The New American Normal

"The best way to defeat Islamic State would be for the U.S. to assemble a coalition of Iraqis, Kurds and neighbouring Sunni countries led by U.S. special forces that minimized the role of Iran. Such a Sunni force would first roll back ISIS from Iraq and then take on ISIS and the Assad government in Syria. The latter goal in particular would meet Turkey's test for participating, but the Obama administration has refused lest it upset Iran."
The Wall Street Journal, editorial

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (L) holds a meeting with Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif (R) over Iran's nuclear program in Lausanne March 17, 2015. Credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder

The editorial points out the huge inroads that the Islamic Republic of Iran is making in ushering in satellite-state status for Iraq. Mind, the Shi'ite-led government of Iraq is fully in accord, and it is their country, after all, one that they shuffled the deck rather successfully for, in sidelining the Iraqi Sunni population, let alone the Kurds. Effectively creating a tripartite state; Kurdistan, Sunni Iraq and Shi'ite Iraq.

Iran isn't quite satisfied with just one-third of Iraq under its control; it's shooting for the entire area, one-third of which is under Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham control.

It is a situation where one Islamist caliphate-in-the-making is opposing the expansion of yet another caliphate-in-the-making, at sectarian odds. Iran has already succeeded in destabilizing Lebanon, a country once riven by sectarian divides between Druze, Christian, Sunni and Shia Muslims, but which for quite awhile was able to rule itself in a revolving-administrative agreement keeping each enclave from one another's throats.

And that worked until the invasion of the Palestinians with Yasser Arafat at their helm, conducting raiding assaults across the border from Lebanon into Israel, causing Israel to finally march into Lebanon to manage the ouster of the PLO from Lebanon. During that period, Syria and Iran entered Lebanon and the downtrodden Lebanese Shi'ites found an answer to the dilemma of their existence with the Iranian Revolution's tutelage in martyrdom, giving birth to Hezbollah.

Now Yemen is in the throes of becoming another failed state, a la Lebanon. Bahrain may be next. So Iran is on a roll. Well on its way to dominating the Middle East. And then there's the nuclear issue, which the United States is helpfully enabling Iran with, so things are looking pretty good for the Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei's plans for its emerging caliphate which has the Sunni Middle East shuddering with both indignation and fear. That's Iran's gambit with terrorism.

President Obama made a calculated decision to live up to the promise in his Nobel Peace prize; he would abstain from confrontations of any kind that might conceivably lead to war, to having the people who elected him President of the United States point to a legacy of yet another leader of the executive branch taking the U.S. into war, sending its sons home in bodybags. If the U.S. had to pander to a terrorist state like Iran, then so be it.

So is The Wall Street Journal that naive as to believe that it hadn't occurred to the White House that in surrendering their status as global power and international sheriff they would be party to increased bloodshed but not by their hands, only their war materiel, as a sacrifice to be made for the legacy of a President who came to office as a dove speaking of the audacity that he would imbue the office with, and that audacity would be to demur when responsibility raised its inconvenient head?

This is the new American reality, that when the President holds out his open hand in friendship, he will not tuck it away in a pocket when the invitation has been violently bebuffed. The hand would be used to clap single-handedly at the surrender of its role on the international stage, and its entitlement to usher in chaos and bloodshed that the United States cannot be accused of inciting.

Unless one really gives it some hard thought.