PRESS RELEASE
Anti-ISIS War Redrawing the Map of Iraq and Syria
Dec. 31, 2015 (EIRNS)—A front-page story in the Washington Post puts together what is likely obvious to anyone who follows events in Syria and Iraq on a daily basis: Even if ISIS is defeated in the near term, putting Iraq and Syria back together as functioning nation states will be an impossible task, because both countries are broken into a million pieces. In the process of pushing ISIS back, "new borders are being drawn, new fiefdoms are being carved out and the seeds of potential new conflicts are being sown," writes the Post’s Liz Sly.
"A war seen by the United States as primarily aimed at preventing future terrorist attacks in America is being prosecuted for very different reasons by the diverse assortment of Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni fighters battling in both Iraq and Syria, often in pursuit of competing agendas that work to subvert the goal of defeating the militants."
The Kurds in Syria are pursuing their own autonomous region while their brothers in Iraq are moving towards independence. In neither country are the Kurds interested in what they consider to be Arab cities, Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq. Sunnis in Iraq feel disrespected by the central government in Baghdad and by the Shiites of Iraq. Though some Shiites say otherwise, there is no idea of a unified Iraq.
Retired Col. Patrick Lang, retired Defense Intelligecne Agency Middle East analyst, paraphrases Colin Powell, who once said of the Middle East, if you break it, you own it.
"We de-stabilized all those bad, bad dictators who used to keep order in the nursery and now a nursery fight with deadly hatreds and weapons has created a Hobbesian world of chaotic struggle in the non-system,"
Lang wrote on his blog, today.
"The old imperial powers came to understand that the peoples they ruled had to be kept from killing each other. If that meant breaking some of the harder heads... The post-colonial autocrats understood the same thing. American and European liberals have not understood that and still do not. As a result we have now the spectacle of John Kerry (who occasionally sounds like an adult) trying to paste together a ‘peace conference’ for Syria that aspires to find common ground among the various prides of lions.
"The economic determinists and self-justifying Middle Easterners will insist that it is the evil plotting of the West that has brought this sorry pass but, there is no peace and there will be none for a long time.
"President Sisi and the Egyptian Army saved their country from this chaos. Does no one recognize that?"
