Here is the least surprising story of the day:
Many Arab governments grumbled quietly in 2011 as the United States left Iraq, fearful it might fall deeper into chaos or Iranian influence. Now, the United States is back and getting a less than enthusiastic welcome, with leading allies like Egypt, Jordan and Turkey all finding ways on Thursday to avoid specific commitments to President Obama’s expanded military campaign against Sunni extremists.
….The tepid support could further complicate the already complex task Mr. Obama has laid out for himself in fighting the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: He must try to confront the group without aiding Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, or appearing to side with Mr. Assad’s Shiite allies, Iran and the militant group Hezbollah, against discontented Sunnis across the Arab world.
If Arab countries just flatly didn’t want to support our anti-ISIS effort, that wouldn’t be surprising. American intervention in the Middle East hardly has an enviable history of success. It would be entirely understandable if they just wanted us to keep our noses out of things.
But that’s not what’s going on. It’s not that they don’t want American intervention. Many of these countries have been practically begging for it. The problem is that they want our help solely in support of their own sectarian and nationalist pursuits. They want America to commit an endless well of troops and arms in service of ancient enmities and murderous agendas that they themselves are unwilling to commit their own troops and money to. And for some reason, we keep playing along with the charade.
Fighting ISIS isn’t really part of this agenda. It’s Sunni; it’s anti-Assad; and it’s far away. Most of our putative allies in the Middle East either don’t care very much about it or have actively supported it in the past. They’ll pay lip service to destroying it now because they don’t want to break with the United States entirely, but that’s about it. It’s just lip service.
By tomorrow they’ll be back to privately griping that we haven’t turned Iran into a glassy plain or something. And then, like a couple who knows their marriage is broken but can’t quite bear the thought of divorce, we’ll be back to stroking their egos and promising that we really do share their interests. We don’t, thank God: we’re not quite that depraved. We just want their oil and a sort of unstated tolerance of Israel.
It never changes. Next year the details will be slightly different, but we’ll go through the same dance all over again. Hooray.
