Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Wrote a lengthy comment at The American Thinker this morning – it’s a repeat, but I want to keep track of my comments and post them here.  Just skip it if you read yesterday’s blog post.  The article I posted on was interesting too, “What goes around, goes around” by Shoshana Bryen, who writes a lot of very good stuff on the Mid-East.  Definitely go read her article!  Here’s my morning ramble:

susanholly Friday, October 9, 2015 9:33 AM” 16 minutes ago

The US policy went from being one of trying to straddle the three big divides in the region: Shia, Sunni, and Israel and our goal used to be “regional stability”, which benefited our American national interests. And we tended to gauge much of that straddling by the overarching strategic moves of the Cold War. After the fall of the Soviet Union, we spent the 90s being swayed by Clintonian “humanitarian war” arguments to intervene for that “larger purpose”, even in the face of no compelling case of American national interest being defined.

Since 9/11 we’ve lost our way and wandered into some murky “war on terror” wherever we find it and the “we must prevent safe havens for terrorists”, which morphed into regime change to “promote democracy”. Now, we’re somewhere between the feel-good Arab Spring “promote democracy”, the Samantha Power genocide pixie’s “responsibility to protect” humanitarianism and fighting “terror”. Absent any clear-cut American national interest, our schizophrenic policies have fueled widespread chaos, virulent sectarian strife, more power vacuums and seismic regional instability.

Power vacuums are more dangerous and a vastly more immediate threat to our American national interests than Assad. Syria has been a Russian client state for over 40 years, so how Syria remaining a Russian client state is some cataclysmic change, I don’t know. The truth is the US left a gaping power vacuum in Iraq by walking away from a mess we created when we ousted Saddam. Odious Saddam formed a check on Iranian expansion, which we removed. So, Iran’s Shia influence has moved into Iraq and there we’re ostensibly fighting the Islamic State with the Shia-leaning Baghdad government, who now relies on Iranian-backed militias. The Sunni minority after a decade of US occupation became more radicalized, the policy of de-Ba’athification fueled more defections to the Sunni radicals too. American presence also fueled another layer of discontent and violence.

These US policy experts now find themselves wandering in circles repeating bad clichés masquerading as foreign policy. What has them so alarmed is Russia, one-by-one, has picked off American allies in the region and formed their own alliance with Iran to prop up Assad. The US doesn’t have any bold plans – just fear-mongering about Russian aggression, while still talking about arming “Syrian moderates”. Supposedly, these “moderates” were being armed to fight ISIS, but many of them are not moderates and are working with or actually ARE ISIS. Suffice it to say Sunni Islamist views prevail among the rebels fighting Assad. How the US thinks these rebels will lead to a stable government is the same sort of magical thinking that fueled the ouster of Saddam and Gadaffi and Mubarak.

We need to get back to stepping out of micro-strategic thinking to looking at macro-strategic-thinking – REGIONAL STABILITY. If Assad goes as seems to be the US policy at the moment, there is no plan in place to fill that power vacuum. The Islamic State and radicalized Sunnis will seize control. Yes, Russia stands to gain stature and a stronger foothold in the region, but so far our policymakers offered nothing that makes any sense at all.

Now we could talk to Putin like sane people and come up with a real plan to defeat ISIS as the Russians push them eastward toward Iraq. Then after some stability and order is restored in Syria and Iraq, international pressure could be brought to bear from Brussels to deal with Assad. The Russians might be inclined to give up Assad if a Russian-friendly government is in Syria, international pressure could then promote safe zones and actually make them work in Syria for a return of displaced refugees. And the US and Russia might be viewed as adults on the world stage for a change, instead of treating the rest of the world like pawns in some geopolitical chess game (which the US plays badly btw). http://libertybellediaries.com…

I then added a comment:

On second thought we should call the US foreign policy: “I was for them, before I was against them”…. And we wonder why our allies are defecting to Lavrov over listening to Kerry diplomacy, omg.

Yesterday on FOX News I heard a new “idea” from Michael O’Hanlon from the Brookings Institution and also the same general plan from former ambassador, Dennis Ross – ta-dummmmm, hold the applause, it’s “The Bosnia Plan”.

Generally, this plan envisions a partitioned Syria with safe zones for the various factions and get this, the Russians are supposed to help secure this and maybe the Turks and who knows maybe the unicorns, pixies and leprechauns can magically appear too.

There’s this delusional trapped thinking that paralyzes so many of these academic strategic analysts, who only talk to other like-minded insular thinkers.  No new ideas, no bold moves, just regurgitated, echo-chamber nonsense.  So, try this on for size – if Assad falls, ISIS will seize control of all of Syria.  This will be a seismic event for the “Caliphate” and IT will encourage more radical extremism, because nothing encourages followers more than being on a winning team.  It motivates people to sign up.

Ross, O’Hanlon, the entire Obama administration argue the opposite.  They say Assad staying will encourage more jihadists, but here’s the catch, the only way to avoid ISIS seizing control of all of Syria is for someone to fight ISIS and the Russians have put together an alliance to do that.

The reality on the ground determines the options available -a smart strategist should try to seize this opportunity for America to change course, talk to the Russians – work out a coordinated effort to defeat ISIS and guess what, if we act, a lot of the Arab leaders will gravitate toward the US alliance, because they will want to counter the Iranian influence.  Balancing the push and pull from both sides of the Shia/Sunni divide will be easier to work out with the Russians than with the Shias and Sunnis frankly.

We need to keep our eyes on REGIONAL STABILITY, which benefits everyone, except ISIS and other jihadist nutjobs.

Let the Cold War die – look ahead and try to think of a different approach!

A couple years ago I wrote a blog post, “The Mom World Peace Solution”:

“Certainly the tragedy in Syria leaves one wishing for a way to end the fighting quickly.  However, handing more weapons to poorly led, rampaging bands of rebels with little military finesse and a lot of rage seems a recipe for more horrific violence, not less.  The world needs real leadership where the strongest countries should agree to provide a united front and force some calm and work at disarming rather than funneling in more and more advanced weaponry.  Once the irrational actors are neutralized, then rational actors in places like Syria should come to the table and work at political solutions.  This is the Mom world peace solution – take away the dangerous toys from the kids who can’t play nice and who haven’t mastered some self-control.  No fancy one-world government solution or new complicated political theory or even some religion- just common sense.  The road to Peace is built, brick by brick, by building trust among leaders (people).  As with most human endeavors the answers are simple, but that sure doesn’t make them easy.   Trust is one of the hardest things for people to achieve – definitely much harder than devising a theory like “mutually assured destruction”.  Only men could think up that one, believe me!  A Mom sure never would – she’d take away the weapons from the misbehaving, immature kids on the world stage and put them in time out until they learned to play nice;-)”