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US Strikes on ISIS in Syria: Hillary Mann Leverett

Thursday, September 4, 2014 15:57

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(Before It's News)

TND Guest Contributors: Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett |

Last weekend, Hillary went on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Parry to discuss the Obama administration’s fumbling response to the Islamic State (see here and here or click on videos above) and the West’s rising tensions with Russia over Ukraine (see here or click on videos above). Regarding the calls for the Obama administration to expand the current U.S. air campaign against IS targets in northern Iraq into Syria as well, Hillary recounts

“I remember a year ago this weekend. I was on a different program [see here], and I said, ‘Wait a minute. Don’t go bomb Assad’s military in Syria, because they’re one of the only militaries that’s fighting ISIS. We’ll essentially be al-Qa’ida or ISIS’ air force if we do so.’ The president was correct, even though he took a lot of backlash, not to bomb Assad’s army last year, and he’s probably correct not to [mount a bombing campaign against ISIS] this year, because that’s exactly what ISIS wants—they want the United States back in, full throttle, to send hundreds of thousands of troops back and make this an all-out war with the United States to take over their swath of the Middle East.”

And, while Obama’s surely more-revealing-than-he-intended acknowledgment, “We don’t have a strategy,” was maladroit in the extreme, Hillary reminds,

“In the Bush administration, we forget, but it took the administration about a month to come up with plans to attack Afghanistan. They also had no strategy, even though al-Qa’ida had been attacking us for six years, from 1995 on. We knew al-Qa’ida, we knew Afghanistan, but we had no strategy.

My concern is that the president—and it isn’t just the president, but it’s the entire foreign policy elite and bureaucracy—has not learned a thing since 9/11. Here we are—we know Iraq, we had 150,000 troops there, we were there for years, we bombed that country for a long time. We know the situation, and we still don’t have a strategy…

If there were a strategy, it would actually tell the American public the hard things they need to hear, which is that you don’t partner with, align with, have coalitions just with countries that have like-minded, so-called ‘values.’ You deal with countries as they are—like Iran and Assad’s Syria, who are the only governments in the region fighting ISIS. And to have this policy that keeps them in the ground is enormously destructive to the United States.”

Hillary points out another serious defect in the U.S. policy discussion—namely, political and policy elites’ collective and willful refusal to acknowledge that the Islamic State has popular support:

“A Saudi-funded newspaper, Al Hayat, did a poll in Saudi Arabia, of Saudi public opinion. They found that 92 percent of Saudis believe that ISIS conforms to their view of Islamic values and Islamic law. So we have our head in the sand—that this makes no sense, everybody hates [ISIS], and we can recruit our Sunni autocracies as allies to fund even more Sunni militants to deal with this. That is insane…

[T]o the extent that we support governments, like the Saudi government, that Saudis themselves and ISIL have as their target—their target is to bring down the Saudi government, to bring down the other Gulf autocracies and take over the heart of the Hijaz, Mecca and Medina—to the extent we are sending $60 billion in weapons systems to Saudi Arabia, ISIS has us in their sights. Remember that the execution of [James] Foley happened not just because they were looking to kill an American, but when we started bombing them in Iraq. It’s a very deliberate, sophisticated military strategy.”

On Russia and Ukraine, Hillary offers up the critically important but almost universally avoided truth about the self-damaging quality of America’s increasingly promiscuous resort to financial sanctions as a foreign policy tool (a truth that can also be made with reference to U.S. policy toward Iran):

“Not that I would agree to use force, but President Obama preemptively, almost immediately, and repeatedly has taken force off the table, and has said that we’re essentially going to rely on sanctions—sanctions that have not affected Russian calculations, and we have no basis to believe they will affect Russian calculations. What we do know about sanctions is that it will be extremely counterproductive for us. It will accelerate the replacement of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. We’ve seen Russia and China coming closer together, the increase in the Chinese currency, the RMB, [becoming] more accepted internationally. And once foreigners stop wanting the dollar, we’re done as a superpower.”

But that’s where the flailing and failing American hegemon seems determined to go.

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

# # # #

Click here to learn about “Going to Tehran,” co-authored by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett. This article originally appeared at the “Going to Tehran” website and is reprinted with permission.

About the authors:

Flynt Leverett is a professor at Pennsylvania State University’s School of International Affairs and is a Visiting Scholar at Peking University’s School of International Studies.

Dr. Leverett is a leading authority on the Middle East and Persian Gulf, U.S. foreign policy, and global energy affairs. From 1992 to 2003, he had a distinguished career in the U.S. government, serving as Senior Director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, and as a CIA Senior Analyst. He left the George W. Bush Administration and government service in 2003 because of disagreements about Middle East policy and the conduct of the war on terror.

Dr. Leverett has written extensively on the politics, international relations, and political economy of the Middle East and Persian Gulf. In a series of monographs, articles, and opinion pieces (many co-authored with Hillary Mann Leverett), he has challenged Western conventional wisdom on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s foreign policy and internal politics, documented the historical record of previous Iranian cooperation with the United States, and presented the seminal argument in American foreign policy circles for a U.S.-Iranian “grand bargain”. His new book is Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic(also co-authored with Hillary Mann Leverett).

Dr. Leverett has published opinion pieces in many high-profile venues, including The New York Times, POLITICO, and CNN, and contributes frequently to Foreign Policy. He has been interviewed about Iran and its geopolitics on leading public affairs programs around the world, includingCharlie Rose, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Empire and Riz Khan (Al Jazeera English), Viewpoint(Abu Dhabi Television), Spotlight (Russia Today) and Washington Journal (C-Span), as well as in leading publications such as Der Spiegel and Le Monde. Along with Hillary Mann Leverett, he was featured in the PBS Frontline documentary, “Showdown With Iran”, and profiled in Esquiremagazine.

Dr. Leverett has spoken about U.S.-Iranian relations at foreign ministries and strategic research centers in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. He has been a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University.

Dr. Leverett holds a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

# # # #

Hillary Mann Leverett is a Senior Professorial Lecturer at the American University in Washington, DC and a Visiting Scholar at Peking University in Beijing, China. She has also taught at Yale University, where she was a Senior Lecturer and inaugural Senior Research Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. She is also CEO of Strategic Energy and Global Analysis (STRATEGA), a political risk consultancy. Her new book is Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic (co-authored with Flynt Leverett).

Mrs. Leverett has more than 20 years of academic, legal, business, diplomatic, and policy experience working on Middle Eastern issues. In the George W. Bush Administration, she worked as Director for Iran, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf Affairs at the National Security Council, Middle East expert on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, and Political Advisor for Middle East, Central Asian and African issues at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. From 2001-2003, she was one of a small number of U.S. diplomats authorized to negotiate with the Iranians over Afghanistan, al-Qa’ida and Iraq. In the Clinton Administration, Leverett also served as Political Advisor for Middle East, Central Asian and African issues for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, Associate Director for Near Eastern Affairs at the National Security Council, and Special Assistant to the Ambassador at the U.S. embassy in Cairo. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and a Watson Fellowship, and in 1990-1991 worked in the U.S. embassies in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt and Israel, and was part of the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait after the first Gulf War.

Ms. Leverett has published extensively on Iran as well as on other Middle Eastern, Central and South Asian, and Russian issues. She has spoken about U.S.-Iranian relations at Harvard, MIT, the National Defense University, NYU, the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, and major research centers in China. She has appeared on news and public affairs programs on BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Al Jazeera (Arabic and English), and was featured in the highly acclaimed BBC documentary, Iran and the West. She appeared in the PBS Frontline documentary, “Showdown With Iran”, and was profiled in Esquire magazine. Her articles, often co-written with Flynt Leverett, have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Politico, the Penn State Journal of Law and International Affairs, the Washington Monthly, and The International Spectator. She has provided expert testimony to the U.S. House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.

Mrs. Leverett holds a Juris Doctor from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in Near Eastern Studies from Brandeis University.