Wrong Department

Recent Headlines regarding the U.N. running out of money to feed Syrian refugees, ISIS claiming that the U.S. is in league with Assad and finally Secretary of Defense Hagel’s resignation leads one to believe that the wrong department is charge of our war against radical Islam.  Instead of Defense it should be the State Department.  President Obama’s funding request of $5 Billion for the war on terror should be divided between the two departments with 80% dedicated to State with a mandate to orchestrate a Marshall plan to make a viable political state out of the Sunni Refugees in Southern Syria and encourage the further consolidation of the Kurdistan state in Iraq toward North East Syria.  The purpose of the plan is to have moderate political forces that are efficient distributors of the public good with fair policing and adjudicating governments to take over once the fighting has stopped.

WIthout a viable political state at the ready to occupy a city or region it is not worthwhile to re-take it in the first place.  A most dispiriting example is the blood and treasure lost in our Marine’s house to house conquest of Fallujah in Iraq years ago only to have it all lost to an unresolved civil war. It is blatantly obvious that the military option is useless until the political option is developed. It is probably the source of the Secretary of Defense’s recent hesitancy. His military experience in Vietnam colors a less than enthusiastic promotion of firepower solutions which escalate the stakes and hardens the foe to taunt us to bring on more bombs so as to draw fresh radical recruits into the fray.  “We have met the enemy and he is us” is a Vietnam era lyric that has got to haunt Chuck Hagel.   

The U.N. Syrian refugee hunger aid program’s shortage of funds is an indication of a policy blindness to the vacuum which allows an ISIS to metastasize into an out of control radical movement.  Rather than military force the American counter to radical islam should be to nurture the refugee camps in North Jordan with massive aid organized in the same manner used by the U.N. where funds are distributed directly to refugees in debit card form so that individual families decide for themselves what goods and services they want to buy.  With this direct distribution a self formed representative state develops within the refugee camp to tax, police and govern in a relatively efficient manner and a governing body develops. The free flow of cash in the area lets Jordan create a market infrastructure to service the refugees and eventually a construction company to build a city state just across the border in South Syria. This would be a city protected from Assad’s helicopters with American air power and governed by the former Moderate Sunni Government in exile of the refugee camp.  It would be a city that swells by accepting more refugees so as to expand northward into Assad’s domain.  Let Damascus’ disaffected Sunnis vacate and migrate South, thereby leaving the regime alone with its Alawite Shia followers to eventually retreat to the West shore of Syria.

From the Northeast the U.S. should divert all resources to the independent Kurdistan region of Iraq so that it sweeps North and Westward. Turkey will have to accommodate Kurdish independence in a federated form or lose to it completely.  The reason is that the Kurds in Iraq have an efficient and sensible body politic already built and in place to govern along Turkey’s southern border well into Syria in the East.  Unfortunately for Turkey’s current anti Kurdish stance, Turkish Kurds will coalesce with their southern brethren. It can’t be helped and is part of the process where the artificial borders drawn up by European powers after World War I will be redrawn so that Syria, Iraq and possibly Turkey split off into a variety of nation states.  One consolation for Sunni Turkey is the possibility to expand into North West Syria and annex cities such as Aleppo and drive ISIS into the desert.  Iraq that is not part of Kurdistan is to be abandoned by the U.S.  Our policy of uniting Iraq will not happened and all efforts to patch it up are costly and futile.  The Shia South as well as a Middle and East Sunni regions will naturally coalesce into a their pure sectarian states to develop as well or badly as they decide.

Success in the Middle East needs to be cost effective.  The military solution is counter effective, and very costly, and so is the Defense Department’s lead in our war against terrorist who metastasisize out of failed states.  The long term least costly solution is to develop and nurture successful states which eventually displace the dysfunctional ones. It is a job for the State Department.  The analogy to the Marshall Plan’s containment of Soviet encroachment in post World War II Europe which nurtured war torn states back to health highlights the need for a similar plan for the faction torn Middle East. State building using the region’s consumers is a better path of development for self sustaining moderate nation and city states and for our and the World’s security.