The Root of Our Foreign Policy Blunders | John Tirman
▻http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-tirman/us-foreign-policy-blunders_b_5484217.html
The question of whether arming the “moderates” among the rebels in Syria would have made a difference in dealing with Assad is anyone’s guess. The argument is that it would put pressure on Assad and his supporters, and enable the “moderates” to defeat ISIS. A bigger civil war might unseat Assad (and might not), but the only certainty of that course is more civilian deaths, already at 200,000, and more immiseration of ordinary Syrians. Meanwhile, our longtime buddies in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar, have been pouring their oil treasures into ISIS and other extremists. Why the U.S. has not used its leverage to stop that is a more important question than why Obama has been reluctant to arm rebels. It is that Gulf pipeline of oil lucre and weapons that has enabled ISIS to win Mosul and Fallujah, march toward Baghdad, and possibly threaten the next obvious target, Jordan.
That all of this was spurred by the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is a truism, though one often smothered by the blame-Obama meme. Much else has contributed to this fiasco, including the Clinton-imposed sanctions on Iraq that weakened society irreparably, the failure to leverage Israel to settle with the Palestinians (which would have isolated Assad), and the absence of an energy policy that would diminish the political and social power of the petro-states. And lest we forget: the arming of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Reagan’s gift to jihadism that keeps on giving. Arming dodgy rebels has enabled enormous scales death and instability, yet we continue to treat “rebels” as if they were the loyalists in 1930s Spain — a trope much beloved by Christopher Hitchens and other would-be Orwells.