Patrick Cockburn is not optimistic that the ISIS genie can be put back in the bottle, and he has a more realistic explanation for how this problem snapped into existence than Hillary Clinton does. For Cockburn, the problem arose from too much support for anti-Assad rebels, not too little.
The foster parents of Isis and the other Sunni jihadi movements in Iraq and Syria are Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey. This doesn’t mean the jihadis didn’t have strong indigenous roots, but their rise was crucially supported by outside Sunni powers. The Saudi and Qatari aid was primarily financial, usually through private donations, which Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, says were central to the Isis takeover of Sunni provinces in northern Iraq: ‘Such things do not happen spontaneously.’ In a speech in London in July, he said the Saudi policy towards jihadis has two contradictory motives: fear of jihadis operating within Saudi Arabia, and a desire to use them against Shia powers abroad. He said the Saudis are ‘deeply attracted towards any militancy which can effectively challenge Shiadom’. It’s unlikely the Sunni community as a whole in Iraq would have lined up behind Isis without the support Saudi Arabia gave directly or indirectly to many Sunni movements. The same is true of Syria, where Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington and head of Saudi intelligence from 2012 to February 2014, was doing everything he could to back the jihadi opposition until his dismissal. Fearful of what they’ve helped create, the Saudis are now veering in the other direction, arresting jihadi volunteers rather than turning a blind eye as they go to Syria and Iraq, but it may be too late.
Compare this to Hillary Clinton’s analysis:
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.
As she writes in her memoir of her State Department years, Hard Choices, she was an inside-the-administration advocate of doing more to help the Syrian rebellion. Now, her supporters argue, her position has been vindicated by recent events.
Clinton’s thesis is predicated on the idea that there were enough moderate opponents to Assad’s regime that they could have been built into an army by the United States that would have been able to crush not only Assad but all the more radical forces being funded by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and rich sheiks throughout the Gulf region. President Obama has at least explored the idea, but Cockburn paints an accurate picture with this:
Isis may well advance on Aleppo in preference to Baghdad: it’s a softer target and one less likely to provoke international intervention. This will leave the West and its regional allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – with a quandary: their official policy is to get rid of Assad, but Isis is now the second strongest military force in Syria; if he falls, it’s in a good position to fill the vacuum. Like the Shia leaders in Baghdad, the US and its allies have responded to the rise of Isis by descending into fantasy. They pretend they are fostering a ‘third force’ of moderate Syrian rebels to fight both Assad and Isis, though in private Western diplomats admit this group doesn’t really exist outside a few beleaguered pockets. Aymenn al-Tamimi confirms that this Western-backed opposition ‘is getting weaker and weaker’; he believes supplying them with more weapons won’t make much difference.
Hillary’s case is basically that we could have succeeded if only we had started earlier and had more commitment. But, again, our “regional allies” are the ones that went ahead without us and spawned the Islamic State. They were working with what they had, and “moderates” weren’t available in sufficient numbers, nor did they have the needed zeal for combat.
Left unsaid is the fact that for Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar, this has been primarily a sectarian war from the beginning, while for the United States it has been more of a way of protecting Israel and weakening Iran. For America’s foreign policy establishment, the problem with Assad was never that he was the head of an Alawite religious minority that lorded it over a majority Sunni population. But for the Sunni powers, this was a very important consideration. This is also why we couldn’t rely on our regional allies to pursue a pluralistic and ecumenical future for Syria where religious minorities’ rights are respected. What Clinton cannot explain is how we could have overcome the sectarian priorities of our allies.
All along it was clear that the most effective anti-Assad fighting forces were sympathetic to al-Qaeda in both their hatred for Shiites and for the West. It was also clear that this was acceptable to our regional allies.
In retrospect, the error wasn’t that we didn’t try to build up an army of non-existent moderates, but that we looked too much the other way as our opposition to Assad blinded us to what our regional allies were building in the hope of toppling him.
The one thing we have consistently gotten right is that we do not want to takes sides in a sectarian religious war. Had we made that mistake, too, we’d be in an even deeper hole.
