U.S. Can’t Keep Up With Arab Divisions and Shifting Alliances

A headline says “Congress forges ahead with Obama’s request to arm Syrian rebels,” the “moderate rebels”. Meanwhile a top Syrian official (Speaker of its Parliament) “calls on the United States to refrain from arming and training so-called moderate Syrian rebels and from entering into a coalition with countries whose religious ideologies, the Speaker says, has fueled the growth of ISIS. Speaker Jihad al-Lahham also writes that one of the two American journalists beheaded by ISIS was sold to the militant group by the moderate forces.”

In addition, the moderate rebels and IS sign a truce with one another.

This bolsters the warning of Speaker al-Lahham:

“What is called moderate opposition sold to ISIL the innocent, beheaded U.S. journalist. There is nothing to prevent those groups from selling the U.S. weapons to ISIL as it is their proven common practice.”

U.S. leaders cannot keep up with the many shifting Arab factions, divisions and makeshift alliances. These are rooted in a dozen different factors: ethnic, tribal, religious, national, political, and ideological. Also: control of resources, rivalries, revenge, securing arms, strategies and goals. These cross many borders of existing states. There are many reasons why the U.S. should withdraw immediately and entirely from the Middle East. This incapacity of the U.S. to cope with and control people and events on the Middle Eastern ground, even when it tries to, is a very strong operational and pragmatic reason. From this narrow perspective, the U.S. is always behind the curve. It’s always out of touch. It always lacks good information. It always is manipulated by local charlatans. It always keeps biting off more than it can possibly chew. It always has foggy objectives, loses sight even of those, and has no definite means of attaining them. It’s constantly treading on shifting sands and sometimes quicksands. It’s thrashing around like a dinosaur caught in a tar pit. It all comes out looking like a death wish, overlooking the impediments and seeking a resounding victory, but subconsciously leaping into the morass and repeating the defeat that was South Vietnam over and over again. If not a death wish, it looks like an attempt by American leaders to demonstrate American manlihood and prove to themselves that they still are potent. Maybe it’s to prove that our tribe is stronger than your tribe and superior to it. Maybe it’s hatred and revenge. There are some deep and dark drives, not just commercial and imperial motives, that have escalated the U.S. interventions in the Middle East and North Africa since 9/11.

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12:37 pm on September 16, 2014