Friedman's Ruined Day

As often noted here, The New York Times' Tom Friedman is worth reading when his topic is the Middle East. Today he writes about that benighted region and, as is typical, says things worth your attention.

Friedman's basic thesis is that the West tends to talk about the Middle East in terms of what we hope or wish were true there, instead of what is actually happening. He trots out three examples of this beginning with Israel where Obama, Kerry & Co. keep pushing for a two-state solution.

The fact is a good half of Israel identifies with the paranoid, everyone-is-against-us, and religious-nationalist tropes Netanyahu deployed in this campaign. That, along with the fact that some 350,000 settlers are now living in the West Bank, makes it hard to see how a viable two-state solution is possible anymore no matter who would have won.

Next he points out how we misread Iran.

In the brutal Middle East, the only thing that gets anyone’s attention is the threat of regime-toppling force. Obama has no such leverage on Iran.

Geopolitics is all about leverage, and we are negotiating with Iran without the leverage of a credible threat of force. The ayatollahs know it. Under those circumstances, I am sure the Obama team will try to get the best deal it can. But a really good deal isn’t on the menu.

A bad deal is worse than no deal, because it obscures the ugly reality. Finally, Friedman turns to ISIS and voices some heretical thoughts.

Why are we, for the third time since 9/11, fighting a war on behalf of Iran? In 2002, we destroyed Iran’s main Sunni foe in Afghanistan (the Taliban regime). In 2003, we destroyed Iran’s main Sunni foe in the Arab world (Saddam Hussein).

ISIS, with all its awfulness, emerged as the homegrown Sunni Arab response to this crushing defeat of Sunni Arabism — mixing old pro-Saddam Baathists with medieval Sunni religious fanatics with a collection of ideologues, misfits and adventure-seekers from around the Sunni Muslim world.

Why is it in our interest to destroy the last Sunni bulwark to a total Iranian takeover of Iraq?

This last suggests we should ease up on ISIS because it is a more immediate threat to the ambitions of Iran than to the West. If, during World War II we could make common cause with Stalin - arguably a worse butcher than Hitler - degrading ISIS doesn't seem quite so pressing.

At COTTonLINE we've argued that it is in our interest to allow the peoples of the region to remain at each other's throats, fighting to a bloody standoff and destroying each other in the process. That is realpolitik.