The Middle East: New strategic realities

After half a century of stasis, there are big new strategic realities in the Middle East, but people are having trouble getting their heads around them. Take the United States, for example. Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state in President Barack Obama’s first administration, is still lamenting her former boss’s failure to send more military help to the “moderate” rebels in Syria.

“The failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton told Atlantic magazine recently. She’s actually claiming that early and lavish military aid to the right people would have overthrown Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, while freezing the al-Qaeda/Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) jihadists out. If only.

Clinton travels a lot, but she never really leaves the Washington bubble. There are intelligence officials there who would gladly explain to her that almost all the desirable weaponry sent to the “moderates” in Syria ends up in the hands of the jihadists, who either buy it or just take it, but she wouldn’t listen. It falls outside the “consensus.”

Yet that really is how ISIL acquires most of its heavy weapons. The most striking case of that was in early June, when the Iraqi army, having spent $41.6 billion in the past three years on training its troops and equipping them with American heavy weapons, ran away from Mosul and northern Iraq and handed a good quarter of them over to ISIL.

In fact, that’s the weaponry that is now enabling ISIL to conquer further territory in eastern Syria and in Iraqi Kurdistan. Which, in turn, is why Barack Obama has now authorized air strikes in Iraq to stop ISIL troops from overrunning Arbil, the Kurdish...