US
Former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin addresses several questions concerning the upcoming campaign against ISIL –
The president sidestepped the question of Syria’s Bashar Assad last night. What does this mean? That he hopes — and he is likely correct — that we can deal with the Islamic State and Assad in sequence. We need not ally with Assad to eliminate the Islamic State. It will be hard in today’s Middle East to ever have perfect consistency.
Think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
FP's Rosa Brooks raises some interesting points in her warning against what she views as a ‘dumb war’ –
How is it dumb? Let me count the ways. First: the Islamic State (IS) is an undeniably nasty group, but even the president admits that IS poses no immediate threat to the United States. Second, other actors may be better suited than the United States to combatting the regional threat IS poses. Third, U.S. military strikes against IS in Syria risk inspiring more new violent extremists than they kill, undermining long-term U.S. security interests. Fourth, our current fixation on IS also carries opportunity costs. Fifth, Obama's willingness to embrace and expand George W. Bush's doctrine of unilateral preventive self-defense is one more nail in the coffin of the fragile post-World War II collective security system.
Israel
Shimon Shiffer believes that Israelis should listen carefully to what the army intelligence refusniks have to say –
I believe I won't be exaggerating when I say that the 8200 soldiers' letter is a turning point in the expressions of insubordination in Israel in the past few decades.
Why this time we are not talking about soldiers and officers from the Infantry Corps and Armored Corps who are refusing to pull the trigger, or about pilots refusing to drop bombs from the air. This time we are talking about a refusal to monitor millions of Palestinians who have been under Israeli occupation since 1967. This time we are talking about a refusal to accept the routine life in the territories, not a refusal to accept an unusual event.
Mosaic’s monthly essays are always very interesting, and so are the reaction essays. Here is a bit from Robert Satloff’s response essay to Elliot Abrams piece on Israel –
Let me conclude on the broader point. As the old joke goes: Israel’s situation is, in one word, good; in two words, not good. The humbling reality is that Israel is likely to live for a long time in the gray netherworld between those two conditions. Many factors, including the five negative trends to which Abrams wisely draws our attention, will affect how light or dark the shade of gray will be at any given time. A strong, creative, activist, and confident Israel has a role to play in this, too.
Middle East
Frederic Hof argues that the US must depose Assad if it wants to effectively fight ISIL –
Over three years ago, President Obama called on Bashar al Assad to step aside. Moving this murderous regime offstage will be neither easy nor quick. Yet unless it is a major facet of American strategy, the Islamic State will not be killed. It has been a gift to the Assad regime, one that will keep on giving so long as that regime exists. Legitimate governance in Syria will require much more than removing Assad. But regime removal is the first step, and without legitimate governance in Syria (as well as Iraq) the undead Islamic State will continue to march.
Hurriyet columnist Verda Ozer points out that the real coalition against ISIL is quite different from the formal one –
This is exactly the shape of the “coalition” that the U.S. is trying to form today. The center is the U.S. However, it is not the “core coalition” announced last week that represents the inner circle – not Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Denmark, Australia, Canada and Turkey. If there is any real “coalition,” it is the Iraqi government, Kurdish peshmerga and the Shiite militia supported by Iran, since these are the only forces fighting on the ground. This is why the U.S. is helping Baghdad and Arbil militarily and works in close coordination with Iran.
Jewish World
According to Yehudah Kurtzer, the pro-Israel community in US college campuses needs to change its strategy –
Nevertheless, there is a strategic error already starting to emerge in the Jewish community’s predictable response to these concerns, which places the entirety of emphasis on the facts and fictions of the war, and proffers only a militaristic and defensive response in what is ultimately a conflict of ideas. We can already see it coming, in talking points and flashy brochures (“Five Facts College Students Need to Know About the War in Gaza,” and the like) that seek to educate retrospectively about a conflict whose optics (we are Goliath, they are David) are not on Israel’s side. This instinct is born of defensive thinking: it suggests that when it comes to Israel education, our goals are to explain and defend practices that have already happened, or to reframe the historical realities that have befallen us that are outside our control.
A new book about Adolf Eichmann, written by Bettina Stangeth, takes on the assumption that Eichmann was just a cog in the Nazi machine (this is a bit from a Forward interview with the author) –
There is no doubt: It is possible to have people who act as cogs in the wheels of a murderous machine, who only seek a normal life, a little bit of comfort and career, and do not ask about the bigger picture. But a murderous machine needs more than cogs; it needs a few engineers, too. In this case, after the crimes, the engineer had no problem pretending to be a cog, hiding behind his own colleagues.
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