BOSTON — The centuries turn over, the big players evolve, the local battlefields change, but the results remain the same: When external military powers intervene in the Middle East to secure their national interests, the result is inevitably local chaos that also generates retaliations and terrorism against those same foreign powers. Turkey and Russia are the latest states to experience this, clearly ignoring the lesson of their own imperial past.

The military power and its dominant national or religious identity are irrelevant; this universal pattern of history and human behavior applies whether the external power’s population is mostly Christian (Russia, United States), Muslim (Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia), Jewish (Israel), or any combination of these. The United Kingdom and France a hundred years ago, the United States in the past 60 years, Russia, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey today, and others all blindly assume they are impervious to any kind of reactions from the societies they penetrate militarily, and subsequently ravage politically, and often dismember as coherent states.

This critical dynamic is as old as human history itself, and is replayed with the repercussions of events in Syria and Iraq. So this would be a good moment for president-elect Donald Trump and his band of warriors to ponder the implications of mainly using more military force to rid the world of the scourge of terrorism from the Middle East. Perhaps a Trump administration will be able to re-think this approach more effectively than its predecessors, because of the many ex-generals in Trump’s entourage who have actually fought wars and maybe understand two critical facts that the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations ignored.

The first fact is that military power cannot be the primary instrument of foreign policy, even when addressing security threats such as terrorism. We also learn this from decades of experiences of the United States, Israel, and Turkey, who have used massive military force against their political foes, but continue to face resistance and terrorism, in some cases on a widening scale. Foreign powers have never found the formula for how to prevail by using military force against foreign societies whose ordinary people seek to live in security and dignity at home, such as in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Algeria, and many others.

The second fact is that military force used brutally and constantly generates its own new problems of insecurity, resentment, chaos, ungovernable spaces, and mass demographic displacement and desperation in the countries in question, which in turn spawn new forms of resistance and terror. These often manifest themselves well beyond the borders of the lands that foreign armies have invaded or penetrated. Most of the perpetrators call their acts resistance; the rest of the world calls them terrorism. If we do not grasp the relationships between these two realities then we will only suffer this problem for decades to come.

It is important to note that I do not condone or excuse the acts of terror we see in Syria, Iraq, Ankara, Berlin, Zurich, Brussels, Paris, and dozens of other cities. I am not judging terror and indiscriminate violence against civilians, because decent human beings can only respond to such crimes with severe revulsion and condemnation, and apply appropriate, legitimate, and effective responses to reduce or end terror threats. So why do terror and terrorists keep expanding all around us?

Deep, honest analysis of the links among foreign military interventions in the Middle East, sustained autocratic and often incompetent local regimes, and greater terror waves emanating from our region remains largely absent from the mainstream Western and Middle Eastern media and political spheres, with only occasional exceptions. A more accurate analysis would show that all our condemnations of terror seem only to coincide with expanding acts of increasingly brutal terror in more and more countries around the world. Good morning? It is high time to hear a more sensible explanation of this dilemma from mainstream media and political circles than the largely nonsensical, self-serving, imperial, and fiercely un-self-critical discussions of terror that dominate most Western and Middle Eastern societies.

Here’s another reason to wake up and ask why most of what we hear about the causes of terror make little sense, in view of terror’s expanding terrain and targets: Many of the recent acts in Europe and the United States seem to have been perpetrated by local individuals who became incensed by events abroad and at home, and once they became radicalized they carried out attacks such as those in Ankara and Berlin this week. This trend is likely to continue and expand.

The assassination of the Russian ambassador in Turkey follows many other recent attacks against American, French, Israeli, Jordanian, Iranian, Saudi Arabian, Turkish, German, and other targets. It seems that no country is immune. Why is it that all the smart people in the world lack the political honesty to figure this one out, but never seem to run out of enthusiasm for condemning the barbarism and criminality of the terror that they cannot seem to slow down? Maybe Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran who are now part of this ugly cycle can offer us better insights that the United States, Israel, U.K., France and other traditional military actors in the Middle East have failed to do?

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 December 2016
Word Count: 874
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The fall of Aleppo to the coalition of Syrian-Iranian-Russian-Hezbollah forces this week is likely to be a symbolic and historical turning point amidst different eras. How events play themselves out will be determined in the same way as events in Syria have been determined: by the extent of the will or reluctance of individual men and women in power to use force to achieve their strategic aims.

Yet, as is usually the case in this situation in the Middle East, it is impossible to predict what happens next, or how different powers will behave. This is because of an ever-changing kaleidoscope of personalities, state interests, short-term alliances, and surprise indigenous developments like the sudden birth of the Islamic State two and a half years ago. Consequently, it is best to refrain from either the pomposity of giving advice to governments to act in this way or that, or the fortune-teller’s speculation of what we should expect to happen down the road.

We can, however, recall how many different countries and non-state actors behaved in the past decade or so, and reach conclusions about what the fall of Aleppo teaches us about our ways as men and women of the world in our era that simultaneously globalizes and pulverizes its own children.

Perhaps the first conclusion is that the post-Cold War era is finally over for real. The global dominance of the American-led Western system of life, governance, and international reach seems to have run into a serious obstacle in Syria during the past six years, after two decades of the U.S broadly doing whatever it deemed to be in its interest around the world. The deep irony in this is that hundreds of millions of people around the world are keen to go live in the United States and other Western societies, rather than in Russia, Iran, or Syria. So the battle underway is not for hearts and minds, it is for sheer will in the exercise of power, especially military force against hapless civilians.

The end of the post-Cold War era will usher in something new that we cannot possibly predict now. That will depend on the policy decisions of big powers like Russia and China, regional powers like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Iran, and local powers like Hezbollah, assorted Kurdish groups, and other such forces that have real clout in the region, especially because they tend to have a greater will to fight than others.

Also left behind us in a flurry of dust, blood, drones, and anguished social media messages is the concept of “the international community,” and a set or norms developed over the past century that sought to bring order and justice to the world. Aleppo and its people — along with tens of millions of other Syrians and vulnerable, bludgeoned citizens across many Arab countries — repeatedly but futilely asked the “international community” to protect them from the brutality of their own or neighboring governments, or distant drone operators, or wholesale aerial bombardments of urban neighborhoods, or sieges in urban areas in Syria, Gaza, Yemen, and elsewhere.

United Nations officials and sincere executives of global non-governmental humanitarian organizations added their voices to the dying citizens’ pleas for protection. When that failed, desperate men, women, and children asked only for some mercy, like a fast death. But protection and mercy were not to happen for the most part, except for pro-Syrian government citizens who enjoyed the protection of Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah forces who came to their aid.

We must equally see as dead and gone the idea of an official Arab order which once tried to assert itself through the Arab League. Arabism has been a very real popular sentiment for the past century, but it has not provided a credible foundation for statehood and governance. The Arab order has vanished also because many — not all — Arab states have proven themselves to be some combination of untenable, illogical, illegitimate, inefficacious, non-viable, or simply corrupt and amateurish.

Maybe this is the fate of the whims of European colonial officers and drunkards; maybe it is the consequence of cruel and incompetent Arab leaders seizing power for their own benefit, and never letting it go; and maybe it is inevitably what happens when a conflict in Palestine is allowed to linger for nearly a century, global powers in that same period sending in their troops to pursue their interests at will, and energy resources proving to be a bigger priority for the world than any human concept, need, or right.

As the global, regional, and local structures that shaped our region for the past century all continue to disappear in critical pivots of the Arab World — Syria and Aleppo are the latest — we will have to wait some time until a new constellation of forces emerges from within the region that can rid us forever of drunken colonial officers and indigenous dictators, and find that evasive road to justice, order, and stability for the 400 million citizens of the Arab world whose worldly anchors and foundations have all be shaken badly.

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 December 2016
Word Count: 845
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NEW YORK — One of the great battles underway now in the United States is between people of different ideological stripes who seek to write President Barack Obama’s legacy before he leaves office. This is mostly meaningless political entertainment that continues in another form the profound policy disagreements and character attacks that defined the recent presidential campaign. Yet one important episode that just occurred strikes me as worth analyzing in greater depth, because it was Obama himself who made a speech this week in which he sought to defend his anti-terror strategy as a success.

The facts suggest otherwise, and Americans and their friends around the world should decisively hold the United States accountable for the way it has pursued its anti-terror goals — because of the immense impact these policies have had and will continue to have for many years in cases like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Obama’s main point in his address to troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, was that he made the right decision in scaling back huge American military engagements around the world in favor of more targeted special operations and developing a “network of partners” to fight the terrorists. He said the terror threat remains real and dangerous, but that today’s extremists, unlike communists and fascists, do not threaten the world order.

He thanks the troops for their role in “breaking the back” of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq, noting these people “are thugs and murderers who should be treated that way. He added that the United States’ “smart strategy that can be sustained” had successfully prevented another major terror attack on its soil since Sept. 11, 2001.

Like most politicians, Obama here speaks both sense and nonsense at the same time. He is correct to note that no major terror attack has occurred in the United States for the past 15 years, but he ventures into the world of make-believe and wishful thinking when he says that his strategy of destroying terror installations and leaders by building a network of allies can be sustained as a long-term successful strategy.

The most important point is that his focus on destroying the actual terrorists and their networks and facilities is important and legitimate, but this will not rid the world of the terror threat in the years ahead. The United States’ use of military power against terrorists has been decisive and impressive since the fight against them was launched in the 1990s by President Clinton; yet even more striking has been the virtually total refusal or inability of the United States (and its network of Arab and Asian allies) to identify and seek to redress the underlying causes that allowed so many terror groups to emerge in the past quarter century or so.

The fight against Al-Qaeda is most instructive here, because the United States has a longer experience in this battle than it does against ISIS (which in any case emerged from within Al-Qaeda, showing the weaknesses of the American strategy to fight terror). The United S.tates under the past three presidents (Clinton, Bush and Obama) has used immense military force against Al-Qaeda for nearly two decades, using the same strategy that Obama boasts of today. Yet we find today that Al-Qaeda has expanded in those past 20 years, has been deeply involved in the fighting in Syria, and on the way it spawned the group in Iraq that later became ISIS.

Similarly, the United States has been fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for decades, only to find today that the Taliban have resumed expanding their significant control of territory in the country, while some 12,000 American and other troops continue to fight there.

The second critical flaw in the U.S. strategy is that its “allies” in the Arab-Asian region where terror is most troubling are mostly autocratic governments whose policies of socio-economic mismanagement and denying their citizens any serious political rights have proven to be a major reason for the birth and expansion of terror movements.

Obama is correct to note that no terrorists have succeeded in attacking the United States again after 9/11, and that is a credit to the diligent police and intelligence work of U.S. government agencies and their foreign partners. Yet the situation across the Middle East and parts of South Asia and Africa are exactly the opposite: There the continuously growing frustrations, indignities, and dehumanizations of ordinary citizens combine with the organizational work of small groups of militants to spread the presence and impact of terror groups across many lands, including recently in Europe.

All the underlying deficiencies in people’s lives and government services that initially spawned these terror groups have continued to worsen in recent years — including jobs, income, health and education services, basic security, and credible opportunities for political participation and accountability. The United States and other foreign powers have continued to support the autocratic Arab-Asian regimes that have brought about this calamity.

This is a bitter legacy for the past three American administrations and for all their international partners in inhuman, uncaring policies that have wrecked the lives and futures of hundreds of millions of people. It is precisely the opposite of a successful strategy; it is a deeply flawed and counter-productive strategy, beyond preventing an attack on U.S. soil; the departing American president who has done so many other good things should not make foolish statements as he just did because of his impulses as a politician still battling his wild-eyed Republican opponents.

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 December 2016
Word Count: 912
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BOSTON — The Middle East-related policy world of former and hopeful officials, think tanks, analysts, scholars, and researchers in the United States that I have followed at close range in the past three months is more turbulent than ever, given the Donald Trump presidential victory and the considerable uncertainty it portends for the region. This universe is now running in overdrive, with the usual string of study group reports, policy recommendations, seminars, and lectures anticipating and suggesting what the United States might do in the Middle East, amidst irritating unpredictability of Trump’s priorities and policies.

Within this swirling arena of imprecision and speculation, one issue seems to have captured the attention of assorted credible experts and analysts: whether President Barack Obama should use his last seven weeks in office to lay down a more emphatic U.S. position on the status of the occupied Palestinian lands and the ultimate shape of a permanent Israeli-Palestinian agreement. Former President Jimmy Carter and the respected International Crisis Group, among others, have called for moves such as Obama formally recognizing the State of Palestine, issuing a set of parameters the United States supports for a permanent peace agreement, or supporting a UN Security Council resolution that would affirm such parameters that all council members agree upon.

It is fascinating, first of all, that men and women of wise and serious ways would pick out the Palestine issue and the unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict as a specific foreign policy move that Obama could make in his last weeks in office. This runs against the broad trend in policy circles in the United States that discounts the Palestine issue as a priority, because the Middle East is consumed with more urgent dangers and problems. My sense is that this partly reflects exasperation among officials and other experts whose attempts to broker Arab-Israeli peace have failed miserably and consistently, and partly the continuing ability of Israel’s Likud-led government to influence thinking about Israel-Palestine among many American officials in Washington.

Palestine is a low priority issue in the Arab world, according to many mainstream U.S. and Israeli policy circles that feel the new administration should not waste time entering into new diplomatic mediation. This is desirable in the eyes of the Israeli government that wants to continue its colonization of Palestinian lands without the irksome interference of foreign mediators seeking to reverse that process. It is also convenient for the U.S. policy elite that has run out of ideas, after trying many peace-making ideas that all failed, decade after decade.

So it is noteworthy that respectable and serious quarters in the United States and Europe would continue to grapple with the idea that Obama should make a forceful and substantive diplomatic gesture on the Israel-Palestine issue before he leaves office. The arguments made in their favor of such a move are logical and realistic, including that they generate a clear global consensus on the core elements of a fair and achievable resolution of this long-running conflict, and that Trump would be able to engage on this issue if he desired with the benefits of an American position that is widely supported, without having to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel.

Such suggested moves also assume that the U.S. position would forcefully affirm the security and legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-June 1967 borders, with agreed mutual adjustments, while demanding the end of Israel’s colonization, siege, annexation, collective punishment, extra-judicial assassinations, and other illegal policies. This position would be supported by virtually the entire world; in fact, it is now already supported by virtually the entire world, including the American government.

So here is the dilemma that policy experts and advocates still dance around without coming to a credible conclusion: Reaffirming existing positions on the inviolability of Israel’s security while condemning its colonial occupation policies, and giving this position a slightly more robust stamp of approval by the United States and other governments through the UN Security Council, achieves nothing in the realm of practical politics or in changing conditions on the ground. It is a feel-good, zero-impact approach.

If the United States or other countries, unilaterally or via the UN, wish to make a gesture that affirms equal rights among Israelis and Palestinians, they need to seriously explore a more effective approach. They need to find ways to link their welcomed rhetorical statements with practical political, diplomatic, and economic actions that would prod Israelis, Palestinians, and other interested Arabs to actually retreat from the current cycle of confrontation, violence, and mutual degradation and death. Israel in particular, being the stronger occupying and colonizing power, must pay the price for its harsh policies that the world objects to. Statements that oppose colonization need triggered penalties that deter and end colonization.

Statements, parameters, and international recognitions on paper are always welcomed, but they have had zero impact in the past century of this conflict. Any moves in this direction should ponder this reality and change it, rather than perpetuate it.

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 December 2016
Word Count: 831
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BEIRUT — The sad spectacle of the truncated “summit” of Arab leaders in the Mauritanian capital Monday was even more embarrassing than usual for this recurring event. It highlights again the often-frivolous behavior of Arab leaderships, and the massive challenges they are failing to meet. The most troubling aspect of the event was its affirming again the capacity of Arab leaderships to ignore the actual, home-grown, causes of their countries’ problems, and instead to repeat clichés about fighting terrorism and seeking peace — two areas in which the Arab world has failed to make any headway.

The dismal state of collective and individual Arab leadership is far more troubling today than it has been in recent decades, due to the deteriorating conditions across our region. Arab leaders who care to do so have many serious options to address the real problems facing their societies — at least those Arab countries that are not at war at home and with neighbors, under international sanctions, actively struggling to avoid total disintegration, or becoming the world’s leading sources of refugees and terrorists.

The summit was destined for ignominy and irrelevance from the start when during the opening session Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail invoked his President Abdelfattah Sisi’s call for “an Arab strategy of struggle against terrorism.”

Such calls totally lack credibility, because it should have become obvious by now, including to incumbent Arab officials, that during the past two generations the main reason for state fragmentation, sectarianism, tribalism, and now terror across much of the Arab world has been government mismanagement of state resources and national development, alongside corruption and sustained absence of democratic participation by citizens. Those are realities that Arab officials, including the ones who attend Arab summits, can repair, if they wish — but there seems to be no sign of a wish to do so.

If there is a genuine will among Arab societies — citizens and governments — to work collectively on issues of common concern, then Arab summits need to be radically reconfigured to achieve that sensible goal. The first step in that direction must be the capacity of Arab citizens to have some credible input into the decisions of their governments. Citizen participation in decision-making and holding accountable state institutions and the private sector alike remain grossly absent from the modern Arab world. The result is that major policy decisions in small and large Arab countries continue to be made in a whimsical and often impulsive manner, reflecting personal inclinations, emotions, self-aggrandizement, and self-interest, more than the studied collective well-being of the citizenry. This includes decision of war-and-peace related to places like Israel, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and Lebanon, supporting insurrections within Arab states, and launching ambitious showcase “development” projects that mostly reflect the profit motives of crony capitalist circles close to the existing power structures.

Even the occasional sensible ideas, like those suggested by Saudi Arabia and Egypt to create regional forces to fight terrorism, usually remain unimplemented, in large part because they have not been securely anchored in the expressed will and capacity of Arab citizenries to work together to achieve these goals. This is due to a very large extent to the inability or unwillingness of Arab leaderships to recognize their own domestic, self-inflicted causes of their disequilibrium, vulnerability, turbulence, and insecurity.

These causes are big-sticker items like frivolous application of the rule-of-law, the slow collapse of the public education system across the Arab world, increasingly erratic access to clean water and sanitation, and security systems’ dominance of executive, judicial, and legislative authority, leaving ordinary citizens almost totally helpless in the face of the power of the state. These and other constraints eventually usually lead to one of two conditions — either states fragment and sometimes collapse (Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Sudan) or result in authoritarian state control as demonstrated in Egypt today, with somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 of its citizens in jail, mainly for holding views that are not shared by the small group of men and officers who manage the levers of state power.

These structural faults in Arab governance are magnified when leaders behave in the erratic manner that defines most recent Arab summit gatherings. Even when they say something sensible — such as the Mauritanian president’s call for fresh efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because regional instability would continue until it was resolved — the Arab leaders leave this hanging in the air without any credible follow-up action. This is also hampered by our not really knowing very clearly whether Arab populations want to make war or peace with Israel, support or help lay siege to Palestinians, isolate or normalize relations with Israel in its current state, or collectively shape and push an international campaign to achieve a negotiated, fair peace with Israel based on the 2002 Arab Peace Plan that itself emerged from an Arab summit.

Unless Arab citizens can express their views openly, and participate in shaping decisions and holding decision-makers accountable, our Arab region will continue to lurch from one crisis to another, plagued by our self-inflicted incompetence in shaping a coherent relationship between our citizens and our states, who largely exist in two very different universes.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 July 2016
Word Count: 856
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BEIRUT — The failed military coup in Turkey and the country’s many links with key regional actors in Syria, Russia, Iran, and NATO clarify how difficult it has become to achieve political solutions to individual conflicts, because local, national, regional, and global interests of any single party do not line up nicely in a coherent and clear balance sheet of desirables and undesirables.

The astounding reality today is not just that events in Syria and Turkey are intimately linked, but also that Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran effectively have to be seen as a single geo-strategic arena in which hundreds of local and national actors engage one another. They also all keep their links open to regional players like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and global powers who are militarily engaged in the region, especially the U.S., Russia, U.K. and France.

The heart of this complex regional situation remains Syria. In the past few days American and French air strikes allegedly killed over 100 Syrian civilians in the area around the strategic town of Manbij being contested by forces of the Islamic State (Daesh) and American-backed and -vetted Syrian rebels in the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces. This has caused other Syrian rebels to ask the foreign powers to stop their air attacks that kill civilians.

That would be a problem because such air power, combined with local fighters, has been critical in halting and reversing the expansion of Islamic State (Daesh) in parts of Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian arm of Al-Qaeda, has emerged as probably the strongest and most effective rebel group fighting to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. It has consolidated its presence in several parts of the country, especially in the Idlib governorate and the pockets in the north-west mainly. Recent credible reports indicate that it has grown significantly in recent months, may field 15,000 trained fighters, and is considering transforming its territory into a formal province (emirate) of Al-Qaeda, giving it a new major leadership base in the heart of the Middle East. Its success reflects its close links with many other fighting groups on the ground, and working out mutually beneficial relations with local communities who share its goal of toppling the Assad government.

In principle, the United States and other foreign powers want to attack Nusra forces, but in reality such attacks run the risk of killing other rebel groups and civilians whose lives, positions, and facilities are deeply intertwined with it. Weakening Nusra also weakens other rebels. Nusra on-and-off also fights against Islamic State (Daesh), but largely focuses on entrenching itself among Syrians and fighting to topple the government. Until the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey and other foreign actors appreciably bolster the non-Nusra rebels and protect civilians, Nusra is likely to maintain its leading role on the ground and among many Syrians.

Russian and Syrian air forces simultaneously constantly attack all these forces that challenge the Syrian state, including Nusra, Islamic State (Daesh), U.S.-supported rebels, other major rebel forces like Ahrar esh-Sham, and the remnants of the Free Syrian Army, and ordinary civilians who pay the highest price in the end. The latest twist in this drama is that the United States and Russia are negotiating an agreement to coordinate their military attacks against Nusra and Islamic State (Daesh), hoping to weaken or destroy them so that a political transition can get underway in Syria and end the war.

The possibility of actual achieving this is zero, because of the massive contradiction between the many different aims of the several principal camps that now face off in the country. Russia, the U.S. and the Syrian government seem to want to defeat Nusra and Islamic State (Daesh); but the U.S. supports other Syrian rebels who want to topple the Syrian government; and many of these rebel groups and their local support communities are closely linked to Nusra’s fighting capabilities and their common aim of toppling Assad.

Turkey further complicates this situation by fighting against some of the Kurdish forces in Syria that the U.S. supports in the battle against Islamic State (Daesh) and Assad. The Turkish government has three strategic priorities in Syria that often are in contradiction — destroying Islamic State (Daesh), toppling the Syrian government, and preventing the establishment of an autonomous proto-state by Syrian Kurds who are the most effective ground troops in the battle against Islamic State (Daesh).

The interests of Iran, Israel, NATO, Saudi Arabia and others also come into play on most of these issues, making it virtually impossible for any power like the United States, Turkey, or Russia to achieve any consistency or clarity in their policies. The Syrian government siege of Aleppo that is now taking shape is likely to add new pressures on all parties, as humanitarian tragedies pile up, refugee flows spike again, and the bitter consequences of everyone’s contradictory existing policies become more clear.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 July 2016
Word Count: 818
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