

 

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by | August 14, 2014 · 7:30 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 140

OBAMA AND IRAQ

The first requirement for the development of an effective foreign policy is to differentiate between your beliefs and reality. I don’t believe President Obama can see the real world. He only sees what he wants it to be. That kind of vision is dangerous in the making and implementing of foreign policy.

Iraq is a clear example. General David Petraeus and his surge strategy won the war in Iraq. To be fair, President Obama did not inherit a stable Iraq. He made the situation worse by his haste to pull all troops out of Iraq. The Iraqi government Bush left him could not last without enough American troops on the ground to check Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s rush to follow Iran’s guidance and to purge his administration and military of all Sunni and Kurd leaders. The end result was the creation of a Shiite oligarchy, no better that the Sunni dictatorship President Bush defeated.

The Bush regime won the war, but paved the way for a failed Iraqi government when they destroyed the Iraqi army and the Bath party of Saddam Hussein. None of the existing infrastructure every government needs was left. To make matters worse, the Bush administration failed to understand a Shiite/Maliki government would never be a check to the Shiite nation of Iran. Instead the Iranians ended up owning Maliki who preceded to further weaken the Sunnis and the Kurds. For all the American blood and treasure the Bush administration spent in Iraq, little was left for Obama to work with, especially given his primary motive to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible. I doubt President Obama, or either of his inept secretaries of state, ever saw the real geo-political problem a Maliki government would cause. You would think that President Obama, who leans hard in the direction of supporting Sunni Muslims, would have recognized the growth and consequences of Shiite power in Iraq.

You didn’t need timely intelligence, which Obama claims he never received, to see the Sunni Islamic radicals that joined the rebellion against Syrian Shiite President Assad could easily cross the border into Sunni areas of Iraq. The Sunni tribes alienated by Maliki were ready to provide support in the form of manpower, logistics, weapons and money. Borders mean nothing if they are not defended.

The result of the ISIS invasion of Iraq is that tribal and religious areas no longer follow the lines drawn by western diplomats after WWI. All remnants of the Shiite/Maliki government are being forced to fall back into Shiite populated areas, primarily south of Baghdad. A realistic map of Iraq will soon show Sunniland, Kurdistan and Shiiteland. The Sunnis and the Kurds will never go back into a centralized Shiite-run government. That failed experiment is over. Only more American blood and treasure could delay the collapse of Iraq, and for what? Our government needs to stop believing a Iraqi centralized government is possible. It is not.

Our policy should be to support the Kurds with modern weapons and monetary aid until their own fighters get properly equipped and to persuade the outside Sunni world to help bring the ISIS under some restraint. In the meantime, use unfettered air power and required boots-on-the-ground to break the advance of ISIS and stop their atrocities against the Christians and other religious groups ISIS is now slaughtering. Some massive evacuations of endangered refugees may be necessary. All because two administrations failed to see the Middle East as it is. Hawks and doves are equally to blame.

Understand more of how the transforming of America is proceeding and what it means to you: Read “INSIGHTS: Transforming America — Is this what we fought for?”   Available at Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and FREE on some Kindle formats.

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by | July 8, 2014 · 7:31 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 125

NEW MAP NEEDED

Put your old map of the Middle East in the pile of historical documents. For a hundred years, the national boundaries of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon followed the contours of the lines diplomats drew to show the demise of the Turkish Empire. Their inked lines paid little or no mind to the impact those lines would have on language groups, cultural and religious realities, and tribal territories.iraq

Iraq is not now and never has been a nation with the common things that make a nation, a nation. Instead, it worked around religious animosities, language differences, and conflicting tribal affiliations. The work around was only possible due to the harsh policies of a Sunni aristocracy that had no hesitation about using brutal tactics to subjugate Shia and Kurdish minorities. The Kurds have wanted and fought for their own nation for decades. At times they have sought Western support only to be betrayed time after time. The Shia are pulled eastward to the strong Persian and Shia  state of Iran, the same state that the Sunni leadership in Iraq fought a brutal war with in the 1980s. During that war, poison gas was used against the Iranians. Saddam Hussein was an equal dispenser of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). He also used poison gas on the Shia and the Kurds. Only ruthless cruelty and fear kept Iraq a nation.

Vice President Joe Biden, who almost got nothing right in his entire political career unless he copied it from someone else, stumbled on the right solution at the wrong time when he proposed dividing Iraq into Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish areas, provinces, or whatever. It was not to happen. His solution was too far outside the box for most of us.

President Obama made all the wrong moves and gave the wrong signals when he took power and pulled all our forces out of Iraq. But let’s be fair. The only way for Iraq to exist as a nation was to put a ruthless Sunni dictator back in power. That wasn’t going to happen. In its wisdom, the Bush Administration destroyed the Sunni-led Iraqi Army and ruling political party, clearing the way for weak Shia leaders to win or manipulate a democratic voting process that prepared the path for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to run a Shia regime that looked eastward to Iran for support and guidance, turning Iraq into an Iranian province.

Our president, who has a strong Sunni bias, knew he could not provide real military support to assist a Shia faction to battle a Sunni force. So all the hand-wringing over the number and kind of troops  sent now to Iraq and what the president should do is wasted. Iraq is history. Now we need to seek common goals among the Sunnis and Kurds.

Either way, this is a perfect issue for President Obama to follow his mantra, “the issue is never the issue.”  He never tries to solve issues anyway, he only uses them to destroy the opposition.  In Iraq, doing nothing is close to being the perfect solution. The Republicans will find some way to use the Iraq issue against themselves.

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