Realism on ISIS

[Geee]

American Conservative:

Last week I argued in this space that some advocates of anti-ISIS intervention in Iraq actually seem more interested in fighting Iran and Syria, which are themselves fighting ISIS.

 

As if on cue, a BuzzFeed headline blared: “Washington foreign policy hands make the case for the unthinkable: an alliance with Assad.” The subhead described this as “Revenge of the realists.”

 

“The proposal poses deep moral and political problems for the Obama administration, which has compared Assad’s slaughter of his own people to the Holocaust,” wrote Rosie Gray on the first anniversary of the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons attack on Ghouta.

 

That event nearly led to a U.S. bombing campaign against Bashar Assad in Syria, which Secretary of State John Kerry sold as an “unbelievably small” war. Congress, the American people, and the British Parliament all had other ideas and the war was quietly dropped.