A Challenging Path to Fix the Rat's Nest: i.e. Syria/Iraq, & Ted Cruz Personality

Thomas Friedman, who has studied the Middle East for at least 35 years, and written extensively on the subject played bare the challenges any policy must overcome to be successful at establishing a peaceful state of Iraq and Syria.  And the two are very much intertwined.

"But to sustainably destroy ISIS, you need to understand three things: 1) It is the product of two civil wars; one was between moderate and extremist Sunnis and the other was between Sunnis and Shiites. And they feed each other. 2) The only way to defeat ISIS is to minimize the struggle between Sunnis and Shiites and strengthen the fighting capacity of moderate Sunnis against extremist ones. And 3) the fight has to be led by Arabs and Muslims but strongly backed by America, the E.U. and, yes, Russia."

"To sustainably defeat ISIS you need a mutually reinforcing coalition. You need Saudi Arabia and the leading Sunni religious powers to aggressively delegitimize ISIS’s Islamist narrative. You need Arab, Kurdish and Turkish ground troops — backed by U.S. and NATO air power and special forces, with Russia’s constructive support — to uproot ISIS door to door."

"You need Iran to encourage the Shiite-led government in Baghdad to create a semiautonomous “Sunnistan” in the areas held by ISIS, giving moderate Iraqi Sunnis the same devolved powers as Kurds in Kurdistan so they have a political alternative to ISIS. And you need Iran to agree to a political transition in Syria that would eventually replace Assad."

"In short, you need either a power-sharing political solution that all the key players accept and will enforce, or an armed force to just crush ISIS and then sit on the region indefinitely, so ISIS doesn’t come back. Obama can’t secure the former, and doesn’t want to do the latter. Nor do the American people — nor Obama’s critics, despite what some of them might suggest."

Link to Freidman's column

Meanwhile, Frank Bruni today examined the strange case of Ted Cruz who somehow fails to make friends wherever he has spent considerable time.  Since getting along with people is a prime necessary condition of being a successful politician, at least historically, this is, to me, a strange tactic.

I hope my freshman year roommate with whom I did not develop any real relationship would think more highly of me than Ted Cruz's does of him.

"Anyone but Cruz: That’s the leitmotif of his life, stretching back to college at Princeton. His freshman roommate, Craig Mazin, told Patricia Murphy of The Daily Beast: “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”"

And I know my former co-workers think more highly of me than the following, witness my friendship with RedStateVt who encouraged me to write this blog.

"The political strategist Matthew Dowd, who worked for Bush back then, tweeted that “if truth serum was given to the staff of the 2000 Bush campaign,” an enormous percentage of them “would vote for Trump over Cruz.”"

"Another Bush 2000 alumnus said to me: “Why do people take such an instant dislike to Ted Cruz? It just saves time.”"

Link to Frank Bruni's column