“The Obama administration’s top priority in the region is rolling back and ultimately destroying Salafi jihadist groups -- above all, ISIS and al Qaeda. These groups may not represent an existential threat to the United States, but they do pose an immediate danger to the country and its allies. The Obama administration’s other major goal is to limit Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, an objective that the recent international agreement has achieved. After the deal, Washington hoped to engage Tehran in regional diplomacy, particularly over Syria, and perhaps even to normalize relations. The administration has not yet realized those hopes, but Obama clearly wants to cooperate with Iran even as he seeks to limit its influence. Washington cares much less about other regional goals. Ever since the administration’s early efforts to jump-start the Israeli-Palestinian peace process foundered, the U.S. government has moved the issue to the back burner. And in Syria, although the Obama administration has repeatedly said that President Bashar al-Assad must step down as part of a negotiated settlement to the civil war, it has done little to make that happen. The United States has provided scant support to the Syrian opposition, and ever since August 2013, when Obama backed down from the redline he had drawn over the use of chemical weapons, it has stopped threatening to attack Assad directly. ISIS, not the Assad regime, now finds itself in Washington’s cross hairs. Saudi Arabia’s priorities are almost exactly the opposite.”
The United States and Russia agreed Friday to take steps that could reduce the violence in Syria, but Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said they will not outline what they are to prevent “spoilers” from disrupting the initiative. – Washington Post
Pro-government forces are tightening a new siege around the country’s largest city, Aleppo, amid intense bombing. Farther south, they are on the verge of overrunning the long-besieged Damascus suburb of Daraya, one of the first to rebel against the government of President Bashar al-Assad five years ago….Both supporters and opponents of Mr. Assad say he and his allies are seeking to press their military campaign as far as it can go before January, when a new American president might take a tougher line in Syria. – New York Times
“Salafism morphed into a religious movement with a number of political manifestations, only one of which was the blend of social conservatism and political quietism represented by the official Saudi variant. This means that leaning on the Saudis to become ‘less Wahhabi’ is unlikely to have much effect on jihadist movements like Al Qaeda and Islamic State. They and their followers look to other sources of political and doctrinal inspiration, not the official Saudi clerics. The jihadist groups draw some of their adherents from Saudi Arabia, but the vast majority of Saudi Muslims, including the vast majority of Saudi Wahhabis, reject these groups. Saudi Wahhabism can be a path toward jihadism, but it is hardly the only one. Tunisia, probably the most secular state in the Arab world and the one relative success story of the Arab Spring, has sent more jihadists to Syria than has Saudi Arabia. The Europeans and Americans attracted by the propaganda of Islamic State did not grow up in the milieu of official Saudi Wahhabism. Global Salafism is now unmoored from its Saudi origins.”
“It’s understandable that President Obama harbored a fantasy of washing his hands of the whole mess. The United States failed to achieve its goals in Iraq and Afghanistan despite killing many people and committing a great deal of resources. The results in Libya are more equivocal and America’s responsibility more broadly shared, but hardly make a case for successful U.S. intervention. But the alternative to reckless interventionism cannot realistically be disengagement. The region’s conflicts implicate the United States and plenty of other foreign powers, along with the whole ethnic, sectarian and ideological panoply of a region that, despite generations of ethnic cleansing, hosts a staggering amount of diversity. America bears heavy responsibility as Israel’s guarantor power, which inextricably ties Washington to Israel’s conflicts with Palestinians and other regional players. Far too late in the game, Obama has learned that saying that something doesn’t matter doesn’t necessarily make it so.”