Why Obama’s Middle East Policy Is Failing Focusing on Islamic State alone leaves the contagion of civil wars to drag the region deeper into disaster.by Kenneth M. Pollack and Barbara F. Walter
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-obamas-middle-east-policy-is-failing-1455579038?cb=logged0.7210164363508158
Imagine that it is Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Roosevelt goes before the Congress to request a declaration of war against . . . the Nazis’ SS.
Not the Japanese—they could never occupy the U.S. Not Hitler—we don’t much like him, but he’s not doing the killing. Not the regular Wehrmacht troops, they’re following orders. Not the Nazi Party—they aren’t a direct, physical threat to the U.S. Only the SS, because they are perpetrating the genocide that is the Third Reich’s worst crime.
Then FDR calls up Stalin and Churchill and urges them to quit worrying about German army divisions and the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s munitions factories—and focus only on the SS.
If America had taken that approach to World War II, it would have been utterly nonsensical, yet that is, in effect, how the Obama administration is dealing with the Middle East conflagration: by focusing exclusively on Islamic State.
The murderous jihadists of Islamic State, or ISIS, are only one symptom of a much larger problem in the Middle East. By fixating on this one symptom—rather than its sources—and then trying to convince everyone else in the region to do the same, we are setting ourselves up for failure.
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