In The Caliphate Vs. Everyone Else, columnist Immanuel Wallerstein offers a vivid portrait of the strange bedfellows that the rise of ISIS has made, including Iran, the U.S., the Syrian regime, the Kurds, various Western European countries, and Russia -- and he then offers an interesting calculation of winners and losers in the unsettling new situation in the Middle East. Tom So what is next? And who is profiting from this realignment? There appear to be three obvious short-term winners. The first is the caliphate itself. The re-entry of the United States into the Iraqi military struggle enables the caliphate to portray itself as the major force defying the devil incarnate, the United States. It will serve to bring many additional recruits, especially from the western world. And one can expect that it will try to engage in hostile activities within the United States as well as western Europe. Of course, this short-term advantage would collapse, were the caliphate to suffer serious military reverses. But it would take some time for this to occur, if ever. The army of the caliphate appears still to be the most committed and trained military force in the region. A second major winner is Bashar al-Assad. The outside support for anti-Assad forces has always been far less than decisive, and it is likely to dry up even further in the short term, as more and more Syrian opponents line up with the caliphate. The third major winner is the Kurds, who have consolidated their position within Iraq and improved their relations with the Kurds in Syria. They will now be receiving more arms from western countries and possibly from others, making their military, the peshmerga, into an ever-stronger military force. Are there clear losers? One, I suspect, is the United States. Unless the caliphate were to crumble in the near future (something that seems most unlikely), this military effort will soon expose once again the limits of U.S. military abilities as well as the inconsistency of their public positions concerning Iraq, Palestine and Ukraine. And Obama will have lost his biggest claim to geopolitical achievement. The U.S. public supports success, not a quagmire. america.aljazeera/opinions/2014/8/islamic-state-caliphateiraqiranusobama.html
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 13:00:00 +0000
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