Posted on 09/01/2015 5:30:06 PM PDT by markomalley
This is a tacit admission that the U.S. can’t find enough “moderates” to do the job against the Islamic State, even after spending $500 million to create a “moderate” fighting force. This is an effective admission that not only the Administration’s entire strategy of dealing with the Islamic State, but its entire diagnosis of the jihad threat, is wrongheaded. Even to suggest this, moreover, demonstrates that Petraeus is entirely clueless about what al-Qaeda is all about, what the global jihad is all about, and how to deal with both.
“Petraeus: Use Al Qaeda Fighters to Beat ISIS,” by Shane Harris and Nancy A. Youssef, Daily Beast, August 31, 2015:
To take down the so-called Islamic State in Syria, the influential former head of the CIA wants to co-opt jihadists from America’s arch foe.
Members of al Qaeda’s branch in Syria have a surprising advocate in the corridors of American power: retired Army general and former CIA Director David Petraeus.
The former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has been quietly urging U.S. officials to consider using so-called moderate members of al Qaeda’s Nusra Front to fight ISIS in Syria, four sources familiar with the conversations, including one person who spoke to Petraeus directly, told The Daily Beast.
The heart of the idea stems from Petraeus’s experience in Iraq in 2007, when as part of a broader strategy to defeat an Islamist insurgency the U.S. persuaded Sunni militias to stop fighting with al Qaeda and to work with the American military.
The tactic worked, at least temporarily. But al Qaeda in Iraq was later reborn as ISIS, and has become the sworn enemy of its parent organization. Now, Petraeus is returning to his old play, advocating a strategy of co-opting rank-and-file members of al Nusra, particularly those who don’t necessarily share all of core al Qaeda’s Islamist philosophy.
However, Petraeus’s play, if executed, could be enormously controversial. The American war on terror began with an al Qaeda attack on 9/11, of course. The idea that the U.S. would, 14 years later, work with elements of al Qaeda’s Syrian branch was an irony too tough to stomach for most U.S. officials interviewed by The Daily Beast. They found Petraeus’s notion politically toxic, near-impossible to execute, and strategically risky.
It would also face enormous legal and security obstacles. In 2012, the Obama administration designated al Nusra a foreign terrorist organization. And last year, the president ordered airstrikes on al Nusra positions housing members of the Khorasan Group, an al Qaeda cadre that was trying to recruit jihadists with Western passports to smuggle bombs onto civilian airliners.
Yet Petraeus and his plan cannot be written off. He still wields considerable influence with current officials, U.S. lawmakers, and foreign leaders. The fact that he feels comfortable recruiting defectors from an organization that has declared war on the United States underscores the tenuous nature of the Obama administration’s strategy to fight ISIS, which numerous observers have said is floundering in search of a viable ground force.
According to those familiar with Petraeus’s thinking, he advocates trying to cleave off less extreme al Nusra fighters, who are battling ISIS in Syria, but who joined with al Nusra because of their shared goal of overthrowing Syrian President Bashar al Assad.
Petraeus was the CIA director in early 2011 when the Syrian civil war erupted. At the time, he along with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta reportedly urged the Obama administration to work with moderate opposition forces. The U.S. didn’t, and many of those groups have since steered toward jihadist groups like the Nusra Front, which are better equipped and have had more success on the battlefield.
How precisely the U.S. would separate moderate fighters from core members and leaders of al Nusra is unclear, and Petraeus has yet to fully detail any recommendations he might have.
Petraeus declined a request to comment on his views from The Daily Beast.
“This is an acknowledgment that the U.S. stated goal to degrade and destroy ISIS is not working. If it were, we would not be talking to these not quite foreign terrorist groups,” Christopher Harmer, a senior naval analyst with the Middle East Security Project at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War, told The Daily Beast. “Strategically, it is desperate.”…
Yep.
Fighting each other is something the Mozlems do when there aren’t enough of us close enough to kill.
It’s kind of like he Orcs with “Meat’s back on the menu boys.”
Petraeus is damaged goods.
If we can get jihadis to kill each other, I’m all for it. I’m not sure how we would do that though.
Bomb it. Pave it. Put in a mall.
It would be a genius idea if it worked. The problem is, its been tried and it is how we got ISIS in the first place. They thought, we could pull a judo move and turn our Al Qaeda enemies against our other enemies. So they sent guys from Guantanamo against Khadafi, along with jihadists recruited from all over. After he fell they decided to do it again against Assad.
Someone probably thought we should use them to drive a physical wedge between Syria and Iran; Syria is Iran's window to the Mediterranean, and this would close that window.
So we have jihadists armed with American weaponry pouring into western Iraq, scooping up more American weaponry conveniently abandoned by departing US troops and more American weaponry abandoned by departing Iraqi troops. They are now the best armed force in the entire region thanks to us.
So now they want to recruit more jihadists to fight the other jihadists. Maybe we can arm them as well as we did the other guys, so we will have two jihadi armies armed to the teeth with our best equipment.
The radical Muslims are a cancer the world over. We can’t use them for a damned thing, other than propping up the coffin industry - that’s exactly what we should do.
What can we use any Muslim, follower of a pedophile psychopath, for?
Compost.
...What can we use any Muslim, follower of a pedophile psychopath, for?....
Moving targets?
We could do that by just letting them have at each other.
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