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As political leaders across the world swear to engage in
total war against Isis in the wake of the massacre in Nice, not enough notice is being taken of the fact that the
long-term prospects of the group will be boosted if Hillary Clinton is elected as the next US President. President Obama and the Pentagon have been giving priority to first weakening and then eliminating Isis, and have been having a fair measure of success. The Iraqi army backed by US-led air strikes have recaptured Fallujah and the self-declared Caliphate has suffered a series of defeats in both Iraq and Syria.
But
Hillary Clinton's expected choice as Defence Secretary, Michèle Flournoy, has just co-authored a report by the
Centre for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington that recommends that the
destruction of Isis should no longer be the overriding objective of the US in Syria, but that equal priority should be given to taking military action against President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian Army. A new pro-US armed opposition would be built up to fight Assad, Isis, al-Nusra and other al-Qaeda clones, a process that the report admits
could take years - and "during that time the
dangers posed by Isis will remain". This is not a marginal opinion among hawks in Washington, as a recently leaked memo from 51 serving State Department officials argued very much the same thing.
This proposed change of policy by a Clinton administration is all
too likely, going by her past record of choosing
military solutions to complex problems even when it means fighting more than one war at a time and when the outcome is unclear. As a Senator, she
voted for the Iraq war in 2003 and, as Secretary of State in 2011, she was the
driving force behind the Nato military intervention in Libya that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi and handed over the country to criminalised warlords. Her opinions normally coincide with those on the
hawkish end of the US foreign policy establishment,
whose policies Obama contemptuously described in a famous interview with
The Atlantic Monthly as
"the Washington Playbook". Once Hillary Clinton is in the White House, the "Playbook" that Obama so despises will be very much back in business. A
frightening preview of what is to come can be found in the
CNAS report, which comes across as a caricature of
Washington wishful thinking that is woefully detached from real conditions on the ground.
Comment: Further reading: Erdogan benefits from Turkish coup attempt because it failed, not because he engineered it