Most Americans are unaware of the phrase “War Between the Wars.” It describes Israel’s low-grade war with Iran, Hezbollah and Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria to stop Iran from transforming “Syria and Iraq into missile-launching pads,” as it has in Lebanon. The goal is to prevent a permanent Iranian presence on Israel’s doorstep with advanced weaponry that could tip the scales against Israel’s qualitative military edge.
Read the rest from The Hill.
{Previously published by the JNS}
U.S. President Joe Biden ordered airstrikes late last week in eastern Syria against the Iranian-controlled militias, Kata’ib Hezbollah and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada. This was in retaliation for their most recent attack against an American base in northern Iraq (Kurdistan) that injured an American soldier and killed allied personnel.
According to Politico, “The Biden administration is taking heat from fellow Democrats as lawmakers pressure the White House to provide a legal justification for (the) airstrike…giv(ing) new ammunition to lawmakers who want to roll back broad presidential war powers (claiming) offensive military action without congressional approval is not constitutional.”
For years, I have written and urged members of Congress to exert their constitutional role in foreign affairs and not be a rubber stamp for executive actions, whether they are kinetic or diplomatic. Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Tim Kaine of Virginia—members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations—claim that Congress must be consulted according to the War Powers Act (2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq) for military actions. Their goal is transparent: extricate America from its forever wars in the Middle East. Last year, the Democratic-controlled House voted to end military actions against Iran after the U.S. strike against Iranian terror mastermind Gen. Qassem Soleimani for directing strikes against the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and bases in Iraq.
Although I disagree that the president has to clear all military actions with Congress, Congress does have a right to demand that they be briefed on significant engagements. Their opinion is to be taken seriously. However, the final decision is still with the president. Senators have many ways of punishing a sitting president if he/she does not take their advice with the proper respect it deserves.
Yet such punctilious study of the Constitution, as the senators claim, regarding the controversial use of war powers by this president is absent in their support of Biden’s desire to rejoin America’s most consequential treaty in 50 years without a Senate vote as proscribed by the Constitution.
The importance of the Iran nuclear deal—or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—and its binding consequences demand the Senate’s deliberation and approval. Murphy and Kaine were against using the constitutional standard for treaties in 2015 and remain curiously silent today for members who demand that America follow the rule of law regarding the War Powers Act, which is legislative but doesn’t have the gravitas of the Constitution itself.
The Constitution demands that the president make treaties with the Senate’s advice and consent, providing two-thirds of the Senate vote in favor (Article II, section 2). Murphy and Kaine want to check presidential power concerning military actions, which is their prerogative. However, abandoning the demand that the Senate be presented with the JCPOA as a treaty smacks of politicization that undermines American national security interests and the American people’s will.
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Texas), a longtime anti-war advocate who also favors limiting presidential military actions, should be applauded for honesty. She makes it clear that military action should be stopped so as not to handicap America’s return to the Iran nuclear deal. This is something most advocates of the JCPOA choose not to articulate, hoping that the American people will not catch on. This is the same logic used by the Obama administration in not adding sanctions for Iran’s malevolent behavior after 2015, lest it cause Iran to walk away from its legacy foreign-policy achievement.
Lee’s wing of the party wants to give Iran a pass on attacking Americans and American bases. To say nothing of attacking its own people, being complicit in the Syrian genocide and its role in the humanitarian disaster in Yemen—all to rejoin a nuclear deal that guarantees a revolutionary Islamist Republic nuclear weapons while it vows to destroy the State of Israel and burn effigies of the Great Satan.
Unfortunately, advocates like Murphy, Kaine and Lee subscribe to the discredited idea that the nuclear agreement ends Iran’s ability to have a nuclear weapon. Although former President Barack Obama said the JCPOA “cuts off all of Iran’s pathways to the bomb,” he also said that in 2028, just seven years from now, “breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero.”
So is a temporary pause in its nuclear program, which would end sanctions and empower this malign regime, something any president should be able to do of his or her own accord? The financial rewards of sanctions relief should be reserved for an indefinite end of their nuclear program, the end of the sunset provisions, and nothing less, something the current JCPOA does not do.
So which is it: Senators and the Constitution only when it is politically convenient, or doing what the Senate is supposed to do and look beyond the political fray and prioritize the Constitution and American national security interests?
As former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren and Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi wrote in Jan. 21 article “The Case Against the Iran Deal” in The Atlantic: “Reviving the JCPOA will ensure either the emergence of a nuclear Iran or a desperate war to stop it.” It is hard to believe that Kaine and Murphy would want that.
Dr. Eric R. Mandel is the director of MEPIN, the Middle East Political Information Network. He regularly briefs members of the U.S. Senate, House and their foreign-policy advisers. He is the senior editor for security at “The Jerusalem Report/The Jerusalem Post” and a contributor to i24TV, “The Hill,” JTA and “The Forward.”
{Previously published in The Jerusalem Post}
You can replace Afghanistan with Iraq, Kurdistan or Syria in the title and ask: Can they survive America’s exit, and does it serve America’s interests to hand them over to enemies of the West?
Americans are in no mood for new entanglements in the Middle
East. The politically expedient choice for the US Congress and the president is
to follow the nation’s mood – by not only avoiding any new potential areas of
conflict arising with the aggressions of Iran and its proxies, but maybe by
also abandoning allies who have worked side-by-side with American soldiers in
Iraq and Syria against ISIS, leaving Afghanistan to the mercy of the Taliban,
and forgetting their savage misogyny and its place as a safe haven where al
Qaeda brewed its attacks on 9/11.
The Wall Street Journal’s Saturday Essay by Yaroslav Trofimov was titled, “Can
the New Afghanistan Survive America’s Exit? An exhausted America, no longer
determined to bring democracy to the Muslim world, just wants to leave.”
You can replace Afghanistan with Iraq, Kurdistan or Syria in
the title and ask: Can they survive America’s exit, and does it serve America’s
interests to hand them over to enemies of the West?
American foreign policy operates under a hundred-year-old construct based on
the misguided belief that we must keep artificially constructed Middle East
nation-states like Syria and Iraq whole, even when it flies in the face of
reality – or of what is best for American interests or the people who live
there.
Sixteen years ago, I recommended that Iraq be turned into three states, Sunni,
Kurdish and the largest, Shi’ite. I was not alone. This was based on the
obvious religious animosity, ethnic divisions and tribal nature of the country
that had no historical antecedent, whose people value clan, tribe and religion
rather than allegiance to the state itself.
The core American belief that dividing up Iraq or Syria is a bad idea because
it will lead to failed states ignores the more plausible concept that, if put
back together, it will not only be less sustainable as a whole state but, more
consequentially, it may be more dangerous whole than divided – especially if
the US abandons the region.
Today, the failed Iraqi state has been taken over by Iran, America’s most
dangerous Middle East adversary, which not only has political parties allied
with it in the Iraqi government but, more consequentially, controls the
nation’s most powerful force: the Shi’ite militia al-Hashd al-Sha’bi, which has
ethnically cleansed Sunni areas for an Iranian land corridor to the
Mediterranean and answers only to the supreme leader and his Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps. How does this serve American interests?
In 2006, Joe Biden, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – and Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations – penned an op-ed in The New York Times recommending Iraq be divided into three autonomous regions, “giving each ethno-religious group… room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests.”
In 2015, president Barack Obama’s defense secretary Ash Carter, speaking before Congress, said that Iraq is so broken that maybe it shouldn’t be put back together: “The question [is] what if a multi-sectarian Iraq turns out not to be possible?”
In 2016, CIA director John Brennan said: “I don’t know whether or not Syria and Iraq can be put back together again. There’s been so much bloodletting, so much destruction.”
MOST AMERICANS have no knowledge that most of the nations of the Middle East are artificially constructed entities based on the interests of the French and British after the First World War, when they divided the region not according to its natural tribal divisions, but according to their own economic interests, forcing antagonistic groups to live together in authoritarian regimes.
It didn’t work, and we have rarely stopped to ask why we want to keep putting these broken nation-states back together. How does this serve American interests?
Iraq was a dysfunctional nation long before it collapsed after the 2003 US invasion. Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party repressed and terrorized the Sunni majority and the Kurdish North. After US president George H.W. Bush allowed Saddam to remain in power after America’s Gulf War in 1991, he took his vengeance out against the Shi’ites of the South and the Kurds of the North, who deserve as much as anyone to have their own independent state. He may not have had nuclear weapons in 2003, but he did use chemical weapons against his adversaries and still remained in power.
America, with good intentions, thought that all of the world’s people wanted Western style democracy, but soon learned that in the Middle East, other than Israel and the Kurds of northern Iraq, autocracy and Islam rule the day.
We live in a world where politicians are afraid to speak honestly to the American people for fear that they will lose their popularity and their ability to remain in office, especially those who seek our highest office.
Maybe it’s time for our political leaders to explain the world to our nation in something more than sound-bites and tweets that pollsters tell them will raise their numbers.
US President Donald Trump seems to believe that we should return to an isolationist strategy. That, despite his bellicose talk, is not very much different from Obama’s actions not to confront aggression even when justified. Obama’s great foreign policy fault was that he didn’t realize you couldn’t change the spots of the Iranian tiger; abandoning allies to realign with Iran; undermining American foreign policy by making America look unreliable to the world; and let everyone, friend and foe, come to see us as a paper tiger.
WHICH BRINGS US to America’s Kurdish allies in Syria and Iraq. These two Kurdish peoples share the same ethnicity but are very different. What they do share in common is that they were at the front lines of defeating Islamic State, helping the US achieve its primary strategy in the Middle East under both Obama and Trump. They also both live in states that are artificially constructed and, if put back together, will sow the seeds for more sectarian violence, pulling the US back to region it so wants to leave.
Now there is a call to withdraw American forces from both northern Syria and northern Iraq, abandoning important allies and forcing them, for their own survival, to make deals and to ally with America’s enemies. The Kurds of Iraq may have to cut a deal with Iran and the Iranian-controlled Iraqi government in Baghdad to survive, while the Syrian Kurds may have to work with their adversaries – the Syrian regime, Iran and Russia – in order not to be ethnically cleansed by Turkey. Millions of new Sunni refugees may flow from Syria to Turkey into Europe and onto our shores. How is this in America’s interest?
I recently interviewed American soldiers working with the Kurdistan military force, the Peshmerga, who are still fighting ISIS. Their unreserved clarity of purpose and their importance as American allies was striking – something Congress, the State Department and the president need to hear.
America’s chances for a new war in the Middle East are greatly increased by withdrawing from the Middle East; becoming isolationist as we did after the First World War, since we were totally unprepared when we were dragged into the Second World War.
A modest American presence remaining in Afghanistan, Syria, Kurdistan and Iraq creates leverage for American interests far beyond the small number of troops remaining in harm’s way.
We certainly cannot cure the ills of the Middle East, but our goal should be to strengthen our allies and lower the flames that would certainly erupt with an American withdrawal. America’s primary goal is not only to prevent the resurgence of ISIS, but – more importantly – to create a long-term strategy to stop Iranian expansionism that endangers not only our allies, but also the world at large. Sorry, Mr. Obama, the Iranian Islamist regime is a leopard that will not change its spots – no matter how many pallets of cash we give them.
The writer is the director of MEPIN, the Middle East Political Information Network, and regularly briefs members of the Senate, House and their foreign policy advisers. He is a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, and a contributor to i24TV, The Hill, JTA, JNS and The Forward.
{Previously published in the Jerusalem Post}
Iran has invested tens of billions of dollars in Syria, and is not about to readily abandon this investment to Russian pressure.
The national security
advisers of Russia, the United States, and Israel are scheduled to meet in
Jerusalem later this month for what former US ambassador to Israel Daniel
Shapiro called a potential “game changer on pushing Iran’s military out of
Syria.”
Russia has, with Iranian assistance, gained
everything it set out to accomplish in Syria. It expanded its naval and air
bases and elevated its international status, while diminishing and
marginalizing America.
However, Russia, Israel and the United States
may now share some common interest in keeping the Iranian regime from getting
what it wants – a permanent presence in Syria. Moving forward, Iran may be more
a headache than an asset for Russian interests. This month Russia expelled
Iranian allied militia from the Russian naval base in Tartus on the
Mediterranean coast of Syria.
Anyone who understands Iranian intentions and
regime ideology knows Iran will not voluntarily leave Syria or Lebanon. Its
desire to destroy Israel remains a foundational pillar of their version of
Twelver Shi’ism, and their land bridge to the Mediterranean
accomplishes both their hegemonic ambitions and represents a major step in
their strategy to threaten Israel from the north.
What would be the price Russia will demand to
rein in or oust Iran from Syria, assuming they have enough leverage with Iran
to do either?
According Yediot Aharonot, the Arabic daily
Asharq al-Awsat quoted “Western sources” claiming a quid pro quo is being
discussed whereby the US and Israel would recognize the legitimacy of the Assad
regime, and the US would remove some economic sanctions on Russia – and “in
return, Russia will limit Iranian activity in Syria.”
The key word is “limit.” What does “limit”
mean, and how enforceable would it be? And what would Russia expect in return?
Would they demand relaxation of the sanctions
applied to Russia in response to their illegal occupation of Crimea and
Ukraine, or would they require becoming a full partner in any new negotiations
regarding Iran’s development of nuclear weapons? If it is the latter, then you
may have the makings of a deal. In any case, Iran won’t be happy and will
resist, and make the usual false promises and demands.
America should not consider waiving Russian
sanctions unless every Iranian proxy is permanently removed from Syria. Last
year the Russians promised to move Iran and its allies 50 miles from the
Israeli border, and that Iran and its proxies would not be in the Quneitra and
Daraa provinces bordering the Israeli side of the Golan. But as last week’s
rocket attack on the Golan proves, the Russian promise was worthless.
Since at least 2017, Iran has helped Syria
ethnically cleanse the country of its Sunnis, re-populating non-indigenous
Shi’ites into southern Syria, providing them with Syrian citizenship and Syrian
uniforms, and making them a stealth Iranian militia that may be impossible to
remove.
According to Raja Abdulrahim and Benoit Faucon
writing in the Wall Street Journal, for those Sunnis remaining in Syria, Iran
is using “cash, food and public services in a hearts and minds campaign to
cultivate loyalty, draw military recruits and win converts to the Shi’ite
Muslim sect… to cement its influence in Syria.”
Iran has invested tens of billions of dollars in Syria, and is not about to readily abandon this investment to Russian pressure. Russia and Iran are not natural allies, and can easily become estranged as Iran’s Islamic fervor could encourage Muslims in the Caucuses to make problems for Russian rule.
AMERICA AND Israel should not fall for the
deceptive maneuver of Iranian Revolutionary Guards withdrawing from Syria to
Lebanon and Iraq. So long as the Shi’ite militias remain under the control of
Iran, Hezbollah holds sway in Lebanon and Bashir Assad remains a puppet of the
Iranians, Iran will effectively be in control on Israel’s doorstep to the
north, with Iran eyeing when to destabilize Jordan and the territories.
Iran is clever and knows it can con the
Europeans into believing that a token Syrian withdrawal is real. The Europeans
eat up this nonsense of Iranian plausible deniability, just as they say with a
straight face that they believe the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Agreement) will
permanently end the Iranian nuclear program.
But is it realistic to aim to get Iran and all of its proxies completely out of Syria, short of a massive ground operation?
Probably not.
Should America and Israel take half a loaf and
be happy if they can, with Russian help, remove the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards from Syria, leaving the PMU (Popular Mobilization Units) and Hezbollah
untouched?
What if the Russians could really enforce the
50-mile zone on the border, as they originally promised?
These half-measures would kick the can down
the road, the easiest option for any politician and the most likely, but that
would almost guarantee that Iran would never leave Syria under the current
regime. That is why the ultimate answer short of a massive ground assault is
regime change, preferably peaceful, by supporting the Iranian people’s
inevitable next insurrection.
Israel has been mowing the grass in Syria for
the last few years, targeting transfers of game-changing weaponry to Hezbollah,
and more recently attacking Iranian weapons and drone factories. But just as in
Gaza, it is unlikely to dislodge Iran and its proxies from the region unless
one considers a massive ground operation and occupying territory for the long
haul.
Israelis think of the Second Lebanon War and
the divisive 18-year occupation of Lebanon and pause, just as Israelis have no
desire to reoccupy Gaza again.
So, what are Israel’s options?
The easiest option is to just keep hitting
Iranian targets while keeping the Russians in the loop. But this falls far
short of the Israeli stated goal of having no Iranian or Iranian proxy presence
in Syria.
With Israel in electoral chaos, putting off
any significant action unless a critical mass of missiles starts flying from
Syria is what is most likely to happen. Israel with the full support of its
populace and the United States will strike Iran again and again in Syria,
hoping that the unprecedented trilateral meeting of the United States, Russia,
and Israel can at least rein in some Iranian gains, and buy more time.
Except that time is on Iran’s side.
The writer is the director of MEPIN (Middle East Political and Information Network), and is a regular contributor to ‘The Jerusalem Post’ and i24 TV. MEPIN is a Middle East research analysis read by members of Congress, their foreign policy advisers, members of the Knesset, journalists, and organizational leaders.