How has Obama expanded the drone war?
What are the immediate effects of the drone war?
4 The Syrian war in the global war on terror
What is the war in Syria all about?
The civil war in Syria seems so complicated – is it really just one war?
What was the story behind the chemical weapons attack that led President Obama to threaten to bomb Syria in 2013?
Why didn’t the US attack Syria over the chemical weapons issue in 2013?
Did the US start bombing Syria in August 2014 to save the Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar?
Who are the ‘moderates’ in Syria?
Who are the key forces within the Syrian conflict?
Wasn’t the original Syrian opposition a nonviolent movement? What happened to it?
How successful has US involvement in the Syrian war been?
5 The Arab Spring
What was the Arab Spring all about?
Why did the US and NATO launch an air war in Libya to overthrow Qadafi?
What was the impact of the regime change in Libya?
Where are all the weapons in the region, especially in Iraq and Syria, coming from?
6 In the region and the world
Why do so many Middle Eastern governments and opposition movements use religion to justify violence?
What is the Sunni-Shi’a split in the region all about?
Is this conflict just an intractable war between two Islamic sects intent on imposing their beliefs on the populace?
Where does Saudi Arabia fit in?
What are the consequences of the Syrian war across the region?
What is the European refugee crisis all about?
What is Iran’s role in the US global war on terror?
What role does oil play in all this?
What do the Kurds have to do with the current war in Iraq and Syria?
What role is the United Nations playing, and what more is needed?
Obama planned to withdraw almost all US troops from Afghanistan by 2017 – why did he change his mind?
What was the significance of the US bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan?
What does all of this have to do with Palestine and Israel?
7 Looking forward
Isn’t military force necessary against such a violent force as ISIS? What are the alternatives to war with ISIS?
What can people – separate from governments – do to help end the wars and support movements for freedom and liberation in the Middle East?
Resources
The rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and the US war against it have exploded into a regional and global conflagration. Once again, civilians are paying the price for both extremist attacks and US wars.
When ISIS swept across northern Syria and northwestern Iraq in June 2014, occupying cities and towns and imposing its draconian version of Islam on terrified populations, to many around the world it looked like something that had popped up out of nowhere. This was not the case, but the complicated interweaving of players, places, and alliances make understanding ISIS seem almost impossible. Yet ISIS has a traceable past, a history and a political trajectory grounded in movements, organizations, governments, and political moments that form a long story in the Middle East: from Saudi Arabia to al-Qaeda, from the US invasion and occupation of Iraq to the Arab Spring, regime change in Libya and the chaos of Syria’s civil war.
The US war against ISIS, President Obama’s iteration of George Bush’s much-heralded and long-failed ‘global war on terror’, presents us with an equally complex set of paradoxes and contradictions. The US is fighting against ISIS alongside Iran and the Iranian-backed Baghdad government in Iraq, and fighting in Syria against ISIS alongside (sort of) the Iranian-backed and US-opposed government in Damascus. And all the while, the US and its Arab Gulf allies are arming and paying a host of largely unaccountable, predominantly Sunni militias that are fighting against the Syrian government and fighting – sort of – against ISIS. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the Iranian government is arming and training a host of largely unaccountable, predominantly Shi’a militias that are fighting against ISIS and – sort of – alongside the US-backed Iraqi government.
It’s a mess.
That’s why this book came to be written. It’s designed to help readers sort out the history and the players, identify who’s doing what to whom, who’s on what side, and most of all, figure out what we can do to help stop the killing. That’s why the last questions in the book are perhaps the most important – what would alternative policies toward ISIS, toward the region, toward war and peace, actually look like? What can we all do to bring those alternative approaches into the light of day?
For more than a century, US policy in the Middle East has been rooted largely in maintaining access to and control of oil. For roughly three-quarters of a century, in addition to its oil agenda, US policy has had a Cold War-driven strategic interest in stability and US bases to challenge competitors and project power. And, for almost half a century, US policy has been built on a triple play of oil plus stability plus Israel.
While each component of this triplet played the dominant role at different times, overall US interests in the region remained constant. But some changes are under way. Oil is still important to the global economy, but as the threat posed by oil’s role in global warming becomes better understood and sustainable alternatives continue to emerge, it is less of a factor than it once was. And where it comes from is changing too. The US is producing and exporting more oil than ever, and while the Middle East is still a huge exporter of oil, Africa surpassed the Middle East as a source of US oil imports in 2010.
The US continues to pay more than $3.1 billion every year of taxpayer money to the Israeli military, and continues to provide absolute protection to Israel in the United Nations and elsewhere, assuring that no Israeli officials are held accountable for potential war crimes or human rights violations. But with rising tensions between Washington and Tel Aviv over settlement expansion and especially over Israel’s efforts to undermine Washington’s negotiations with Iran, President Obama in 2015 for the first time hinted at a shift, indicating that the US might reconsider its grant of absolute impunity to Israel. With public opinion shifting dramatically away from the assumption that Israel can do no wrong, and influential, increasingly mainstream campaigns pushing policymakers in that direction, a real shift in US policy may be on its way. We’re not there yet, but change is coming.
That leaves strategic stability, military bases and ability to ‘project power’ – read: send troops and bombers – as the most important ‘national interest’ driving US policy in the Middle East. This means that the war on terror, the seemingly permanent US response to instability in the region, is strategically more important – and far more dangerous – than ever.
That war is rooted in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks – the US invasion of Afghanistan, and especially the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. Twelve years after the invasion of Iraq, several groups of physicians attempted to accomplish what the ‘we don’t do body counts’ Pentagon had long refused to do: calculate the human costs of the US war on terror. In ‘Body Count: Casualty Figures