In the wake of President Obama’s speech yesterday at the U.N. General Assembly, there were of another chemical weapons attack near Damascus launched by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. If true, Assad is just drawing the logical conclusion from the president’s speech and the administration’s actions over the last several weeks. The policy of the Obama White House is to target Sunni extremism. That means that Assad and his partners in the Iranian resistance axis are virtually untouchable. Indeed, the administration Tehran before launching strikes on Monday that the strikes would do no damage to the Assad regime assets.
Therefore, Assad sees not only that he’s in the clear, but also an opportunity to press his advantage: with a chemical weapons attack on rebel fighters, or civilians, he is saying that he, too, has joined the U.S.-led coalition against Sunni extremists. After all, as Assad sees it, what’s the difference between the missiles and rockets fired by the U.S. Air Force on ISIS and the barrel bombs that the Syrian Air Force drops on the Sunni opposition? As the Syrian media , the Damascus regime and the Obama administration share the same enemy: terrorism—of the Sunni variety.
In his speech at the UN, the president that ISIS “has terrorized all who they come across in Iraq and Syria. Mothers, sisters and daughters have been subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children have been gunned down. Bodies have been dumped in mass graves.”
All true. I knew of the “innocent human beings … beheaded” by ISIS. But in terms of casualty figures and sheer brutality, the Assad regime still sets the pace in the Levant, with more than 200,000 dead during the course of a three-and-a-half year civil war. So why did the White House spare Assad?
“There can be no reasoning – no negotiation – with this brand of evil,” Obama said of ISIS. “The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force.”
True again, but over the last 35 years the Islamic Republic of Iran has killed thousands more Americans than ISIS has since it first appeared in its present incarnation less than two years ago. And yet instead of using or threatening to use force to deal with Iran, in his speech, “is pursuing a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue."
The fact is that there is no humanitarian argument to be made for targeting ISIS while letting the Iranian axis get away with mass murder. No, Obama’s case is, he thinks, strategic. The U.S.-led campaign against ISIS is the test case for the new Middle East security that Obama has set out in several interviews and articles. As Obama David Remnick in January, the issue to get an “equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.”
What Obama wants is to balance the Shiites against the Sunnis. They don’t have to love each other. They just need to stop fighting each other, directly or through proxies, and they’ll eventually come to recognize their common interests in regional stability.
From Obama’s point of view, the ISIS issue was an ideal opportunity to try out this theory. Obviously the Iranians and their allies have reason to fear Sunni militants, but so do many of the Sunni states traditionally allied with the United States. Jordan, for instance, fears it might be next in line to fall to ISIS’s 30,000-man militia, which comprises a lot of Jordanian nationals. Saudi Arabia, suspicious of every Islamist movement save its own Wahhabism, doesn’t much like the idea of a “caliphate” that challenges the Islamic legitimacy of the Saudi Kingdom, guardian of Islam’s two holiest sites.
Obama deserves some credit for getting Sunni powers to join the anti-ISIS coalition, presumably through some combination of sweet talk and threats. Yes, he must have told the Saudis and others, I promise I’ll finally train and arm the Syrian rebels, as I’ve promised for nearly three years now. And yes, once we’re done with ISIS, I’ll turn all my attention to stopping the Iranians from getting the bomb. In the end, however, the Arabs understood they had no choice but to sign on with the coalition, or else they’d be seen as part of the problem: why, if you don’t want to fight extremism, then you must be an extremist yourself.
Of course, the same didn’t apply to the Iranians. Last week, Iran U.S. pleas to join the anti-ISIS coalition. “I said no, because they have dirty hands,” said Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He accused the White House of seeking a “pretext to do in Iraq and Syria what it already does in Pakistan -- bomb anywhere without authorization.”
The American overture gave Khamenei the chance to portray himself as a champion of pan-Islamic causes, and the Obama administration as an oppressor of Muslims. And from Khamenei’s perspective, so what if the Muslims Obama planned to kill were also those the Iranians most wanted to see dead. The Americans were going to do it anyway, so why should the Iranians get their hands dirty for the sake of the Americans—who, as a further bonus, now look more sectarian than the Iranians themselves?
The reason Obama goes easy on the Iranians is because the Iranians hold the key to making his vision of the region a reality. He knows they’re not angels. He told Remnick that he wants “to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion,” so that it’s “not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon.”
In other words, Obama seems to believe, correctly, that Shiite extremism is every bit as dangerous as Sunni extremism—except that the latter is embodied and employed by non-state or sub-state outfits, like ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda. That’s what concerns Obama--not extremism per se, but the extremism of regional actors that is not susceptible to the traditional instruments of statecraft. Regardless of how badly Iran acts, on Obama’s view, it is a nation-state, and therefore a rational actor with interests that can be engaged, deterred, contained, or if necessary, bombed. Organizations like ISIS, as Obama said in his UNGA speech, can only be met with force.
This White House is eager not to make the mistakes it believes the previous administration did, for instance, by disbanding the Iraqi army. This is why administration officials frequently speak of preserving Syrian “state institutions”—meaning of course not institutions tasked to collect garbage or keep on the lights, but security services, interior ministries, militaries. As Obama told Remnick, he wants to “work with functioning states to prevent extremists from emerging there.”
The problem is that Obama seems not to have wrestled with the question—what happens when extremists control state institutions? After all, most of the suffering humanity has endured throughout history has been inflicted not by non-state actors, but by states, like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, and China in the last century alone. What if Obama’s campaign against the non-state murders in ISIS is empowering a graver threat from the murderers who run a state in Tehran?