Serjilla: Dead City

In northwestern Syria are more than a hundred ghost town collectively known as the Dead Cities. They date to between 400 and 700 AD. The best preserved is Serjilla.

These seem to have been ordinary farming towns where some folks got rich after the fall of Carthage to the Vandals cut off supplies of olive oil from the western Mediterranean, leading to an olive oil boom in Syria.

That explains their rise, but their fall is more mysterious. There are no signs of violence, nor any record that the conquering Arabs did much damage. Some speak of changes in trade routes, but these towns were within two day's journey of Aleppo, which remained a great city throughout the Middle Ages, so I am not sure why that would be relevant. Did changes in the weather render the land less valuable?

I have no idea, and so far as I can tell, nobody else really knows either. So a little mystery, a whole rural district that prospered for two centuries and then faded away, leaving these splendid ruins.

Town plan.

Some authorities identify this as a tavern others an an Andron, a meeting place for men.

The town had public baths, which were a lot less common in 500 AD than they had been 200 years earlier, so the elite were a traditional bunch.

But they were of course Christian; this is the church.

So far as I can tell, this place has so far survived Syria's Civil War unscathed. May it long endure.

Trump's Frustration with "the Blob" Boils Over

Toward the end of his second term, President Obama and his closest advisers took to calling the foreign policy establishment/military industrial complex "the Blob." They were deeply frustrated that the "experts" refused to offer them any options to meaningfully reduce US involvement in foreign wars. Hence Obama's great satisfaction the one time he stood up to the Blobsters, refusing to order attacks after Assad crossed his "red line" in Syria.

And now Trump, it seems, shares his predecessor's frustrations. I of course think that withdrawing US troops from Syria and Afghanistan is a great idea. I do understand that it is better to work with one's generals in arranging these things rather than just announcing them over twitter, but sources are telling the Times that Trump tried to get the military to give him withdrawal timetables and they simply refused.

Some former Trump advisers attributed the sudden nature of the announcement to Mr. Trump’s frustration with generals who resisted him at every turn when he tried to set a timetable for getting out of Syria and Afghanistan — something, his supporters point out, that he had promised to do during the 2016 campaign.

“The apparatus slow-rolled him until he just said enough and did it himself,” said Stephen K. Bannon, who clashed with the generals over Afghanistan when he served as the president’s chief strategist in 2017. “Not pretty, but at least done.”

So there's one thing for Trump; he thinks that the President should set our military policy, not a lot of generals and ambassadors, and is willing to act on his convictions in a way that a more cautious and mainstream leader probably would not.

Refugees and the Syrian End Game

The civil war in Syria is winding down across much of the country, because the government has won. As you can see from the map above, the government (red) now controls all the inhabited areas in the south and center of the country and is slowly constricting the remaining rebels in the north. What remains of Aleppo is in government hands. The yellow area is under the control of Kurdish militias and their American advisers, and so far the Kurds have remained mostly at peace with the government.

So especially in the south those communities that have been hosting thousands of Syrian refugees are eager to see them go home:

Seven years of war in Syria has displaced more than half the country’s population, leaving millions of refugees shipwrecked between the wasteland of home and the void of exile. Among the many Lebanese and Jordanian towns that received them was Arsal, where rented rooms and tent cities overflowed at one point with 120,000 Syrians — quadruple its Lebanese population.

But with the Syrian government closing in on victory, President Bashar al-Assad declaring the country safe for Syrians again and their reluctant Lebanese hosts pressing them to leave, the Syrian refugees are now beginning to set out on the fraught road home.

Over the past month, convoys carrying nearly 2,000 Syrians have crossed the border, returning families to the homes they had abandoned years ago — though few knew whether those homes had survived the bombs and shells.

I consider this great news. On the other hand certain other news shows why so many Syrians hate the Assad regime so much, and why western governments keep saying that the problem can't be solved so long as Assad remains in power:

But many may be stuck in Lebanon. Thousands of Syrians in Arsal have applied to return, only to be rejected by Mr. Assad’s government. Many more say they believe that if Mr. Assad remains in power, the outcome tacitly accepted by the global powers haggling over Syria’s future, they have only arrest, torture, death or forced conscription to return to.

“Here, I’m a refugee,” said a former Syrian soldier who asked to be identified by his nom de guerre, Abu Fares. “In Syria, I’m a traitor.”

So at least for the next few years, many refugees will be unable to return even if they want to. I suspect that European countries in particular will put pressure on the regime to change this policy as the central plank in any peace settlement, but for notorious regime opponents there won't be anything they can do.

The other big question to be resolved in any peace settlement will be the Kurdish areas. The government can't conquer them so long as thousands of Americans remain in place, nor will the US support outright independence for the Kurds. So I suspect a stalemate like the one in Iraq is inevitable. Since right now the Kurds and Americans control big areas where the people are all Arabs, maybe a deal can be worked out in which the Kurds withdraw from the Arab areas in return for recognition of their autonomy in the areas where they are the majority. I hope so.

The Syrian Mess

In Syria, our NATO allies the Turks are, with Russian help, attacking our other allies the Syrian Kurds, who did much of the hard fighting against the Islamic State around its old capital. We are paralyzed, caught in a web of our own making: we can't fight the Turks, because they are in NATO and we depend on our Turkish air base to keep our Middle Eastern wars going; we can't fight the Russians because we agreed to their setting in up Syria, and anyway we don't want a war with Russia, and on what basis could we complain about their helping our Turkish allies? We can't abandon the Kurds because they are our only really reliable friends in the whole godforsaken region, plus we would feel like cads for ditching them after working so closely with them for so long, not to mention the whole "losing face", "not following through on our commitments" thing that matters so much to so many American foreign policy types. And, we can't broker a peace deal in Syria because that would mean recognizing the Syrian government, which we have been saying for years is an illegitimate tyranny.

Near as I can tell, our Syrian policy is to keep muddling along until a democratic, human-rights-respecting, pro-America, pro-Israel, anti-Iran, anti-terrorist government miraculously appears in Damascus. Meanwhile, people continue to be blown up on a regular basis, and the whole region from Manchester to Amman is in crisis over what to do about refugees thrown up by this and other wars. There's no use blaming Trump's people for this, because Obama's had no idea what to do, either, and ended up focusing on the Islamic State because that was one problem we felt like we could solve. They seem to be pretty much beaten. But Syria's ordeal seems likely to stretch on for decades.

Sigh.

On the map above, territory controlled by the Syrian government is in red, Kurdish territory in yellow, other rebels in green, and the remnants of the Islamic State in gray.

Rumblings of a Bigger War in Syria

What would we do if our Turkish "allies" launched a major military attack on our Syrian Kurdish "allies"?

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Days after a reshuffle of Turkey's top military commanders, President Tayyip Erdogan has revived warnings of military action against Kurdish fighters in Syria that could set back the U.S.-led battle against Islamic State.

Kurdish militia are spearheading an assault against the hardline militants in their Syrian stronghold Raqqa, from where Islamic State has planned attacks around the world for the past three years.

But U.S. backing for the Kurdish YPG fighters in Syria has infuriated Turkey, which views their growing battlefield strength as a security threat due to a decades-old insurgency by the Kurdish PKK within in its borders.

There have been regular exchanges of rocket and artillery fire in recent weeks between Turkish forces and YPG fighters who control part of Syria's northwestern border.

Turkey, which has the second largest army in NATO after the United States, reinforced that section of the border at the weekend with artillery and tanks and Erdogan said Turkey was ready to take action.

"We will not leave the separatist organization in peace in both Iraq and Syria," Erdogan said in a speech on Saturday in the eastern town of Malatya, referring to the YPG in Syria and PKK bases in Iraq. "We know that if we do not drain the swamp, we cannot get rid of flies."

There are hundreds of Americans working in Syria with the YPG, including artillery batteries currently engaged against the Islamic State in Raqqa. Is Erdogan mad enough to attack the Kurds anyway?

Can you imagine Trump doing nothing if an American were killed?

This seems quite dangerous to me.

The Arab Spring, Failed Hopes, and Self Doubt

The Arab Spring, a great movement for democracy, human rights, and hope, has crashed and burned. Outside Tunisia it has led only to some combination of civil war and renewed repression. Algerian writer and activist Kamel Daoud wrote a moving essay about these events for a French newspaper that has now been translated and published in the Times. It makes me wonder.

Daoud admits that the dreams of the protesters and the rebels are dead or dying, but he does not attribute this to any sort of natural disease. He believes that those dreams were murdered. They were murdered by dictators like Assad with their airplanes and poison gas, by cynical foreign governments, by lies. The liars claim that attempts to establish Arab democracy only empower radicals like the Islamic state and lead to chaos and foreign intervention:

For President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, the Arab springs were “devastating conspiracies.” According to a private Egyptian television channel, even ‘‘The Simpsons’’ contained proof of untoward foreign designs in Syria. The political chaos in Libya has fanned distrust as well.

The foreign-intervention theory is used as a weapon against local dissenters. In 2016 Bouteflika, ailing and immobilized, announced that he would seek yet another term, after having the Constitution amended so that he could stay in office for the rest of his life. When his opponents countered his proposals by invoking democratic values, government media accused them of being traitors, Western agents or Zionists.

The case of Syria — subject to alliances with Iran or Russia and playing against Saudi Arabia, Qatar or the United States — gives weight to such propaganda. It seems to demonstrate that any demand for democracy eventually translates into chaos, and chaos invites the return of colonialism. The same goes for Libya. Better then to submit to one’s dictators than compromise oneself with foreigners.

I want to agree with Daoud that the dream of Arab democracy remains alive, and that things might have gone differently. But I am not sure. I am not much of a believer in luck or genius. I think most of what happens in history is driven by vast, long-term forces that we only partially understand and can rarely control. It seems to me that people who point out what happened in Libya when the dictator was overthrown are onto something. The situation did not degenerate into chaos for no reason at all; it degenerated because Libyans are deeply divided among themselves by region, tribe, class, attitudes toward Europe, and their interpretations of Islam, so much so that once the heavy hand of dictatorship was removed the situation spontaneously combusted. Can democracy flourish in such circumstances? Assad has held onto power in Syria not just because he has airplanes and poison gas, but because he has the support of many Syrians. Foreign powers meddle in Arab conflicts not just for their own nefarious purposes but because various Arab factions are always begging them to.

Consider events in Iraq and Egypt. In Iraq the US removed the dictator and his whole apparatus, and so far the result has been corruption, conflict, terrorism, the rise of the Islamic state, a devastating civil war, and the effective secession of Kurdistan. Consider the still smoldering ruins of Mosul, once one of the Arab world's great cities, as collateral damage from this experiment. In Egypt democracy was established and an election held, but the winner was from the Muslim Brotherhood. The secular, western-oriented people who began the protests and launched the revolution recoiled in horror from what their countrymen had chosen and allied with the military to overthrow the Morsi government and return Egypt to dictatorship. The hard, rational part of my brain says this all proves that most of the Arab world is simply not suitable for democracy.

But even as I reach that conclusion I doubt it. Americans always used to say that Latin America was unsuitable for democracy and pointed to the numerous failures, but right now most of the region is democratic, and some of those democratic nations are thriving. Am I just being smug and indifferent when I write off the dreams of Daoud and millions of others? Is my resignation just an excuse for the west's clumsy combination of military meddling and moral indifference? For my refusal to endorse spending American dollars and soldiers overthrowing Assad? I don't know.

I would never tell Daoud or an other citizen of a dictatorship to give up hope; hope is a precious thing in any circumstances. But I am not myself optimistic that things will get better in the Middle East any time soon.

Trump's Normalization Continues with Cruise Missile Barrage

The President:

Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched. It is in the vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread of chemical weapons.

I'm having a hard time feeling anything about this at all, because it seems so normal. It's what American presidents have been doing since Bill Clinton's time. I'm glad this was defended as a specific response to the use of chemical weapons – a resurrection of the "red line" that Obama invented and then ignored – rather than as a grand scheme to restore civilization in Syria.

To me the most important thing about the decision is its very normality. It is exactly what any ordinary Republican president would do, or many moderate Democrats; both Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio praised the attack.

The attack was not praised by either the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, people like Rand Paul and Justin  Amash, or by many on the Alt-Right. "Trump joins the neocons" was a typical reaction from that quarter. After all this was an attack on a close ally of Vladimir Putin.

This reinforces the sense for me that Trump, without the ideas, energy, or know-how to chart his own political path, is drifting toward being an ordinary Republican. Except for the short attention span and atmosphere of chaos, everything that made him distinctive is falling away: the talk of more generous healthcare, the trillion dollar infrastructure plan, the nods toward raising taxes on hedge fund billionaires, etc. All that remains is Bushism or Ryanism with a wagonload of scandals.

What Happens if Assad Wins?

The Times finally discusses Syria in terms that make sense to me, admitting that Assad is likely to win the civil war:

With the Syrian government making large territorial gains in Aleppo on Monday, routing rebel fighters and sending thousands of people fleeing for their lives, President Bashar al-Assad is starting to look as if he may survive the uprising, even in the estimation of some of his staunchest opponents.

But should he win, it is not likely to be a very glorious victory:

Yet, Mr. Assad’s victory, if he should achieve it, may well be Pyrrhic: He would rule over an economic wasteland hampered by a low-level insurgency with no end in sight, diplomats and experts in the Middle East and elsewhere say.

Post-civil war Syria was described by former U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford as "a half-dead corpse. . . a gaping wound that stretches as far as the eye can see." Assad has offended the U.S. and the E.U. too deeply to be able to get any rebuilding aid from them or the World Bank, and his friends in Iran and Russia don't have much money to give him. So the Syrian government will be broke, its industry ruined, its largest city rubble, with ISIS and al Qaeda still on the loose.

Syria's suffering is likely to go on for at least another decade.

Taking "Risks" for Peace in Syria

As I write, the cease-fire in Syria is mostly holding, and people living in besieged areas of Aleppo have reported going outside to walk around for the first time in months. No war as complex and emotional as this one was ever settled so easily, but meanwhile there is at least a day of peace, and that counts for something.

So I offer congratulations to the people who made this possible, especially Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

But I also want to comment on the weird way this deal has been presented in much of the American press. The Times:

The new arrangement on Syria, set to begin Monday, was greeted with skepticism by Syrians on all sides and carries many risks of failure, which the Pentagon and Mr. Kerry acknowledged. . . .

The accord was reached after sharp divisions inside the Obama administration over the wisdom of sharing targeting information with Russia, and accusations that the Russians have used the negotiating period to help Mr. Assad regain control in Aleppo and strike at American-backed opposition groups.

For Mr. Obama, who asked Mr. Kerry to keep working on the negotiation after the president failed to reach an accord with Mr. Putin during the Group of 20 summit meeting in China last weekend, the new accord poses considerable risks.

Risk? What risk, exactly, are Kerry, Obama et al. taking? Or any other American? We are talking about a war in which half a million people may have died, and that has spawned Europe's greatest refugee crisis since World War II. Compared to the risks millions of Syrians and others are facing every day, who has time for the possible damage to the reputations of diplomats, or the ins and outs of Russian-US military posturing?

Sure, if this fails, as it is very likely to, Kerry may end up looking foolish and Obama may end up looking weak, blah blah blah. Those are the risks we pay our leaders to take. I am glad they have taken them. But I am also bewildered by the thicket of bristling suspicion that surrounds this and most other peacemaking efforts. Sometimes there is nothing to be said but do the right thing or go home and let someone else do it.

Civil War and Foreign Intervention, or, Why Syria's Nightmare Drags On

Historians who study civil wars say that foreign intervention tends to make them last much longer:

Most civil wars end when one side loses. Either it is defeated militarily, or it exhausts its weapons or loses popular support and has to give up. About a quarter of civil wars end in a peace deal, often because both sides are exhausted.

That might have happened in Syria: the core combatants — the government and the insurgents who began fighting it in 2011 — are both quite weak and, on their own, cannot sustain the fight for long.

But they are not on their own. Each side is backed by foreign powers — including the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and now Turkey — whose interventions have made Syria an ecosystem with no entropy. In other words, the forces that would normally impede the conflict’s inertia are absent, allowing it to continue far longer than it otherwise would.

Government and rebel forces are supplied from abroad, which means their arms never run out. They also both draw political support from foreign governments who do not feel the war’s costs firsthand, rather than from locals who might otherwise push for peace to end their pain. These material and human costs are easy for the far richer foreign powers to bear.

This is why, according to James D. Fearon, a Stanford professor who studies civil wars, multiple studies have found that “if you have outside intervention on both sides, duration is significantly greater.”

There is much more in that article, including evidence that foreign intervention leads to more atrocities against civilians. In the Syrian case foreign support seems to make it impossible for the war to ever end, since whenever one side starts losing the other side's sponsors step up their support until the stalemate is re-established.

The End of the Caliphate

Various signals coming from the Islamic State indicate that it is preparing for the loss of all its cities and most of its territory, converting itself back into a rootless terrorist network:

A remarkable editorial last month in al-Naba, the Islamic State's weekly Arabic newsletter, offered a gloomy assessment of the caliphate's prospects, acknowledging the possibility that all its territorial holdings could ultimately be lost. Just two years ago, jihadist leaders heralded the start of a glorious new epoch in the world's history with the establishment of their Islamic "caliphate," which at the time encompassed most of eastern Syria and a vast swath of northern and western Iraq, a combined territory roughly the size of Great Britain.

The editorial, titled, "The Crusaders' Illusions in the Age of the Caliphate," sought to rally the group's followers by insisting that the Islamic State would continue to survive, even if all its cities fell to the advancing "crusaders" - the separate Western- and Russian-backed forces arrayed against them.

"The crusaders and their apostate clients are under the illusion that . . . they will be able to eliminate all of the Islamic State's provinces at once, such that it will be completely wiped out and no trace of it will be left," the article states. In reality, the group's foes "will not be able to eliminate it by destroying one of its cities or besieging another of them, or by killing a soldier, an emir or an imam," it says. . . .

The editorial asserts that the "whole world . . . has changed" with the creation of a theocratic enclave that has "shown all of mankind what the true Islamic state is like."

"If they want to achieve true victory - they will not, God willing - they will have to wait a long time: until an entire generation of Muslims that was witness to the establishment of the Islamic State and the return of the caliphate . . . is wiped out."

Recent advances by the Iraqi government and Syrian Kurds have cost ISIS 12 percent of their territory, and it seems the Iraqis are on the verge of a major effort to retake Mosul, the largest city under ISIS control.

But of course even the loss of all its cities will not end the Daesh's ability to make trouble. Most experts have interpreted the recent spate of terrorist bombings around the world as a shift in strategy from holding territory back to terrorism. As one Islamic State operative told a western journalist,

We do have, every day, people reaching out and telling us they want to come to the caliphate. But we tell them to stay in their countries and rather wait to do something there.

Terrorism is bad, of course, but not so bad as having ISIS armies on the march, enslaving women and carrying out genocide. So I would be happy to trade the elimination of the Islamic State for a short-term increase in bombings.

When the Islamic State is defeated, things may get worse

Today's cheerful reminder from Tom Friedman:

Let’s go back to the future of Iraq. “The problem in Iraq is not ISIS,” Najmaldin Karim, the wise governor of Kirkuk Province, which is partly occupied by ISIS, remarked to me. “ISIS is the symptom of mismanagement and sectarianism.” So even if ISIS is evicted from its stronghold in Mosul, he noted, if the infighting and mismanagement in Baghdad and sectarian tensions between Shiites and Sunnis are not diffused, “the situation in Iraq could be even worse after” ISIS is toppled.

Why? Because there will just be another huge scramble among Iraqi Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmens, Shiite militias, Turkey and Iran over who controls these territories now held by ISIS. There is simply no consensus here on how power will be shared in the Sunni areas that ISIS has seized. So if one day you hear that we’ve eliminated the ISIS caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and lowered the ISIS flag over Mosul, hold your applause.

This is why I think Obama is right not to make a major American commitment to defeat the Islamic State with another blitzkrieg armored advance on Raqqa, no matter how many people they kill in Europe and America. As things stand, that would only lead to more chaos, and to more intense fighting among all the other factions. We would be spending tens of billions of dollars and losing hundreds of lives to achieve nothing.

I am not sure if it is even possible to find a diplomatic, political solution to the mess in Syria and Iraq, but I believe that achieving a stable political climate is the only way to control terrorism. Shock and awe will not suffice.

The Latest from our War in Syria

Ahem:

Officials with Syrian rebel battalions that receive covert backing from one arm of the U.S. government told BuzzFeed News that they recently began fighting rival rebels supported by another arm of the U.S. government. . . . A Syrian rebel group that the CIA has been arming in collusion with other governments came under attack from the Kurdish YPG that the Pentagon has armed to fight ISIS.

Daniel Larison explains:

U.S. support for one group is now directly undermining its effort to support another, and that’s happening because the U.S. is pursuing two separate and often contradictory goals in Syria at the same time. Remember this the next time you hear a Syria hawk on the campaign trail demand that the U.S. sink even deeper into the morass of Syria’s civil war.

The U.S. is lending support to anti-regime rebels to maintain the fiction of backing a “moderate” opposition, and it is backing the YPG as part of the war against ISIS, which is the administration’s real priority. Given the fractious nature of anti-regime forces and the multi-sided nature of the civil war, it was probably inevitable that different U.S.-backed groups would end up fighting each other. Arming these groups doesn’t provide Washington with any influence or control over how they use the weapons the U.S. provides, and each one has its own agenda and priorities.

No New Ideas for Fighting the Islamic State

Many people have noticed that while the leading Republicans love to criticize the Obama administration's policies in Syria and Iraq, they actually agree with him. From an article on Ted Cruz:

Given that Cruz believes America has “receded from the world stage” and is “increasingly viewed as irrelevant” under the Obama administration, which has pursued “a photo-op foreign policy of a bomb here and a missile there” rather than trying to defeat ISIS, you might expect that Cruz is promising a dramatically more aggressive policy to defeat the group. But the Cruz plan for taking on ISIS doesn’t differ dramatically from the airstrikes plus proxy war strategy the Obama administration is already pursuing to decidedly mixed effect.

As I noted at the time, Rand Paul explained this last year, writing in response to a belligerent Op-Ed from Rick Perry:

In fact, some of Perry’s solutions for the current chaos in Iraq aren’t much different from what I’ve proposed, something he fails to mention. His solutions also aren’t much different from President Barack Obama’s, something he also fails to mention. Because interestingly enough, there aren’t that many good choices right now in dealing with this situation in Iraq.

The only people who actually have different recommendations are Trump, who suggested we ally with Assad and the Russians, and Lindsay Graham, who wants to send in a large American ground force. Everyone else is advocating slight variations of what we are already doing.

The War against the Islamic State from the French Perspective

Olivier Roy:

As President François Hollande of France has declared, the country is at war with the Islamic State. France considers the Islamist group, also known as ISIS, to be its greatest enemy today. It fights it on the front lines alongside the Americans in the Middle East, and as the sole Western nation in the Sahel. It has committed to this battle, first started in Mali in 2013, a share of its armed forces much greater than has the United States.

On Friday night, France paid the price for this. Messages expressing solidarity have since poured in from all over the Western world. Yet France stands oddly alone: Until now, no other state has treated ISIS as the greatest strategic threat to the world today.

Roy recapitulates the indifference toward the Islamic State of regional powers:

Bashar al-Assad’s main adversary is the Syrian opposition — now also the main target of Russia, which supports him. Mr. Assad would indeed benefit from there being nothing between him and ISIS: That would allow him to cast himself as the last bastion against Islamist terrorism, and to reclaim in the eyes of the West the legitimacy he lost by so violently repressing his own people.

The Turkish government is very clear: Its main enemy is Kurdish separatism. . . .

The Kurds, be they Syrian or Iraqi, seek not to crush ISIS so much as to defend their newfound borders. They hope the Arab world will become more divided than ever. . . . For the Kurds of Iraq, the main danger is seeing a strong central government emerge in Baghdad, for it could challenge the de facto independence of Iraqi Kurdistan today. ISIS stands in the way of the creation of any such power.

The Shiites of Iraq, no matter what pressure they face from America, do not seem ready to die to reclaim Falluja. They will defend sectarian borders, and will never let Baghdad fall. But they are in no hurry to bring the Sunni minority back into Iraq’s political mainstream; if they did, they would have to share power with it.

For the Saudis, the main enemy isn’t ISIS, which represents a form of Sunni radicalism they have always supported. So they do nothing against it, their main enemy being Iran.

The Iranians, for their part, want to contain ISIS but not necessarily to destroy it: Its very existence prevents the return of the kind of Arab Sunni coalition that gave them such trouble during their war with Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

Then there is Israel, which can only be pleased to see Hezbollah fighting Arabs, Syria collapsing, Iran mired in an uncertain war and everyone forgetting the Palestinian cause.

In short, no regional player is willing to send out its forces, bayonets at the ready, to reclaim land from ISIS. And wars are not won without infantry.

But Roy also explains that the Islamic State has few other options for expansion. Only within Syria and Iraq can it post as the defender of Sunni Arabs, the main source of its legitimacy and support.

Which leads me to think again that the simplest solution would involve redrawing national borders, breaking up both Iraq and Syria to create two new states, one for Kurds and one for Sunni Arabs, its capital perhaps at Mosul. Both western diplomats and Middle Eastern governments have long resisted this option as opening a Pandora's Box of border questions, but without changes in borders it is going to be very, very difficult to find any resolution to these conflicts.

The Price of Intervention

The Islamic State is not a rootless terroristic entity like al Qaeda, with vague dreams of future revolution. It is a functioning government that controls territory, collects taxes, and makes war on its enemies. Like France. One of the terrorists attacking the Bataclan nightclub shouted, according to witnesses,

Now you will pay for what you are doing in Syria!

The Daesh did not target France because they "hate its values," a stupid phrase that showed up again in the last Republican debate. They targeted France because French planes are bombing them in Syria. This is a war between states, not a random event.

I think it is important to emphasize this because neither in France nor in the U.S. has the nature of the Middle Eastern conflict really been explained to the voters. According to The Times, some Parisians last night were asking, "Why us, again?" This strikes me as a good indication of the disconnect between what our governments are doing and what people are thinking about. The Islamic State would probably not be interested in killing French people if France were not waging war against them. Our own undeclared war against the Islamic State is exposing us to the same risk of terrorist attacks that France faces, although in practical terms it is of course much harder for the Daesh to attack across the Atlantic.

Since just about everybody hates the Islamic State, with its appalling record of massacres, rapes, slave markets, mass extortion, and so on, how do they survive? They survive because defeating them is not anyone's first priority. The Obama administration has tried to organize an anti-Islamic State coalition, but really nobody's heart is in this fight. The Saudis and the Gulf states are supposed to be part of this coalition, but they have moved all their planes south to attack Shiites in Yemen; to keep even nominal Saudi support against the IS, we have to support that horrific campaign, which is killing a lot more civilians than soldiers or Iranian agents. The Turks are also supposed to be our allies in this fight, but they also worry a lot more about Iran, and more about the Kurds than either. When the Turks finally sent some planes to Syria they attacked, not the IS, but Kurds that the US has supplied with weapons. The Israeli government keeps insisting that the Islamic State is of no consequence, and that the real danger is the axis running from Iran through the Syrian government to Hezbollah in Lebanon. (The IS has sent suicide bombers to attack Hezbollah.) The one country in the region where they hate the Islamic State as much as the US and France do is Iran.

I think one of the main reasons our policy in Iraq and Syria is incoherent is that we keep dividing the parties into good and bad guys according to our own notions of good and bad, which so far as I can tell are not shared by anyone in the region. If we were really serious about defeating the Islamic state we would ally with the thuggish Syrian government and their Iranian and Russian supporters and tell the Turks, Saudis and Israelis to keep out of the way or else. But in our calculus Iran, Vladimir Putin and the Syrian government are bad guys, and Turkey and the Saudis are good guys, so we refuse to do that. Plus it would enrage Israel and create lots of other problems.

I cheered earlier this week when the Kurds, reinforced by Yazidi volunteers, drove the Daesh from the city of Sinjar where fanatics had been enslaving women and carrying out mass executions. But I thought it was telling that the Times headline read Kurdish Fighters Retake Iraqi City, when in fact the Kurds had never been in Sinjar before. It used to be part of the Shiite run Iraqi state, and in Baghdad they were not at all happy about its falling into Kurdish hands. Not only that, but there are forces in the city loyal to at least three different Kurdish factions, and they have already started to squabble about credit for the victory and control of the city. There are no neat lines to be drawn in this conflict between good guys and bad guys, or even between allies and enemies.

If we are going to make war against a dangerous enemy, shouldn't we do it in a serious way, with an actual plan for winning? Obama really doesn't want to be involved in this mess, but he is trapped by foreign commitments and domestic politics into "doing something." He has taken some consequential steps. He engineered a change of government in Iraq and made it clear that the US would not support a Shiite regime that wrote off the whole Sunni populace. He has provided arms and air support to the Iraqi government, the Iraqi Kurds, and Kurdish fighters in Syria. We have repeatedly bombed every Islamic State target we can find, including the infrastructure of their oil wells. But none of this has really changed the situation on the ground, in the face of Iraqi incompetence, the massive unpopularity of the brutal Syrian regime, and the indifference of our allies.

If we are going to wage war against enemies who have the power to strike back against us anywhere in the world, shouldn't we at least have a policy that makes sense? And shouldn't someone in power make a real effort to explain to our citizens what we are doing and why? I look in vain across the political landscape for anyone in power who is honest about the situation and what it would take to change it. I think that on Syria Donald Trump makes more sense than Obama, which is a sentence I never imagined myself writing.

I hate the Islamic State, and I would support fighting it if we had a policy that made any sense. But we don't. To invite terrorist attack on our people by getting involved in a war we have no real desire to fight and no plan to win is crazy.

I wonder if the Paris attacks will make any difference to this -- after all, France is a NATO ally, so now that they have been attacked we are obliged to come to their defense. But any effort to do more will inevitably run smack into all of the complications I just laid out and probably dozens of others I don't even know about. So all in all I doubt it.

Patrick Cockburn on the Sunni-Shia War

After reviewing the American and Russian involvement in Syria, Cockburn writes:

But great power rivalry is only one of the confrontations taking place in Syria, and the fixation on Russian intervention has obscured other important developments. The outside world hasn’t paid much attention, but the regional struggle between Shia and Sunni has intensified in the last few weeks. Shia states across the Middle East, notably Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, have never had much doubt that they are in a fight to the finish with the Sunni states, led by Saudi Arabia, and their local allies in Syria and Iraq. Shia leaders dismiss the idea, much favoured in Washington, that a sizeable moderate, non-sectarian Sunni opposition exists that would be willing to share power in Damascus and Baghdad: this, they believe, is propaganda pumped out by Saudi and Qatari-backed media. When it comes to keeping Assad in charge in Damascus, the increased involvement of the Shia powers is as important as the Russian air campaign. For the first time units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have been deployed in Syria, mostly around Aleppo, and there are reports that a thousand fighters from Iran and Hizbullah are waiting to attack from the north. Several senior Iranian commanders have recently been killed in the fighting. The mobilisation of the Shia axis is significant because, although Sunni outnumber Shia in the Muslim world at large, in the swathe of countries most directly involved in the conflict – Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – there are more than a hundred million Shia, who believe their own existence is threatened if Assad goes down, compared to thirty million Sunnis, who are in a majority only in Syria.

I really don't see any way that the ongoing wars in the Middle East can be brought to an end. No faction is powerful enough to dominate the region, and the civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen seem headed for stalemate. Because of our fixation with nations and national borders, we and the Europeans will never tolerate the redrawing of the map along religious or other factional lines, and we will never accept an IS state. So conflict will go on until everyone is exhausted, which may take a long time.

The Anthem of the Islamic State

We live a life in safety and peace
Our state is based on Islam
And although it conducts jihad against its enemies
It regulates people's affairs
With love and patience.

No, really. Outside the realm of song, the caliphate is failing as an actual government, and recent studies of captured documents have revealed that its main source of revenue is extortion from the people under its control:

It is theft that is filling IS coffers, not any kind of functioning economy. The caliphate is unsustainable.

Democracy in Kurdish Syria

Interesting little account by Carne Ross about the Kurdish-ruled area of northern Syria (including Kobani), a place with very little government:

After the authority of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad collapsed at the start of the Syrian revolution in 2011, the Kurds took advantage of the vacuum to set up government without a state. There is no top-down authority, even within the military. One Y.P.G. commander gently corrected me when I addressed him as “general.”

“We have no ranks,” he said — and sure enough, his uniform bore no insignia of seniority. “We are a team.”

Alongside the men of the Y.P.G., fighters from the Women’s Protection Units, or Y.P.J., also fight at this front. Behind the lines, too, women are prominent in the forums in villages and towns that are part of Rojava’s democratic experiment.

Most of Syria has broken up along ethnic lines. But in Rojava, members of the Arab and Assyrian minorities are deliberately included. . . .

Self-government in Rojava means that, as much as possible, decisions are made at the local, communal level. In one village, women and men sat separately, reflecting local tradition. Like most political meetings, it was lengthy and sometimes boring, with the usual long-winded speeches (but not all from men). But anyone could speak, without distinction, and young and old alike stood up to debate jobs, medical services, even the menace of kids riding their bikes too fast around the village.

In the modern era democratic experiments have appeared before, mainly in times of civil war, most famously the Paris Commune. In a state of crisis that forces everyone to get along or die, they can work for a while. In peace, they tend to slide back into bureaucracy. Is that inevitable? I suspect so. For one thing, one of the biggest political groups in Syria, the supporters of sharia and an Islamic state, are mostly on the other side of the temporary border. If peace is ever made those people will have to be incorporated back into the state; presumably in any sort of democratic set-up they would have to be given a political party. It would be a lot harder for every one to get alone with a bunch of ex-al Qaeda men at the table.

But the regular appearance of such self-rule makes me optimistic about our species.

The Latest Triumph of Our Syrian Policy

The Telegraph:

Pentagon-trained rebels in Syria are reported to have betrayed their American backers and handed their weapons over to al-Qaeda in Syria immediately after re-entering the country. Fighters with Division 30, the “moderate” rebel division favoured by the United States, surrendered to the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, a raft of sources claimed on Monday night.

Daniel Larison:

This is entirely unsurprising, and it drives home how irresponsible demands to “arm the rebels” in Syria have always been. Of course these weapons are ending up in the hands of jihadists. Jihadists and their allies make up the forces fighting against the Syrian regime, and any other anti-regime group is going to cooperate with them or be attacked and have their weapons plundered by them. . . . Syria hawks have promoted the fantasy that there are “moderates” that can be turned into an effective U.S. proxy in order to get the U.S. sucked into a conflict in which it had and still has no stake and no allies worth having.

I suppose part of the problem is that Obama agreed to go along with the scheme while obviously believing that it has no chance of success, which is hardly a recipe for victory. But that does not mean that an administration with more "resolve" would do any better; likely a Rubio or Fiorina administration would only send more arms that would just as quickly end up in the hands of our enemies, and perhaps start dropping bombs that would kill lots of Syrians without fixing anything.