{"id":140892,"date":"2014-10-16T18:42:06","date_gmt":"2014-10-16T18:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=140892"},"modified":"2014-10-16T20:32:54","modified_gmt":"2014-10-16T20:32:54","slug":"7-disastrous-outcomes-new-war-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/war-terrorism\/7-disastrous-outcomes-new-war-middle-east\/","title":{"rendered":"7 Disastrous Outcomes of Our New War in the Middle East"},"content":{"rendered":"

What could go wrong in our battle against ISIS? So many things.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

You know the joke? You describe something obviously heading for disaster — a friend crossing Death Valley with next to no gas in his car — and then add, \u201cWhat could possibly go wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n

Such is the Middle East today. The U.S. is again at war there, bombing freely across Iraq and Syria, advising here, droning there, coalition-building in the region to loop in a\u00a0little more<\/a>\u00a0firepower from a collection of recalcitrant allies, and searching desperately for some non-American boots to put on the ground.<\/p>\n

Here, then, are seven worst-case scenarios in a part of the world where the worst case has regularly been the best that\u2019s on offer. After all, with all that military power being brought to bear on the planet\u2019s most volatile region, what could possibly go wrong?<\/p>\n

1. The Kurds<\/strong><\/p>\n

The lands the Kurds generally consider their own have long been divided among Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. None of those countries wish to give up any territory to an independence-minded ethnic minority, no less find a powerful, oil-fueled Kurdish state on their borders.<\/p>\n

In Turkey, the Kurdish-inhabited border area with Iraq has for years been a low-level war zone, with the powerful Turkish military\u00a0shelling<\/a>, bombing, and occasionally sending in its army to attack rebels there. In Iran, the Kurdish population is smaller than in Iraq and the border area between the two countries more open for accommodation and trade. (The Iranians, for instance, reportedly\u00a0refine oil<\/a>\u00a0for the Iraqi Kurds, who put it on the black market and also buy natural gas from Iran.) That country has nonethelessshelled<\/a>\u00a0the Kurdish border area from time to time.<\/p>\n

The Kurds have been fighting for a state of their own since at least\u00a01923<\/a>. Inside Iraq today, they are in every practical sense a de facto independent state with their own government and military. Since 2003, they have been strong enough to challenge the Shia government in Baghdad far more aggressively than they have. Their desire to do so has been constrained by pressure from Washington to keep Iraq whole. In June, however, their military, the\u00a0Peshmerga<\/a>, seized the disputed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the wake of the\u00a0collapse<\/a>\u00a0of the Iraqi army in Mosul and other northern cities in the face of the militants of the Islamic State (IS). Lacking any alternative, the Obama administration let the Kurds move in.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What could go wrong in our battle against ISIS? So many things. You know the joke? You describe something obviously heading for disaster — a friend crossing Death Valley with next to no gas in his car — and then add, \u201cWhat could possibly go wrong?\u201d Such is the Middle East today. The U.S. is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":138724,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18,16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-140892","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news","9":"category-war-terrorism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140892\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}