Exclusive: In the last debate, Hillary Clinton vowed to follow up the defeat of ISIS in Iraq’s Mosul with a march on ISIS’ capital in Raqqa, except that’s in Syria, a suggestion of a wider war, says Daniel Lazare.
By Daniel Lazare
Attentive viewers may have noticed something curious about last week’s presidential debate. Asked if she would send troops to help stabilize Iraq once ISIS has been expelled from of the northern city of Mosul, Hillary Clinton replied that U.S. intervention would only make matters worse by providing Islamic State with a rallying point.
But then she said: “The goal here is to take back Mosul. It’s going to be a hard fight. I’ve got no illusions about that. And then [we should] continue to press into Syria to begin to take back and move on Raqqa, which is the ISIS headquarters. I am hopeful that the hard work that American military advisers have done will pay off and that we will see a really successful military operation.”
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at the third debate with Republican nominee Donald Trump. (Photo credit: hillaryclinton.com)
Move on Raqqah? What did that mean – that Clinton wants to follow up victory in Mosul with a push into Syria? That she envisions a coordinated military thrust into Syria from Iraq? The answer is not quite, although the results could hardly be more dangerous than if she did.
While the press focuses on the latest Donald Trump groping scandal, few reporters have noticed the explosion of violence from Mosul all the way to Afrin, a Syrian Kurdish stronghold some 380 miles to the west. What Clinton sees as a simple two-pronged assault – first the U.S. and its allies wrest back Mosul, then they take Raqqah, and then they mop up whatever remains of ISIS in between – is already turning into something far messier, i.e., a multi-sided power struggle among Kurds, Turks, Shi‘ites, and Sunni Salafists. All are terrified that they will be shut out of the new post-ISIS order, and all are scrambling to gain an edge on their rivals.
Ironically, the winner could well turn out to be Islamic State, as ISIS is also known. The group is hyper-alert when it comes to divisions among its enemies and skilled at using them to its advantage. The greater the turmoil, the more likely that ISIS will be able to regain its footing once the battle of Mosul is over.
If so, ultimate responsibility will lie with the U.S. After all, it was the United States that tipped the region into chaos by invading Iraq in 2003 and then did seemingly everything in its power to compound the damage in the years that followed. Donald Trump’s claim that Barack Obama’s decision to pull American forces out of Iraq in 2011 allowed Al Qaeda to expand and regroup is not entirely incorrect [although the withdrawal timetable was actually negotiated by President George W. Bush’s administration at the insistence of the Iraqi government].
Still, after all but destroying the Iraqi state in 2003, U.S. withdrawal undoubtedly created a vacuum that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was quick to exploit. But the Obama administration’s decision to back an insurgency in Syria that it knew was dominated by Al Qaeda was no less significant in enabling such forces to regroup.
[Recall that ISIS is an Al Qaeda spinoff, originally called “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” although, in Syria, Al Qaeda’s official affiliate has been the Nusra Front, recently renamed Syria Conquest Front, a key part of the militant force holding east Aleppo.]
Making Matters Worse
The crisis in Syria was compounded by the decision under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama to give Saudi Arabia full backing in its growing anti-Shi’ite sectarian war. This was Bush’s policy shift that investigative reporter Seymour Hersh famously labeled “the redirection” toward overthrowing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a policy that Obama embraced in 2011 amid the Arab Spring protests.
Barack Obama and George W. Bush at the White House.
After the collapse of the 2011 Arab Spring, U.S. support for the Saudi sectarian conflict has been no less important in fueling conflict across the region despite warnings from the Defense Intelligence Agency that the strategy would benefit radical Sunni jihadists in Syria.
[Obama partially shifted U.S. policy again in 2014 when ISIS began beheading Western hostages and capturing cities in Syria and Iraq, causing U.S. public outrage that prompted Obama to target ISIS for destruction but not Al Qaeda, whose jihadists were by then deeply enmeshed with the U.S.-backed anti-government rebels in Syria.]
Now the U.S. has launched its long-anticipated anti-ISIS offensive around Mosul. The problem is not so much the goal as the methodology. War-weary and overstretched, America is loath to commit significant numbers of ground troops. Instead, its strategy is to leverage its imperial power by enlisting a range of local actors to do its bidding.
This is a policy that Hillary Clinton helped craft as Secretary of State when she enlisted more than a dozen states to overthrow Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and then encouraged Saudi Arabia and others to fund the anti-Assad revolt in Syria. But the strategy has repeatedly backfired. Employing regional actors means empowering them, and that means triggering a host of secondary conflicts as differences multiply.
The most obvious such example is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been on a rampage since last July’s attempted military coup. The U.S. has backed operation Euphrates Shield, the code name for last August’s Turkish incursion into northern Syria, even though it brought pro-Turkish forces into conflict with Kurdish fighters whom the U.S. also supports.
But now, with his “neo-Ottoman” ambitions in full flower, Erdogan is casting his eye on Mosul. He declared last week that the city and its ethnically variegated hinterlands are within Turkey’s legitimate sphere of influence. When Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called on him to withdraw from a military enclave that he has established in Bashiqa, a small town seven miles northeast of Mosul, he told him to “know your place.”
“The army of the Republic of Turkey has not lost its standing so as to take instructions from you,” Erdogan said. “You are not my interlocutor, you are not at my level…. It’s not important at all how you shout from Iraq. You should know that we will do what we want to do.”
Sectarian Conflicts
Erdogan’s motives are many – imperial, ethnic, and religious. Not only does he claim a special right to intervene in Mosul, but he also sees himself as a champion of the Sunnis. He is up in arms, consequently, that Shi‘ite militias known as Al-Hashd al-Sha’bi, or Popular Mobilization Forces, are to take part in the “liberation” of a predominately Sunni city of more than 1 million inhabitants.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President during the United Nations General Assembly’s seventy-first session, Sept. 20, 2016. (UN Photo)
“They say 30,000 Shia militants are coming,” he warned last week. “They should be prepared for what they will face.”
Unfortunately, Erdogan’s concerns are not entirely baseless. When Iraqi government forces took back the central Iraqi city of Tikrit from ISIS in April 2015, the same Popular Mobilization Forces looted, torched, or blew up hundreds of civilian houses and buildings, according to Human Rights Watch, and detained some 200 men and boys, at least 160 of whom remain unaccounted for.
Videos circulated of Shi‘ite militants beheading at least two Sunnis and using a sword to slice strips of flesh off the charred and burning remains of a third “like a shawarma.” After taking back Fallujah in June, Shi‘ite militias reportedly executed more than a dozen Sunnis and beat and abused hundreds more taken into custody.
It is hardly reassuring, therefore, that the same groups are now looking to take Mosul or that a Shi’ite militia leader named Qais Al-Khaz’ali recently proclaimed that the battle will provide an opportunity for “vengeance and retribution” against Sunnis responsible for the death of Hussein, the prophet Muhammad’s grandson who is a major figure in Shi‘ite martyrology, more than 1,300 years ago. It’s as if a Christian warlord had vowed vengeance on the Jews for the death of Christ.
Al-Khaz’ali even suggested that Erdogan, Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, and Atheel Al-Nujaifi, a Sunni former governor of Nineveh province who commands his own militia, were all descendants of those responsible for Hussein’s death, words not likely to calm fears inside Mosul or to dispel passions across the border in Turkey.
Undoubtedly, the Obama administration is now leaning on Baghdad to keep the Shi‘ite militias under control. But Obama would undoubtedly love a clear-cut victory by Election Day, so he’s probably not leaning all that hard. Moreover, it’s not clear what he can do. Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Abadi’s government relies on the Shi‘ite militias for support, so U.S. leverage is limited.
After the fall of Tikrit, a Sunni political leader named Hamid al-Mutlik says he confronted al-Abadi “numerous times” about Shi‘ite abuses, but to no avail: “I told him, ‘you are the commander-in-chief of the Iraqi forces. The militias have kidnapped hundreds of innocent people. What is your role?’ He replied simply, ‘These militias have embarrassed me so much.’”
If Al-Abadi was powerless then, he’s not likely to be more forceful now. So the Shi‘ites are on the march, and the Turks as well.
And then there are the Kurds, the X-factor across the entire region. Kurdish peshmerga forces clashed with Shi‘ites last spring in the northern Iraqi town of Tuz Khurma while Sunni Arabs remember the massive looting that erupted when Kurdish units swept into Mosul on the heels of the U.S. invasion. Neither side is particularly happy to see the Kurds return, and neither is Erdogan.
The Kurdish Clash
But this is nothing compared to how Erdogan feels about the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, across the border in Syria. The YPG is his bête noire because it is closely allied with Abdullah Öcalan’s Kurdistan Workers Party, which heads up the Kurdish revolt inside Turkey. Hence Erdogan sees the Kurdish battle against ISIS in Syria as virtually part of the same insurgency.
Map of Syria, showing Golan Heights in the lower left corner.
Erdogan’s worst fear is that the U.S. will rely on the YPG to spearhead an assault on Raqqah, thereby enabling it to solidify its position in northern Syria and channel aid across the border to its comrades in arms in Turkey. His goal, therefore, is to shut out the YPG by taking Raqqah himself.
Last week, Turkey pounded YPG positions near Afrin with airstrikes and artillery, killing 200 fighters, according to Turkish sources, although Kurds put the losses at just ten. When the assault continued a day later, the YPG accused the U.S. of providing aid behind the scenes. Given the YPG’s long-standing cooperation with the U.S. in the war against ISIS, it was indicative of just how much alliances are splintering and tempers are beginning to fray.
Former Secretary Clinton’s idea about a simple two-pronged offensive is thus pouring gasoline on the ethno-religious fires. So why does the U.S. do it? Why doesn’t it pause and reconsider where it is heading and consider a different strategy?
The answer is that it can’t because all other options are even worse. It can’t abandon the fight against ISIS because that would leave its clients in Baghdad in the lurch and leave them with no choice but to turn to Iran and Russia for aid. The Obama administration also can’t join forces with the Syrian government to defeat ISIS — no matter how logical that might seem — since its regional partners, Israel and Saudi Arabia, want Assad out and Obama has been promising to remove him since late 2011. Reversing course now would be inconceivable.
The U.S. also can’t buck Turkey, a NATO member and an important regional power, and it can’t afford to alienate the YPG either since it is the only reliable anti-ISIS force that is still on the U.S. side.
Deep in the Big Muddy
So America has no choice but to continue with the present strategy. It’s neck deep in the Big Muddy, yet can only push on. Since pushing on is Hillary Clinton’s specialty, she is the perfect choice for the job. As she once told a roomful of angry Pakistani students, according to her memoir Hard Choices: “It is difficult to go forward if we’re always looking in the rearview mirror.”
Video of the Russian SU-24 exploding in flames inside Syrian territory after it was shot down by Turkish air-to-air missiles on Nov. 24, 2015.
History, in other words, is irrelevant bunk. So stop dwelling on a long list of foreign-policy disasters and just keep pressing on.
As Gordon Adams and Lawrence Wilkerson, veterans of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, observed recently in The National Interest, Clinton’s penchant for military intervention and her deep belief in American exceptionalism put her in tune with Washington’s foreign-policy establishment, which is “why a large number of neoconservative national security experts have endorsed Clinton over Trump.”
But the fact that foreign-policy experts agree with her doesn’t make her right. Since their view is increasingly at odds with reality, reality, all it means is that hers is as well. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Hillary Clinton’s ‘Exceptionalist’ Warpath.”]
“This ‘consensus’ judgment of foreign-policy makers,” Adams and Wilkerson write, “which Clinton’s views reflect and support, not only fails to perceive the changed world we live in correctly, but executing its strategy risks producing precisely the opposite result from what is intended.
“A no-fly zone in Syria seriously risks putting US military forces at the heart of the conflict, creating the third US invasion in the region since 2001. There is no gain to such a step; there is only high risk of more American lives being lost in an unwinnable war as well as exacerbating regional hostility toward the United States.
“Similarly, a direct confrontation with Russia in central Europe and Ukraine increases by orders of magnitude the paranoia already infecting the Russian leadership that the United States intends to put itself right at the periphery of Russia and perhaps beyond. Not for nothing have Russian military exercises for three years running emphasized attacks by NATO – even on Russian territory itself.”
The search for stability, in other words, leads to less rather than more. Yet Clinton forges ahead regardless.
“I’m going to continue to push for a no-fly zone and safe havens within Syria,” she vowed during last week’s debate with Donald Trump, “not only to help protect the Syrians and prevent the constant outflow of refugees, but to frankly gain some leverage on both the Syrian government and the Russians.”
Cooler heads may well prevail by the time she gets into office, not only because of the 70,000-plus military personnel who would be needed to institute such a “no-fly” policy, but because the advanced anti-aircraft systems that Russia has recently installed in Syria would raise the stakes immeasurably.
But that doesn’t mean that conflict will have been averted. To the contrary, closing one door merely assures that conflict will enter via another. The United States would have to engage in an immense effort merely to begin undoing the damage it has done since 2003. But if Obama has not been up to the task, a deep-dyed American exceptionalist like Clinton will be even less so. If she is elected, the chaos can only intensify.
Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).
IS Syriassly marching deeper !
“All other options are even worse”. Indeed. But that also applies to Putin. POTUS45 will have to confront Putin, whoever it may be and whether they like it or not. Putin has openly challenged US global hegemony and undermined NATO’s credibility. US hegemony is essential for Israel’s defence and NATO provides a legal pretext for keeping US forces and military supplies near to Israel. Thus, Putin must, one way or the other, be driven out of Ukraine. No-fly zones or other anti-Assad measures are simply the least costly way of achieving that goal.
Hillary Clinton has NO RESPECT for the law. She shipped “heavy weapons” from Benghazi to John McCain’s ISIS buddies in Syria, which was an international war crime. Rumor is the Benghazi Committee has buried this truth under the pretense bringing it up would damage national security. In truth, both the Reps and Dems created ISIS with their insane warmongering Ziocon backed behavior.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-exclusive-idUSKCN12P2PZ
Just as i predicted Trump will change policy. Assad can stay. ISIS will hopefully be finished. US Russia relationship on a even keel maybe we might be able to relax from a global Armageddon. Now i hope Donald J Trump is the next President of the United States of America.
STARTiNG WITH THE DEBATE, THE 2016 CAMPAIGN…
An excellent article when you persevere. I am waiting for
essays which don’t begin with references to campaign debates.
( did not waste my time with any of them.)
Daniel Lazare and other Consortium writers have provided us
with excellent material on which to base further analyses.
After November 8, I hope they don’t all begin with
references to what x or y said in a debate.
—-Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA
If you look back at every presidency since LBJ killed JFK you see the same thing. I would expect nothing different. https://waitforthedownfall.wordpress.com/the-leadership-of-fools/
Excellent Richard Parker…I agree. Thanks for the work and the links.
If the american people vote for her it just goes to show how sick they are in there taking another step to world war
At this moment I know of only one person in my family who has declared they plan to vote for Hillary. I’ll make a more detailed survey on the next holiday meeting, but all excepting that one person have either voted “third party” or won’t vote at all.
Daniel Lazare – you’ve written a really great article here. Thank you. This is like a hornet’s nest. I can barely wrap my head around all of the players. Will read it again slowly before commenting.
Everyone should read this article, particularly those considering a vote for the fascist harpy. Anyone not reliant on the lamestream media must recognize that this is an accurate view. It is unfortunate that things have deteriorated to this point.
Daniel.
good article but I need to read it a couple of times to fully digest the details. The current situation is an unbelievable mess and certainly it is a mess that we in Australia should not have joined in. Clearly none of our business. Our politicians cannot not even run the country let alone get involved in this circus.
Jack Flanigan
There’s only so many times I can say “So it begins” before it turns into “Please, let it end”. In every possible sense. Third-degree nuclear flash burns tend to make life uncomfortable.
> forget low voter turnout how about ‘No Voter Turnout’? ‘Why I’m Not Voting’ by Lara Gardner posted on counterpunch.org gets into this very subject, and why it may just be the way to go. Ref; Apartheid South Africa, Batista’s Cubean election, and Aristide’s Haiti low voter turnouts left those governments weak and in the eyes of the world they became meaningless. Don’t vote this election….why give Hillary political capital?
> I told my adult kids to have the grandchildren watch the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates. I watched the October 7th 1960 one the other evening. It was so much more rewarding with what each candidate knew and could tie to a particular policy or bill as opposed to the Reality TV show debates we get to entertain ourselves with these days. I urge you to show the younger ones how once we were a relatively sane people in America.
> when I see how one American corporation can pay 85 billion to buy out and monopolize a whole industry, while Russia has a defense budget of only another 5 billion added to that corporate sale number I get dizzy to how massive our corporate culture is. Yet, what Hillary may find most difficult to control is the various countries who will be pealing away from the exceptional empire more and more and by the droves. Duterte of the Phillipines is one example of this pushing away. Tony Cartalucci has been writing about Thailands efforts to gain a little wiggle room away from the giant creature America. Sovereignty is in demand, especially since the 2008 financial crisis, and all these wars….time for a new plan.
> for a good explanation to what is what and about this screwy election read this….
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/10/24/election-potpourri-paul-craig-roberts/
Joe – Paul Craig Roberts’ article is one heck of a good read. He nails it! But the elite are making such a mistake by their lying, cheating and manipulation. What they are doing is actually drawing attention to themselves, and this IS evident to a great many people now, more and more every day. Was just reading a Wall Street Journal article and – wow- I couldn’t believe the negative comments re Hillary Clinton, one after the other. People are waking up.
That as a great article. Thanks for posting it.
In his article Paul Craig Roberts spoke to how our presidential candidates are so awful that the U.S. has been delegitimized to it’s U.S. Citizens and including the rest of the world. It’s with this idea that I advocate not voting. If low voter turnout worked to delegitimized the governments of Apartheid South Africa, and Batista’s Cuba, then why would it not work here? I’m probably not even close to having an answer to how to settle this unanswerable presidential election, but that’s all I got to offer.
We had school debates during the 1960 campaign recapitulating the same topics discussed by JFK and RMN on the extant grainy B&W television. Those 13 and 14-yr old kids were more coherent and on-point than either DJT or HRC have been in 2016. Being the valedictorian of both her Maine Township High School and Wellesley College, HRC must have also been at least somewhat coherent back in the day, before losing her mind to demonic forces… or whatever.
Hillary’s coherency is focused only on winning the White House, and that is her first concern above all else. Hillary’s suggesting we establish a no fly zone over the sky’s of Syria coupled with how she will run straight through Mosul and into Syria is not only wrong headed, but it is certainly illegal on top of all of that vicious rhetoric she throws around while running for the highest office of our land. I mentioned the Nixon Kennedy debates only because if you do a mirror to mirror comparison to today’s debates you will come away from this comparison realizing just how off the course we have gone. In short America has lost it’s mind.
I especially like your referral to Lara Gardner ‘ s article, “Why I am not Voting.” A must read.
Clinton’s Slog Deeper into the Big Muddy
the plural of Clinton is Clintons, no apostrophe
I believe the reference was only to HillBillious.
Slog would then be a noun, rather than a verb.
Fred – but I don’t think it’s plural; it’s possessive as in “Hillary Clinton’s slog…” Slog can be a noun or a verb. It’s her slog, so it’s “Clinton’s slog”.
Hats off to Daniel Lazare. Not sure John Kerry’s attention span (between combing his hair) is long enough to get through this whole article. But let’s hope he gives it a try, rather than whine about how complicated the whole thing is. Ash Carter should read it too. Thanks, Daniel ray
Clinton brazenly flip-flopped from no “we are not” going to put troops in Syria to her own version of Yes We Can!
During the third presidential debate on October 19, 2016, Clinton twice declared that “we can” enter Syria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_JCUtfRhMA
CLINTON: “The goal here is to take back Mosul. It’s going to be a hard fight. I’ve got no illusions about that. And then continue to press into Syria to begin to take back and move on Raqqa, which is the ISIS headquarters.”
(video minutes 1:10-1:25)
CLINTON: “It’s going to be tough fighting. But I think we can take back Mosul and move on into Syria and take back Raqqa. This is what we have to do.”
(video minute 6:30-6:40)
Planning and waging an aggressive war is a crime under international law, but there appears to be a media conspiracy of silence on the subject of Clinton’s Yes We Can war plan for Syria.
When the Queen of Chaos ascends her throne in the Evil Office and becomes empress of the exceptional and indispensable empire she will presume to do anything she wants. Let’s hope that the powers behind the throne can constrain her even if it looks like the writing on the wall says, “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
“the Evil Office”
Good one!
Why do people assume the US voter would elect a corrupt idiot like HRC?
The MSM serial liars claim her victory in sight.Why do people believe serial liars?
Trump is winning and will be our next POTUS.
I was winning!No Trulaine,would be the logical response to all this nonsense.
Yankee come home.
Evil Orifice : Grate reframe !
She already said that she would arm the Kurds in Syria to take out ISIS. But it remains to be seen if she can get the Turks to stop butchering the Kurds in Northern Syria and attacking them with their air force. Erdogan has deeper pockets than the Kurds and can make more generous donations to her foundation.
Exactly. This is a fine article, although perhaps it is odd to say that “America has no choice” when one means that Killary’s campaign bribes from “regional partners, Israel and Saudi Arabia” cause her to “keep pressing on” with her “long list of foreign-policy disasters.” Turkey and YPG can negotiate far better without US wars in the picture.
Clinton and the warmongers are classical tyrants over democracy against whom Aristotle warned millennia ago, who must create foreign enemies to pose as protectors and accuse their moral superiors of disloyalty. Stability is their constant enemy, along with truth and justice.
I read in a recent commentary that what President Eisenhower was referring to in his famous statement, “beware of the Military Industrial Complex” (now becoming more attached to the MIMIC, Military Industrial Media Infotainment Complex, meme) was that a war based economy, WWII, was enriching the war based corporations and certain rich members of the elite establishment to a point of addiction from which they would not return. This enrichment did not involve them actually going off to war and putting themselves in direct danger. 71 years later, my age, the madness has not stopped. Since the days of Vietnam, even their kids are now exempted. With a poor economy and low wages for many, the ,”all volunteer force” continues to fill the ranks that was the job of the draft. As an aside, the idea of free college for all will make it harder to fill the ranks with motivated, intelligent soldiers. Shrinking the size of the carrot is not a good way to sustain the size of those ranks. The psychological brain washing of the US youth and general population that the US is an exceptional state, along with the continuous instilling of the false flag of fear and they “hate our freedoms”, is the only fertilizer remaining to keep the ranks from vanishing. More likely the poor and poorly organized “freedom haters” are just sick and tired of our country in their homes. Our rot has been stinking for a long time! The rot in our own cities is beginning to stink for an ever growing number of our populace. People are realizing that those shiny new cars and huge mansions they see are unattainable for the vast majority of people who live in the US. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our water from the taps in our homes is no longer trusted, our schools are failing due to low teacher pay and parents too tired to raise their kids due to financial and emotional exhaustion, our environmental concerns go unaddressed and on and on while the MIMIC swims scrooge – like in their ever increasing pools of wealth. Ours is a country run by a government not filled with freedoms but rather filled with real humans disguised as corporations who show no face. Unreachable people who go about unashambly in their circles like sharks feeding on all the rest of us.
Wow!!
Joe B – Right on my man Right On!!