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DFN: Update on Military Offensive Against ISIS, SYRIA, 05.06.2018

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Marking 7 bloody years since the Syrian civil war began

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A Syrian airbase has been hit by missiles, two days after several countries, including the US, had blamed Damascus for staging an alleged chemical attack in Douma despite the fact that a probe into the incident hasn't yet been launched.

Daesh terrorists have attempted to launch an offensive in several districts of the Homs province after a missile attack on a T-4 airbase in the province's east, Al Mayadeen broadcaster reported on Monday.

"After the attack on a T-4 airbase, Daesh militants tried to advance to two districts, situated in the desert," a correspondent said, citing personal sources.

SANA news agency reported earlier in the day, citing its own correspondent that the Syrian T-4 airbase in the country's Homs province had been attacked with missiles, alleging that the missiles could have been launched by the US.

However, a source close to the US administration told Sputnik that the US wasn't conducting any military operations against Syria at that time. Several people have reportedly been injured and several died as result of the attack.

Al Mayadeen, in its turn, said that the missiles flew over Lebanon from the Mediterranean Sea.

The Israeli military, in its turn, has refused to comment on the missile attack, regarding the fact that Israel has already attacked the same airbase.

Source: Sputnik

The International News Desk reports on issues and events world wide.

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ISIS attempted to launch an offensive after Israeli missile attack on T-4 Airbase: report

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A Syrian airbase has been hit by missiles, two days after several countries, including the US, had blamed Damascus for staging an alleged chemical attack in Douma despite the fact that a probe into the incident hasn't yet been launched.

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Combined Joint Task Force - Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), which oversees the coalition to defeat the Islamic State, warned today that "much work remains to defeat" Abu Bakr al Baghdadi's organization in Iraq and Syria. The US-led coalition's statement is at odds with the Trump administration's stated position earlier this week.

The White House claimed on Apr. 4 that the "military mission to eradicate ISIS in Syria is coming to a rapid end, with ISIS being almost completely destroyed." The remaining ISIS presence in Syria is "small," according to the White House's statement, which did not mention Iraq.

But CJTF-OIR's latest press release makes it clear that the US and its allies are still targeting ISIS locations and assets in Iraq. Six of the nine airstrikes carried out between Mar. 30 and Apr. 5 were in Iraq. Three of the six were conducted between Baghdad and Mosul, near Bayji and Qayyarah. Two were in western Iraq, in the vicinity of Rutbah and Al Qaim. The sixth was near Baghdad. The targets included an ISIS "supply route," a "cave," three "tactical unit[s]," and a vehicle.

"All Coalition air strikes are carried out with the consent of the Iraqi government," Iraqi Prime Minister Hayder al-Abadi said on Apr. 1, CJTF-OIR noted.

Three other recent airstrikes were conducted in northeastern (near Shadaddi) or eastern (Albu Kamal) Syria, with all the targets being ISIS tactical units and vehicles. The US-led coalition has previously described Shaddadi "as a critical node for training, logistics and revenue and was the main supply artery between the ISIS capital Raqqa and the Iraqi city of Mosul."

According to CJTF-OIR's new statement, the airstrikes in Iraq and Syria are intended to "exert pressure" on ISIS "senior leaders and associates in order to degrade, disrupt and dismantle" the group's "structures and remove terrorists." "This will prevent the terrorist group's ability to resurge and resume its capacity to threaten and destabilize the international community."

While the US-led coalition is bombing ISIS locations in Albu Kamal, the so-called caliphate's men are battling forces loyal to Bashar al Assad's regime in and near the town. The Syrian Army, backed by its "axis of resistance" allies, such as the Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah, claimed to have defeated ISIS in Albu Kamal late last year. "The Syrian Army and its allies in the axis of resistance have expelled Daesh from its last stronghold on Syrian soil," a Hezbollah news service said in Nov. 2017, according to Reuters.

However, ISIS retained an operational capacity in and around Albu Kamal, as well as the surrounding towns in eastern Syria. The organization continues to advertise its operations against Assad's forces and their comrades. ISIS claims to have used SPG-9s, assassinated Syrian soldiers and conducted other operations on the outskirts of Albu Kamal in recent days.

CJTF-OIR says the coalition's airstrikes inside Syria are targeting ISIS locations within "SDF-held areas," meaning the turf held by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). But ISIS continues to fight in areas controlled by the Assad regime and its allies as well, with the two anti-ISIS ground coalitions occupying adjacent territory.

Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal.

Tags: Albu Kamal, CJTF-OIR, Combined Joint Task Force - Operation Inherent Resolve, Iraq, ISIS, Syria, Syrian Democratic Forces

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combined joint task force - operation inherent resolve

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US-led coalition says 'much work remains to defeat' to ISIS | FDD's Long War Journal

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Combined Joint Task Force - Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), which oversees the coalition to defeat the Islamic State, warned today that "much work remains to defeat" Abu Bakr al Baghdadi's organization in Iraq and Syria. The US-led coalition's statement is at odds with the Trump administration's stated position earlier this week.

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President Trump, a foreign-policy neophyte increasingly emboldened to chart his own course, grew testy with the members of his national-security team when they huddled in the White House Situation Room on Tuesday to debate Syria. The split had been publicly telegraphed just hours earlier. At the U.S. Institute of Peace, I listened to top U.S. officials-one running the military campaign against ISIS and the other coördinating the international coalition- stress the need for American forces to stay in Syria.

"We are in Syria to fight ISIS. That is our mission, and our mission isn't over," Brett McGurk, the State Department coördinator for the international coalition fighting ISIS, told the audience. Two pockets of ISIS fighters-numbering in the low thousands-remain in the eastern Euphrates Valley and along the border with Iraq. Among them is the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. "We have to work through some very difficult issues as we speak," he said. "We are going to complete that mission."

About two thousand U.S. troops are still deployed in Syria, largely in the northeast, where they aid and advise local militias that have forced ISIS out of almost a third of Syria, including the Islamic State's nominal capital, in Raqqa. However, the trickier part of the military campaign-stabilizing liberated areas, so that ISIS does not return-still lies ahead.

"The hard part, I think, is in front of us, and that is stabilizing these areas, consolidating our gains, getting people back into their homes," General Joseph L. Votel, who heads Central Command operations, candidly told the conference. "There is a military role in this, certainly in the stabilization phase."

Even as the panel was still speaking, Trump was holding a press conference, a few blocks away, with the Presidents of the three Baltic states. He was visibly angry when asked about Syria. "I want to get out," he said, his voice rising. "I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation. We will have, as of three months ago, spent seven trillion dollars in the Middle East over the last seventeen years. We get nothing-nothing out of it, nothing." He called it "a horrible thing."

"So it's time," Trump said. "We were very successful against ISIS. We'll be successful against anybody militarily. But sometimes it's time to come back home."

Every Administration has had deep internal rifts; every President wants to get the troops home as soon as possible. But the total disconnect-so highly public-between the President and his top advisers on strategy to confront a major threat to national security stunned Washington. Just this week, U.S. troops were reportedly building new frontline positions and bringing more equipment, including construction material, into Syria to improve their capabilities.

Trump made the same argument when the National Security Council met later that afternoon. The President was still cranky. With the recent firing of both his Secretary of State and national-security adviser-and with their successors not yet in place-the generals took the lead. James Mattis, the Defense Secretary; General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Votel tried to persuade Trump to stay the course in Syria for another year or two. They argued that if the area under control of U.S.-backed forces-in almost a quarter of the country-is not stabilized, ISIS could make a comeback. Stabilization involves everything from turning water and electricity back on to clearing thousands of deadly mines and fostering local governance councils-steps allowing the return of life to war-ravaged areas. The failure to fully stabilize Iraq before the U.S. pulled out in 2011-notably brokering a power-sharing agreement among rival communities-contributed to political alienation and the rise of ISIS there.

Trump's advisers also argued that withdrawal could diminish the U.S.-led coalition's leverage in a political settlement to end the war. It could lessen pressure on President Bashar al-Assad-whose ruthless response to peaceful protests sparked a war that has killed half a million people and left more than half of the country's twenty-two million residents displaced-to make concessions. The State Department issued a scathing condemnation of the Assad regime on Wednesday, the first anniversary of Syria's chemical-weapons attack on civilians in Khan Sheikhoun, which killed or injured hundreds of men, women, and children. A year after Trump launched a cruise-missile strike in response to the chemical attack and declared that "no child of God should ever suffer such horror," the State Department said, "There has been no let-up in the atrocities committed by the Syrian regime, enabled by its backers, in flagrant violation of international law."

Yet Trump, in the White House meeting, dismissed argument after argument about a longer timetable to finish the mission in Syria. A premature withdrawal, Trump's advisers posited, would also take the United States out of the game in a country that is the geostrategic center of the Middle East-and borders five countries allied with the U.S.

The generals warned that an already complex war in Syria, now beginning its eighth year, would get even more complicated. They cited the dangers of the Assad regime or other foreign powers-including Iran and its allies in Hezbollah-filling the vacuum in areas that U.S. troops have worked so hard to help liberate. Without the constant threat of U.S. airpower, Russia could feel emboldened to operate in a broader swath of territory. Turkey recently intervened in northern Syria in a campaign targeting U.S. allies-drawing them away from the war against ISIS. A decision to pull out could also strand the Kurds, whose forces have fought most fiercely against ISIS in Syria.

Trump was unconvinced by-and impatient with-the advice, sources familiar with the debate told me. More than once he said, "Why do I have to be the one to do this?" one told me.

Trump's Republican allies in Congress have warned him against premature withdrawal. "It'd be the single worst decision the President could make," Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Fox News on Sunday. "We got ISIL on the ropes. You want to let 'em off the ropes, remove American soldiers," Graham said, using another term for the Islamic State. "This is a disaster in the making," he said. "There are over three thousand ISIS fighters still roaming around Syria. If we withdrew our troops anytime soon, ISIS would come back, the war between Turkey and the Kurds would get out of hand, and you'd be giving Damascus to the Iranians without an American presence."

In recent days, Middle East allies-including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and even Turkey-have also cautioned the President against withdrawing precipitously from Syria, diplomats told me. The appeals seemed only to further irritate Trump. Just hours earlier, he had referred publicly to his recent conversation with King Salman of Saudi Arabia. "Well, you know, you want us to stay-maybe you're going to have to pay," Trump said, at the press conference.

The President's calculation sometimes seemed to be exactly that-transactional, or from a ledger. At one point, he said that the United States should not be building bridges in Raqqa when it wasn't building them in Wisconsin, the well-placed source told me. No argument changed his mind.

On Wednesday, the White House issued a terse four-sentence statement announcing the outcome of the National Security Council meeting. "The military mission to eradicate ISIS in Syria is coming to a rapid end," it began. The U.S., the statement continued, remained committed to eliminating the small ISIS presence in Syria but now expects "countries in the region and beyond, plus the United Nations, to work toward peace and ensure that ISIS never re-emerges." The statement did not provide a timetable. Trump repeatedly chastised President Obama for giving advance notice of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. But countries in the coalition believe that the time frame is four to six months.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday that the United States is moving into a transition to allow local forces to assume control of security, with the goal of getting allies and partners in the region to do more, pay more, and deploy more. "They have a far greater risk, being right there in that region with ISIS," she said. If there is any chance of ISIS reëmerging, she said, "they're the ones that are at the greatest risk, so they should be stepping up and doing more."

The U.S. decision came on the same day that the leaders of Russia, Iran, and Turkey met in Ankara to discuss their next steps on Syria. The troika has virtually hijacked a peace effort long led by the United Nations. At a press conference afterward, President Vladimir Putin of Russia said that the three nations had agreed to expand and consolidate their efforts in post-conflict Syria. U.S. officials have been concerned that an imminent U.S. withdrawal could clear the way for Russia and Iran, particularly, to control the future Syrian political landscape, with military bases and access to the Mediterranean-a geostrategic game-changer.

Amid the growing uncertainty about Syria, ISIS reëmerged on Wednesday, after a long silence. In a communiqué posted on social media, ISIS fighters reaffirmed their allegiance to Baghdadi, the Islamic State's emir, who has not been heard from since November. They pledged, "To infuriate and terrorize the infidels, we renew our pledge of loyalty to the commander of the faithful and the caliph of the Muslims." For them, the caliphate is not finished.

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Trump Defies His Generals on ISIS and Syria

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President Trump, a foreign-policy neophyte increasingly emboldened to chart his own course, grew testy with the members of his national-security team when they huddled in the White House Situation Room on Tuesday to debate Syria. The split had been publicly telegraphed just hours earlier. At the U.S.

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The Pentagon denied it was conducting air strikes in Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical attack on civilians, despite reports from Syrian media.

Syria's state-run news agency said the military's air defenses confronted a missile attack on air base in central Syria early Monday and shot down eight missiles.

The report on SANA says the attack on the T4 military air base in Homs province "is likely to be an American aggression."

SANA says the attack resulted in a number of casualties. Rami Abdurrahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, said 14 people were killed, most of them Iranians or members of Iran-backed groups.

A statement released by the Department of Defense Sunday night denied it had fired missiles and said it would "continue to closely watch the situation and support the ongoing diplomatic efforts to hold those who use chemical weapons, in Syria and otherwise, accountable."

President Trump lashed out Sunday against the alleged chemical weapons attack by Syrian government forces on civilians, ripping "that animal Assad" and laying blame for the Syrian president's power on Russia, Iran and even former president Barack Obama.

Trump's tweet storm came hours after the White Helmets, a civil defense force in rebel-held areas of Syria, claimed that entire families were gassed to death Saturday night in Douma and Eastern Ghouta. The group, which put the death toll at more than 40, said many residents were hiding in cellars, suffocating from poison gas.

Syrian state media said Sunday that rebel forces led by the Army of Islam had agreed to leave Douma within 48 hours as Syrian leader Bashar Assad tightened his grip on rebel strongholds around Damascus.

"Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria," Trump said on Twitter. "Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world."

More: Syria chemical attack would be the eighth since Trump took office

'Children are dying before our eyes': Images from suspected Syrian gas attack again tell the story

The attack came less than a week after Trump, speaking about Syria, declared: "I want to bring our troops back home." A day later, however, the White House signaled that a U.S. withdrawal from Syria is not imminent.

On Twitter on Sunday, Trump demanded that the area be opened up for medical help and verification of a chemical attack, which would constitute a war crime. He called the attack another "humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever. SICK!"

Trump blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran for providing support to Assad. Trump also appeared to blame Obama for allowing Assad to cross his predecessor's "stated Red Line In The Sand." If Obama had acted years ago, Trump said, the Syrian crisis would have ended long ago and Assad would have passed into history.

The United Nations Security Council on Monday will hold an emergency meeting to discuss the suspected chemical attack, reports the Associated Press. The meeting was called by the U.S., United Kingdom, France, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Kuwait, Peru and the Ivory Coast, says the AP.

Reuters says the U.N. Security Council will meet twice on Monday, following a request from Russia as well to discuss "international threats to peace and security."

A statement from U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres calls on all parties to cease fighting.

"The Secretary-General is particularly alarmed by allegations that chemical weapons have been used against civilian populations in Douma," it said in part. "While the United Nations is not in a position to verify these reports, the Secretary-General notes that any use of chemical weapons, if confirmed, is abhorrent, and requires a thorough investigation."

More: How do we prevent ISIS 2.0? Withdrawing from Syria is not the answer.

The attack comes a year to the day after Trump authorized a military strike on a Syrian government airfield after a sarin gas attack that killed at least 85 people in Khan Shaykhun.

Russia on Sunday said allegations of a chemical attack are a ruse aimed at justifying military strikes by foreign forces and warned of grave consequences in case of any military retaliation.

"It is necessary to once again caution that military intervention under false and fabricated pretexts in Syria, where the Russian servicemen stay at the request of the legitimate government, is absolutely unacceptable and may trigger the gravest consequences," the Russian Embassy in Washington said on its Facebook page.

The White Helmets said more than 500 people, most of them women and children, were brought to local medical centers with symptoms consistent with exposure to a chemical agent. Patients showed signs of respiratory distress, burned eyes, foaming of the mouth and other symptoms that included "emission of chlorine-like odor," the group said.

The reports could not immediately be independently verified. Syria called the claims "fabrications," and Iran and Russia also denied that any chemical weapons were used.

More: CIA Director Pompeo challenged Trump plans to withdraw from Syria

More: Syria's civil war has been raging for 7 years and no end in sight

Bahram Qasemi, spokesman for the Iran Foreign Ministry, said the claims were an excuse for U.S. military action. Maj. Gen. Yuri Yevtushenko, who heads Russia's center for Syrian reconciliation, blamed the allegations on White Helmets' "fake news."

"We strongly reject this information and confirm readiness after Douma is liberated from militants to send Russian specialists in radiation, chemical and biological protection to collect data to confirm that these statements are fabricated," Yevtushenko said.

The civil war has been raging in Syria for seven years. The U.N. estimates more than 400,000 people have died. An additional 5 million have fled the country, and 6 million more have abandoned their homes but remain within the beleaguered nation of less than 20 million people.

Syrians are no strangers to chemical weapons. An attack in Syria's Idlib province by government forces a year ago killed almost 100 people, including women and children. An investigation by the international watchdog Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed that sarin nerve gas was used on the town of Khan Shaykhun.

Photos and video of the aftermath that included children dying on camera sparked global outrage directed at the Assad regime. Trump cited the images when he launched cruise missiles on a Syrian-controlled air base.

Fred Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said that the use of chemical agents again would be a "signal of utter contempt" for the U.S.

"Assad may be interpreting (Trump's) recent statements about the United States 'getting out of Syria' as a green light to do what he wants," Hof said. He also warned that Obama's "erasure" of the chemical weapons red line in 2013 had destabilizing implications - including damage to America's credibility - far beyond Syria. Hof said Trump can either erase his own red line or take action, as he did in 2017.

Sen. John McCain said in a statement on Sunday that Assad and his Russian and Iranian supporters have been "emboldened by American inaction."

"President Trump last week signaled to the world that the United States would prematurely withdraw from Syria. Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have heard him," McCain said.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called the chemical weapons report "grim." The European Union called it a matter of "grave concern" and called on Syria, Russia and Iran to prevent further attacks.

The Syrian Women's Political Movement on Sunday urged the international community to end its "blatant complacency." The group issued a statement calling for the U.N. to send in teams to investigate Saturday's attack and to treat the victims.

"The ongoing silence of the international community and its failure to protect civilians in Syria is a disgrace for humanity," the statement said. "One that history will remember."
Contributing: Oren Dorell, and the Associated Press.
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Pentagon denies conducting air strikes in Syria after alleged chemical attack

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CLOSE The Pentagon denied it was conducting air strikes in Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical attack on civilians, despite reports from Syrian media. Syria's state-run news agency said the military's air defenses confronted a missile attack on air base in central Syria early Monday and shot down eight missiles.

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Overseas, the United States is engaged in real wars in which bombs are dropped, missiles are launched, and people (generally not Americans) are killed, wounded, uprooted, and displaced. Yet here at home, there's nothing real about those wars. Here, it's phony war all the way. In the last 17 years of " forever war," this nation hasn't for one second been mobilized. Taxes are being cut instead of raised. Wartime rationing is a faint memory from the World War II era. No one is being required to sacrifice a thing.

Now, ask yourself a simple question: What sort of war requires no sacrifice? What sort of war requires that almost no one in the country waging it take the slightest notice of it?

America's conflicts in distant lands rumble on, even as individual attacks flash like lightning in our news feeds. "Shock and awe" campaigns in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, initially celebrated as decisive and game changing, ultimately led nowhere. Various "surges" produced much sound and fury, but missions were left decidedly unaccomplished. More recent strikes by the Trump administration against a Syrian air base or the first use of the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, the MOAB super-bomb, in Afghanistan flared brightly, only to fizzle even more quickly. These versions of the German blitzkrieg-style attacks of World War II have been lightning assaults that promised much but in the end delivered little. As these flashes of violence send America's enemies of the moment (and nearby civilians) to early graves, the homeland (that's us) slumbers. Sounds of war, if heard at all, come from TV or video screens or Hollywood films in local multiplexes.

We are, in fact, kept isolated from Washington's wars, even as America's warriors traverse a remarkable expanse of the globe, from the Philippines through the Greater Middle East deep into Africa. As conflicts flare and sputter, ramp up and down and up again, Americans have been placed in a form of behavioral lockdown. Little more is expected of us than to be taxpaying spectators or, when it comes to the U.S. military, starry-eyed cheerleaders. Most of the time, those conflicts are not just out of sight, but meant to be out of mind as well. Rare exceptions are moments when our government asks us to mourn U.S. service members like Navy SEAL William "Ryan" Owens, killed in an abortive raid President Trump ordered in Yemen in early 2017 in which children also died (though that was something just about no one here even noticed). While the military has been deploying and striking on a global scale, we've been told from the very first moments of Washington's self-proclaimed war on terror to go shopping or to Disney World and let the experts handle it.

We have, in short, been sidelined in what, to draw on the lexicon of World War II, might be thought of as a sitzkrieg, the German term for phony war.

A bizarre version of blitzkrieg overseas and an even stranger version of sitzkrieg at home could be said to define this peculiar American moment. These two versions exist in a curiously yin-yang relationship to each other. For how can a nation's military be engaged in warfare at a near-global level -- blitzing people across vast swaths of the globe -- when its citizens are sitting on their collective duffs, demobilized and mentally disarmed? Such a schizoid state of mind can exist only when it's in the interest of those in power. Appeals to "patriotism" (especially to revering "our" troops) and an overwhelming atmosphere of secrecy to preserve American "safety" and "security" have been remarkably effective in controlling and stifling interest in the country's wars and their costs, long before such an interest might morph into dissent or opposition. If you want an image of just how effective this has been, recall the moment in July 2016 when small numbers of earnest war protesters quite literally had the lights turned off on them at the Democratic National Convention.

To use an expression I heard more than a few times in my years in the military, when it comes to its wars, the government treats the people like mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them bullshit.
The Fog of Phony War
Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously spoke of the " fog of war," the confusion created by and inherent uncertainty built into that complex human endeavor. As thick as that fog often is, in these years the fog of phony war has proven even thicker and more disorienting.

By its very nature, a real war of necessity, of survival, like the Civil War or World War II brings with it clarity of purpose and a demand for results. Poorly performing leaders are relieved of command when not killed outright in combat. Consider the number of mediocre Union generals Abraham Lincoln cycled through before he found Ulysses S. Grant. Consider the number of senior officers relieved during World War II by General George C. Marshall, who knew that, in a global struggle against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, subpar performances couldn't be tolerated. In wars of necessity or survival, moreover, the people are invariably involved. In part, they may have little choice, but they also know (or at least believe they know) " why we fight " -- and generally approve of it.

Admittedly, even in wars of necessity there are always those who will find ways to duck service. In the Civil War, for example, the rich could pay others to fight in their place. But typically in such wars, everyone serves in some capacity. Necessity demands it.

The definition of twenty-first-century phony war, on the other hand, is its lack of clarity, its lack of purpose, its lack of any true imperative for national survival (despite a never-ending hysteria over the "terrorist threat"). The fog it produces is especially disorienting. Americans today have little idea "why we fight" other than a vague sense of fighting them over there (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Niger, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, etc.) so they won't kill us here, to cite George W. Bush's rationale for launching the war on terror. Meanwhile, with such a lack of national involvement and accountability, there's no pressure for the Pentagon or the rest of the national security state to up its game; there's no one even to point out that wherever the U.S. military has gone into battle in these years, yet more terror groups have subsequently sprouted like so many malignant weeds. Bureaucracy and mediocrity go unchallenged; massive boosts in military spending reward incompetency and the creation of a series of quagmire-like " generational " wars.

Think of it as war on a Möbius strip. More money shoveled into the Pentagon brings more chaos overseas, more imperial overreach, and undoubtedly more blowback here at home, all witnessed -- or rather largely ignored -- by a sitzkrieg citizenry.

Of course, for those fighting the wars, they are anything but phony. It's just that their experience remains largely isolated from that of the rest of us, an isolation that only serves to elevate post-traumatic stress disorder rates, suicides, and the like. When today's troops come home, they generally suffer in silence and among themselves.
America's New (Phony) National Defense Strategy
Even phony wars need enemies. In fact, they may need them more (and more of them) than real wars do. No surprise then that the Trump administration's recently announced National Defense Strategy (NDS) offers a laundry list of such enemies. China and Russia top it as "revisionist powers" looking to reverse America's putative victory over Communism in the Cold War. "Rogue" powers like North Korea and Iran are singled out as especially dangerous because of their nuclear ambitions. (The United States, of course, doesn't have a "rogue" bone in its body, even if it is now devoting at least $1.2 trillion to building a new generation of more usable nuclear weapons.) Nor does the NDS neglect Washington's need to hammer away at global terrorists until the end of time or to extend "full-spectrum dominance" not just to the traditional realms of combat (land, sea, and air) but also to space and cyberspace.

Amid such a plethora of enemies, only one thing is missing in America's new defense strategy, the very thing that's been missing all these years, that makes twenty-first-century American war so phony: any sense of national mobilization and shared sacrifice (or its opposite, antiwar resistance). If the United States truly faces all these existential threats to our democracy and our way of life, what are we doing frittering away more than $45 billion annually in a quagmire war in Afghanistan? What are we doing spending staggering sums on exotic weaponry like the F-35 jet fighter (total projected program cost: $1.45 trillion) when we have far more pressing national needs to deal with?

Like so much else in Washington in these years, the NDS doesn't represent a strategy for real war, only a call for more of the same raised to a higher power. That mainly means more money for the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and related "defense" agencies, facilitating more blitz attacks on various enemies overseas. The formula -- serial blitzkrieg abroad, serial sitzkrieg in the homeland -- adds up to victory, but only for the military-industrial complex.
Solutions to Sitzkrieg
Of course, one solution to phony war would be to engage in real war, but for that the famed American way of life would actually have to be endangered. (By Afghans? Syrians? Iraqis? Yemenis? Really?) Congress would then have to declare war; the public would have to be mobilized, a draft undoubtedly reinstated, and taxes raised. And those would be just for starters. A clear strategy would have to be defined and losing generals demoted or dismissed.

Who could imagine such an approach when it comes to America's forever wars? Another solution to phony war would be for the American people to actually start paying attention. The Pentagon would then have to be starved of funds. (With less money, admirals and generals might actually have to think.) All those attacks overseas that blitzed innocents and spread chaos would have to end. Here at home, the cheerleaders would have to put down the pom-poms, stop mindlessly praising the troops for their service, and pick up a few protest signs.

In point of fact, America's all-too-real wars overseas aren't likely to end until the phony war here at home is dispatched to oblivion.

A final thought: Americans tell pollsters that, after all these years of failed wars abroad, they continue to trust the military more than any other societal institution. Consistent with phony war, however, much of that trust is based on ignorance, on not really knowing what that military is doing overseas. So, is there a chance that, one of these days, Americans might actually begin to pay some attention to "their" wars? And if so, would those polls begin to change and how might that military, which has experienced its share of blood, sweat, and tears, respond to such a loss of societal prestige? Beware the anger of the legions.

Faith in institutions undergirds democracy. Keeping the people deliberately demobilized and in the dark about the costs and carnage of America's wars follows a pattern of governmental lying and deceit that stretches from the Vietnam War to the Iraq Wars of 1991 and 2003, to military operations in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere today. Systemic lies and the phony war that goes with them continue to contribute to a slow-motion process of political and social disintegration that could result in a much grimmer future for this country: perhaps an authoritarian one; certainly, a more chaotic and less democratic one.

Societal degradation and democratic implosion, caused in part by endless phony war and the lies associated with it, are this country's real existential enemies, even if you can't find them listed in any National Defense Strategy. Indeed, the price tag for America's wars may in the end prove not just heavy but catastrophic.

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While we meddle overseas, our homeland crumbles. Overseas, the United States is engaged in real wars in which bombs are dropped, missiles are launched, and people (generally not Americans) are killed, wounded, uprooted, and displaced. Yet here at home, there's nothing real about those wars. Here, it's phony war all the way.

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The latest apparent chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government triggered predictable demands that Washington act. But there are no good options, especially ones consistent with the wishes of an American president who plans to withdraw militarily and an American people who five years ago made clear they did not want to get more deeply involved militarily. However, the assault will make it harder for President Donald Trump to exit Syria.

Trump might be president, but when he announced that he wanted to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, his officials reacted with horror. He can't possibly mean it, they complained.

However, that's what he said during the campaign. And he reiterated that position in early April: "Sometimes it's time to come back home." After all, the trillions of dollars spent on wars in the Middle East had resulted in "nothing except death and destruction." He concluded: "I want to get out. I want to bring our troops home."

So his staff staged an intervention of sorts, browbeating the president into submission. He agreed to delay action. Explained one unnamed official: "We're not going to immediately withdraw but neither is the president willing to back a long-term commitment." If he brings up the issue again, they undoubtedly will use the same tactics as often as necessary to make involvement de facto permanent. In fact, the Pentagon just deployed more troops to the town of Manbij, which Turkey had threatened to attack. And some response to the Assad regime's latest apparent use of chemical weapons seems likely.

The president suggested that Saudi Arabia might "have to pay" the United States to stay, but Washington should not hire out its military personnel as mercenaries to the Saudi royals. An American, Master Sgt. Jonathan Dunbar, died in Syria at the end of March, a victim of an improvised explosive device. (A British soldier, Sgt. Matt Tonroe, was killed in the same incident.) No amount of cash from the Saudis could make up for Sgt. Dunbar's death.

Presidential spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president wanted "our allies and partners in the region, who have a lot more at risk, to put more skin in the game." But they won't do so if we insist on doing everything. For years a mix of angry hectoring and humiliating begging has had minimal effect on allies from Asia to Europe to the Middle East. The way to get them to do more is for the United States to do less.

However, Washington is filled with social engineers who want America to do much more. And they have hysterically high expectations, promising that America's 2000-man force will remake not only Syria but the entire region.

For instance, in January then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered an expansive agenda: Washington planned to wipe out ISIS, force Bashar al-Assad from power, block Iranian influence in Syria and compel Russia to agree to a democratic Syria. This was not just mission creep, but mission leap, dramatically expanding Washington's objectives.

From what stemmed such magical thinking? America's social engineers had failed, usually spectacularly, in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria. Go back further to Ronald Reagan's disastrous intervention in the Lebanese civil war. To argue that Syria would be different was to imagine the triumph of fantasy over experience.

Moreover, the Middle East doesn't matter much to America anymore. No hegemonic power threatens the West's oil lifeline, as during the Cold War. Energy markets have dramatically expanded; America. soon will become the world's biggest oil producer. Israel is a regional superpower, recently shooting down unarmed Palestinian protesters without fear of consequence. Washington need not risk lives and waste wealth to police the ever turbulent and unstable region. There is no need for America to continue defending the indefensible.

Naturally America's self-professed allies want the United States to remain. For instance, Saudi Arabia's crown prince declared: "We believe American troops should stay for at least the mid-term, if not the long-term." However, Riyadh has the world's third largest military budget, only to largely abandon the fight against ISIS in order to brutally attack Yemen. Washington should stop coddling countries able to defend themselves.

Are any serious American interests at stake in Syria?

President Trump expressed outrage at the Assad regime's apparently violation of the chemical red line, but responding effectively would require a major expansion of U.S. military involvement, which Americans made clear five years ago they do not support. Uncle Sam expresses outrage today, but his hands are dirty: the Reagan administration assisted Saddam Hussein's regime in acquiring and using chemical weapons against Iran. Although chemical weapons seem particularly horrid, they are not mass killers, like nukes, and in Syria they have taken far fewer lives than bullets and high explosives. Even if the president desires to punish the Assad regime, ground involvement in Syria's continuing civil war makes no sense.

Defeating the Islamic State was the other task candidate Trump supported. And that goal has been achieved-roughly 98 percent of the "caliphate" has been swept away. However, a State Department envoy, Brett McGurk, warned: "We want to keep eyes on the prize-on ISIS-because ISIS is not finished."

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The President Is Right: It Is Time to Leave Syria

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The latest apparent chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government triggered predictable demands that Washington act. But there are no good options, especially ones consistent with the wishes of an American president who plans to withdraw militarily and an American people who five years ago made clear they did not want to get more deeply involved militarily.

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The White House was feeling pressure from France to act, lest President Emmanuel Macron do so first, according to a Trump administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive international interactions. Mr. Macron, who spoke on Sunday with Mr. Trump by telephone, has repeatedly declared that the use of chemical weapons by Syria's government would be a red line and pledged to strike weapons sites connected to such attacks.

After the phone call, the White House issued a statement saying that "both leaders strongly condemned" the attack and agreed that the government of President Bashar al-Assad "must be held accountable." They vowed to "coordinate a strong, joint response."

The challenge for Mr. Trump's Middle East policy came on a day when he was already facing a transition in his foreign policy team as his new national security adviser, John R. Bolton, arrived for his first day on the job and the president was scheduled to host the nation's senior military leaders for dinner at the White House. Mr. Bolton sat behind Mr. Trump during the cabinet meeting but made no comment while reporters were in the room.

National security and military officers were meeting on Monday to discuss options, but defense officials would not say what specific military actions are on the table. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, speaking with reporters on Monday, sounded a muted tone.

"The first thing we have to look at is why are chemical weapons still being used at all when Russia was the framework guarantor of removing all the chemical weapons," Mr. Mattis said as he hosted the visiting emir of Qatar at the Pentagon. "And so, working with our allies and partners from NATO to Qatar and elsewhere, we are going to address this issue."

Asked if he would rule out airstrikes against Mr. Assad's government, Mr. Mattis said, "I don't rule out anything right now."

Two Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyers are located in the Sixth Fleet's area of operations in the Mediterranean Sea and would be able to get within striking range within hours to days. When Mr. Trump ordered the retaliatory strike against Syria at almost the exact same time last year, it was carried out by two destroyers firing 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Al Shayrat airfield, the suspected source of the chemical attack, hitting fighter jets, hardened aircraft shelters, radar equipment, ammunition bunkers and sites for storing fuel and defense systems.

The already tense situation in the Middle East was further inflamed early Monday morning by an attack reportedly conducted by Israel on a Syrian air base used by Iranian-backed militias. The strike killed about 14 people, according to a conflict monitoring group, and Russia and Syria said it was carried out by Israel, whose government declined to confirm its involvement.

The chemical attack in the suburb of Douma over the weekend killed at least 49 people and raised the temperature of an already simmering relationship between the United States and Russia. Mr. Putin has troops in Syria propping up Mr. Assad's government. Russia has rejected the conclusion that Syria's military was behind the chemical attack, asserting that it was staged by militants to falsely blame the government and justify an American strike against Mr. Assad's regime.

Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov told reporters in Moscow that despite Mr. Trump's comments last week that he wanted to withdraw American troops from Syria, the United States was actually seeking to entrench itself in the country. "The U.S. is taking steps not to leave as President Trump said, and leave Syria for others, but to establish a foothold there for a very long time," Mr. Lavrov said.

Mr. Trump dismissed the Russian and Syrian denials. "They're saying they're not" responsible, "but to me there's not much of a doubt," he told reporters. Mr. Trump said that Syria was not allowing any independent inspection of the attack site. "If they're innocent why aren't they allowing people to go in and prove" it, he asked.

France was not the only European ally to express outrage over the attack. "If confirmed, this is yet another example of the Assad regime's brutality and brazen disregard for its own people and for its legal obligations not to use these weapons," Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain said during a visit to Denmark. "If they are found to be responsible, the regime and its backers - including Russia - must be held to account."

The United Nations Security Council was scheduled to hold an emergency meeting on Monday to discuss the Syria attack but Russia, as a permanent member, holds a veto that would presumably be used to block any action by the world body.

The Syria attack presented Mr. Bolton with his first crisis even as he was moving into his West Wing office. Known as a national security hawk, Mr. Bolton has in the past urged military action against governments in Iran and North Korea to counter their nuclear weapons programs, and he remains a staunch defender of the 2003 invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein.

But like Mr. Trump, he resisted a strike against Syria when President Barack Obama was in office and facing a similar choice following a chemical weapons attack against civilians in 2013. In that instance, Mr. Obama sought support from Congress, but ultimately backed off a strike after reaching an agreement with Russia to remove Syria's chemical weapons arsenal.

"If I were a member of Congress, I would vote against an authorization to use force here," Mr. Bolton said at the time. "I don't think it's in America's interest. I don't think we should in effect take sides in the Syrian conflict."

Mr. Bolton took a different position when Mr. Trump ordered action last year. "I think the Trump decision to strike as they did was the correct decision," he said then. "I think the limited, very precise nature of what the president did and the basis on which he did it was important." He added: "I think there is an American national interest in preventing people from violating treaties that try to restrict the use or the spread of weapons of mass destruction."

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Trump to Decide Soon Whether to Retaliate for 'Barbaric Act' in Syria

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The White House was feeling pressure from France to act, lest President Emmanuel Macron do so first, according to a Trump administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive international interactions.

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RAS AL-AYN, Syria - "Quick, run, run," shouts Kurdish commander Roshna Akeed, as she orders two young female fighters to move toward a brick wall that represents the front line between Kurdish forces and al Qaeda-linked militants in this northern Syrian town.

Six male Kurdish fighters are already guarding this part of the front. They have removed some of the bricks from the five foot-high wall, and their guns peak through small holes toward the enemy, which is positioned in a hamlet roughly one-third of a mile away.

At the moment when the two female fighters arrive, the shooting erupts. One girl sporting a pony tail runs to the right, sticks her Kalashnikov through a hole in the wall and opens fire. Her male colleagues are also firing now. One man shoots through a hole in the wall while sitting on a white plastic chair. On the back of the chair is written in Arabic: "I love you until death."

As if Syria does not have enough war already, fighting recently broke out in the northeast of the country between Kurdish forces and radical Islamists - both of whom are no friends of President Bashar al-Assad's regime. In Ras al-Ayn, all the country's problems come together: The town not only sits on the front lines of fighting between Kurds and Arabs, it is also located right on the edge of the Syrian-Turkish border. The Kurdish fighters in Syria are separated from Turkey's border troops - traditionally the implacable enemies of any form of Kurdish separatism - by only a 5-centimeter-thick iron gate.

The result is a civil war within a civil war. As the United States prepares for a military intervention in response to what it says was an Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime on the eastern Damascus suburbs, it is just these sort of divides that could give American policymakers headaches for months and years to come. While U.S. President Barack Obama's administration has signaled that any strike will not aim to topple Assad, deeper U.S. involvement in the country's two-and-a-half-year civil war will mean more than a few Tomahawk missiles lobbed at military installations in Damascus - it will require grappling with the sectarian and ethnic divides that promise to define Syria's future.

For the Kurdish fighters in Ras al-Ayn, there is no doubt which side the United States should support.

"We are fighting America's war on terror right here on the ground," says Kurdish fighter Dijwar Osman. "Our enemies are those al Qaeda fighters who want to destroy our 4,000-year-old Kurdish culture. These jihadists come from Belgium, Holland, Morocco, Libya, and other countries. Unfortunately, the U.S. and Turkey are on the side of al Qaeda, just like the U.S. was on al Qaeda's side in Afghanistan during the '80's."

The fights erupted after Syria's 2 million Kurds declared "self-governance" this past June in a region the Kurds call "Western Kurdistan" or "Rojava," which is Kurdish for "where the sun sets."

Kurds account for 10 percent of Syria's population, making them the country's largest ethnic minority. And they have turned Rojava, which covers roughly 10 percent of the country, into a de facto Kurdish mini-state: They have their own army and police here, names of towns have been changed from Arabic to Kurdish, and the Kurdish language is being taught in schools - something that was forbidden under the Assad regime.

While the Assad regime and the mainly Islamist Syrian opposition are engaged in a fight to the death elsewhere in the country, they are both staunchly opposed to Kurdish separatist ambitions. Both sides consider the self-governance declaration a first step toward Kurdish independence and a possible break-up of Syria. The move also alarmed the authorities of neighboring country Turkey, which is home to the world's largest Kurdish population and has a long history of violent Kurdish separatism.

The only way to enter Rojava is to sneak in illegally from Turkey or Iraq. We waited in the fields until soldiers weren't on the lookout and then followed a local smuggler across the no-man's land between the countries: We not only jumped a barbed wire fence but also traversed a narrow sand path through a minefield. As we crossed, the smuggler pointed to the area outside the path, saying "boom, boom" by way of warning.

In the town of Rumeilan, about 12 miles from the border with Iraq, you can hear the sound of outgoing mortars. "These go to the Islamists," says Aras Xani, a teacher at a local school who carries a pistol for protection.

"We Kurds are neutral," Aras continues. "We aren't with the regime, and we aren't with the rebels. The regime and the opposition are fighting a sectarian war, which can last decades. We don't want to have anything to do with it. We speak of the Kurdish Spring, not the Arabic Spring."

Although there is not much destruction in Rojava, the situation is far from normal here. In Rumeilan, the main street is barricaded by metal garbage containers - a precaution against Islamist-made car bombs.

Al Qaeda-linked groups have started kidnapping Kurds in the area. Two of Aras's uncles have been taken after Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian al Qaeda affiliate, attacked their family home. During our visit, Aras's mother sat expectantly on the floor in the living room next to a green phone, waiting for the latest information about them.Only five miles down the road, heavy fighting continues between Kurds and Islamists for control over the Syria-Iraq border town of Yarubiya.

Despite these problems, Aras is happy and proud of this Kurdish enclave. "I am now a Kurdish teacher in the same school where I as a child was not allowed to speak Kurdish," he says. "Look, that is what I call victory."

Aras's brother, Sores, is head of Rumeilan's police force. He meets us at his new office inside the former Syrian state oil complex, wearing a new police uniform. "Not Assad, but the Islamists are now our biggest enemy," he says. "The Assad regime only oppressed us. The jihadists want to exterminate us."

According to the police commander, the Kurds did not have a choice when they opted for self-governance. "The war created a vacuum. There was no authority," he explains, "What we have on the ground is not separatism, but self-administrative areas. We are just filling up this vacuum. We don't want to separate. We want to get our rights and stay within Syria."

And they have filled this vacuum with alacrity. On the roads through Kurdish territory in Syria, heavily-armed Kurdish defense units (YPG) stand guard over checkpoints every six miles or so. The YPG is the unofficial army of Rojava; most members are local Syrian Kurds, but they have also been joined by Kurds from Iraq and Turkey.

Most of the YPG fighters wear buttons of Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of Turkey's Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), a staunchly secular Kurdish nationalist organization that has long waged a guerilla war against the Turkish state. As a result, it has been designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union.

"We are not a threat to Syria's unity," says Sinam Muhammad, a pro-YPG politician and a member of the Higher Kurdish Council in the town of Qamishli, 30 miles west of Rumeilan.

Nor does Muhammad, one of the top leaders within Rojava, believe that the burgeoning Kurdish movement in Syria is a threat to Turkey. "It is in Turkey's interest to have safe borders," she said. "But until now Turkey is supporting radical fighters, not the Kurds. This I find very strange, because these extremists might turn against Turkey any moment. These Islamists say they want to topple the Assad regime - but Assad is in the heart of each of them."

At least 40 percent of the YPG fighters are women, and they are organized in units called the YPJ. Kurdish men and women fighters have separate barracks where they prepare for war, but they fight in mixed-gender units on the front lines. Women also command units comprised of men and women throughout the Kurdish areas.

"These al Qaeda guys go crazy when they hear that we are women fighters," says Roshna Akeed, the YPG commander who leads the Kurds on the frontlines of Ras al-Ayn. She notes that the Islamists benefit from thousands of volunteers from Europe and the Middle East, but the imbalance in numbers does not bother her. "Yes, they have quantity," she says. "But they are lousy fighters. They are unorganized. It is easy for us to kill them."

The Kurds, however, have not been successful in beating back the Islamists everywhere. In northern Syrian cities like Aleppo and Raqqa, the Kurds have lost territory. In the countryside around Aleppo, meanwhile, YPG officials say Kurdish towns have been ethnically cleansed by Islamists. Most Kurds in and around Aleppo have fled to the town of Afrin - which is itself partly surrounded by Islamists and is not connected to the main parts of Kurdish territory.

But at least in Ras al-Ayn, the YPG is winning. On July 17 it kicked al Qaeda-linked groups out of the town. "Kurds and Islamists first both controlled it," remembers YPG spokesman Redur Xelil. "But the Islamists became more and more aggressive. They destroyed places where alcohol was for sale. They started to forbid women to walk on the street without a veil. What kind of revolution is that?"

The Kurdish victory, however, came at a high cost for the town.Most of the civilians of Ras al-Ayn have escaped and now wander the country as refugees. The Sunni Arab population of the town generally went west, to the areas under control of the Free Syrian Army and Islamist groups. The Kurdish civilians of Ras al-Ayn went east, deeper into YPG territory and toward the border with Iraq, where Kurds live in relative safety.

Ras al-Ayn is now a ghost town. Many walls are still covered with Islamist slogans. YPG fighters have erased some of them and added their own: "Kurds and Christians will always be friends" is scrawled next to one church.

During the night, sounds of shooting and shelling between the YPG forces and Jabhat al-Nusra in the neighboring western villages often fills the air. And if there isn't shooting, Ras al-Ayn residents are often woken by the rumble of Turkish tanks.

Everyone is worried about what will happen in this slice of land. Syrian Islamists are concerned that the Kurds will break up Syria and start their own country. Turkey is worried that an independent Kurdistan in Syria will give a new momentum to separatist aspirations among Turkey's own 30 million Kurds. And the Syrian Kurds themselves fear that their tenuous new independence will be obliterated by the powerful forces that surround them. As the United States expands its role in Syria, how it will deal with this war's many complexities remains to be seen.

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RAS AL-AYN, Syria - "Quick, run, run," shouts Kurdish commander Roshna Akeed, as she orders two young female fighters to move toward a brick wall that represents the front line between Kurdish forces and al Qaeda-linked militants in this northern Syrian town. Six male Kurdish fighters are already guarding this part of the front.

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The greatest threat to American interests in the Middle East doesn't come from ISIL or al Qaeda. It comes from the civil wars in Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Syria and the risk these wars pose to sparking new civil wars in Lebanon, Jordan, Bahrain, Algeria and Egypt.

In the current issue of The Washington Quarterly, Ken Pollack and I not only outline what it will take to end these wars, but we lay out the four major problems civil wars create for U.S. interests in the region.

First, civil wars reduce oil production. This might seem unimportant in a moment of low oil prices, but the current dip is likely to be temporary. During the 2006-2008 civil war, Iraqi oil production fell by 64 percent. After the 1979 revolution, Iranian oil production fell by 78 percent. And Libyan oil production has fallen 92 percent as a result of its current civil war.

Second, civil wars make is easy for extremist groups to organize, operate and spread. In the 1980s, al Qaeda couldn't make a dent in Saudi Arabia or Egypt, so it fled to Afghanistan where it thrived within the civil war. Al Qaeda then set up franchises wherever civil wars existed in the Muslim world. Today, the real terrorist threats from al Qaeda are entirely located in states with civil wars of one kind or another: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Mali. ISIL's predecessor, for example, was virtually eliminated in Iraq by 2011 until the civil war in neighboring Syria gave it a new refuge and lifeline.

Third, civil wars bring hostile new governments to power. Left to run their own course, civil wars often end in a decisive victory for the group best able to employ violence. This means that the most aggressive, violence-prone organization is the one that tends to lead a new government, a government unlikely to be sympathetic to the United States and its interests.

Finally, civil wars tend to spread. Neighboring states often get dragged into civil wars either because they intervene to help rebels or because rebels take refuge on their territory. Civil wars can also create a contagion effect, where the conditions in one civil war (terrorism, refugees, secessionism, radicalization, economic dislocation, and intervention) move across borders, creating the conditions favorable for civil war next door. The Middle East is especially vulnerable to this problem given that borders are porous, ethno-sectarian groups span state lines, and governments are mostly weak.

What should the U.S. do? Some scholars and commentators (see here and here) have advocated walking away from the Middle East and allowing the region to determine its own fate. But the longer the civil wars continue, the more likely they are to destabilize Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and potentially Kuwait, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Ignoring the current wars in the region, therefore, almost certainly means more war, not less.

Instead, the United States should be serious about creating the conditions for successful negotiated settlements, at least in the two most important civil wars: Iraq and Syria. Historically, negotiated settlements to a civil war have been more likely under three key conditions.

A military stalemate. Parties to the civil war must believe that they cannot win a military victory in order to have incentives to accept a compromise agreement. As long as one group believes it can win total control of a state, it has incentives to keep fighting, forcing its adversaries to do the same. Convincing all parties, therefore, that continued war will be extremely costly and risky, is the first step to getting them to the table.

An equitable distribution of political power. Multiple scholarly studies (here, here, and here) have demonstrated that political, military, or territorial power-sharing guarantees are key to convincing factions to sign agreements and stop fighting. The reason for this has to do with incentives. Warring parties have little reason to stop fighting unless they are given a real stake in a new government. This means that a functional power-sharing arrangement must exist among all of the parties (including compromised elites), and one that includes clear protections for all groups (including minorities).

Iron-clad assurances that the deal will be enforced. All of the warring parties need to believe that the terms of the peace agreement will be enforced over time. One way to do this is to divide the warring factions into separate independent or politically autonomous territories protected by their own militaries or militias. A second way is to create a professional, indigenous military where power and arms are distributed fairly equally among the different fighting factions. Creating such a military force would allow each party to the civil war to retain some self-defense capabilities, while helping them hold political leaders accountable.

The U.S. can continue to focus its energies on ISIL and al Qaeda but doing so will not solve the larger problems that gave rise to them. If the U.S. and the international community refuse to deal with the civil wars raging in the region, then these wars are likely to continue and spread, undercutting whatever more modest strategy they try to pursue. In the end, the U.S. and its allies will be less secure, not more.

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The Biggest Threat to the Middle East Isn't ISIL. It's Civil Wars.

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By Barbara F. Walter The greatest threat to American interests in the Middle East doesn't come from ISIL or al Qaeda. It comes from the civil wars in Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Syria and the risk these wars pose to sparking new civil wars in Lebanon, Jordan, Bahrain, Algeria and Egypt.

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Photo by Rami al-Sayed/AFP/Getty Images

The Institute for Economics and Peace has released its annual Global Terrorism Index, and the main headline, as reported by the BBC and several other outlets, is that the number of deaths from terrorism increased 61 percent between 2012 and 2013. The number of attacks increased 44 percent to nearly 10,000.The news is all the more dispiriting since, just two years ago, the index reported that global terrorist violence had flatlined between 2007 and 2011. The big reason why it's picking up again is pretty simple: Syria.

Iraq has led the world in nine of the last 10 years, but things took a turn for the worse last year, with the number of deaths rising 162 percent, thanks largely to the destabilizing effect of the war in neighboring Syria and the emergence of ISIS. Iraq accounted for more than a third of all terrorism deaths last year. Syria itself recorded zero deaths from terrorism for the two years before the war began in 2011 but now has the fifth-most in the world with more than 1,000 last year. Obviously, many more people than that died as a result of violence in Syria, but the index classifies most of these deaths as the result of conventional warfare rather than terrorism.

That distinction gets into a tricky question about this data. As I've discussed on this blog before, terrorism is a global problem but also a relatively localized one. Last year, 82 percent of terrorist attacks counted by the GTI occurred in just five countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria. In all of these countries, there are large regions where the government is fighting with militant groups for political control. These attacks were primarily carried out by four groups: the Taliban, Boko Haram, ISIS, and various affiliates of al-Qaida. All of these could be described as "part-time" terrorist groups, organizations that employ terrorist tactics but often act more like insurgent or guerilla groups. In other words, when ISIS is fighting with the Iraqi army or the Kurdish Peshmerga for control of towns, it's not engaging in what's traditionally considered terrorism. But when it executes its American hostages or sets off bombs at the Baghdad airport, it is.

While these five countries dominate global terrorism, the report also notes that there were nine additional countries last year that had more than 50 terrorism deaths, bringing the total number to 24-the highest in 14 years. These were: Algeria, Central African Republic, China, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Sudan, and South Sudan.

Algeria is on that list largely because of one horrific incident. Lebanon's terrorism is closely tied to Syria's. CAR, Libya, Mali, Sudan, and South Sudan are all experiencing various states of intrastate warfare.

So the issue here may be less a global increase in terrorism than a set of worsening civil wars (one war in particular) in which the traditional tactics of terrorism-kidnappings, suicide bombings, etc.-are employed by the combatants.

This is more than just a semantic issue. Developed countries are often drawn into costly military interventions in the name of preventing terrorism against themselves, though they experience only a tiny percentage of terrorist violence. Not counting Turkey and Mexico, only 16 people were killed by terrorism in OECD countries in 2013, the year of the Boston Marathon bombing. (The 2014 numbers are sadly going to be higher because of recent events in Israel.)

In the popular imagination, we tend to think of "terrorism" in terms of decentralized radical groups targeting the citizens of wealthy and powerful countries. But around the world, the vast majority of it occurs in the context of battles over territory in some of the most unstable places on Earth. And the strategies being employed to stop it obviously aren't working.

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Deaths From Terrorism Increased by 60 Percent Last Year

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The Institute for Economics and Peace has released its annual Global Terrorism Index, and the main headline, as reported by the BBC and several other outlets, is that the number of deaths from terrorism increased 61 percent between 2012 and 2013.

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With more than 100,000 deaths in less than three years, the Syrian civil war ranks in the top 20 most intense of around 150 civil wars since 1945. Why can't the parties to the war cut some kind of negotiated deal to bring the destruction and suffering to an end, or at least reduce it?

Political scientists who study civil wars have identified a number of key strategic barriers to peaceful resolution. A look at Syria's war reveals that the most common strategic obstacles are present in spades, rendering a stable negotiated settlement particularly unlikely.

Nonetheless, the war will probably become less deadly over time - it is simply difficult to sustain such an intense conflict for more than a few years. People leave the country, it becomes harder to recruit and keep fighters, populations sort at the village and neighborhood level, and local bosses come to shaky mutual understandings.

But the war is unlikely to be decisively ended by either a balanced power-sharing agreement or a definitive military victory. Just as the internal war in Iraq continues today, the war in Syria is likely to drag on. Even an outcome that is mainly a regime victory plus some cosmetic "power sharing" with relative moderates in the opposition would probably not eliminate a continued, lower-level but still very bloody campaign by Islamist radicals.

The most common way that civil wars end is through a decisive military victory by one side. For Syria in the short run, however, it is not likely that either side can completely crush the other, because this is in part a proxy war in which the international parties will adjust their support to prevent military elimination of their clients. The regime may have the upper hand at the moment, but it will face manpower constraints in the longer run even if the conflict continues at a lower level. It seems hard to imagine that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could get things back to where they were in 2010. In the absence of a "diplomatic revolution" in the region, or a surprising and rapid decline of radical Islamist interest in armed jihad, Syria is likely to follow a path akin to Iraq's - or worse - whether or not the Assad regime persists.

What prevents a deal that would stop the war?

Most international proposals for ending the Syrian war imagine a negotiated settlement in which the combatants agree to share power by having representatives from all sides in high-level offices, at least until elections can be held (and which would need to be highly engineered to ensure congruence between the political and military balances). Power sharing is preferred to helping one side to crush the other, both on humanitarian or moral grounds, and due to practical concerns about feasibility and long-run stability. If Assad crushes the rebels, he continues to run a minority-based government faced with a large, angry Sunni majority that has tremendous potential for continued terrorism, as in Iraq. If the rebels manage to defeat the regime, there is valid concern that Alawites and other minorities would be massacred in revenge violence and repression, and that the civil war would just continue among the Sunnis. Anyway, as noted, it doesn't seem likely that either side can completely defeat the other, as long as the Saudi-Iranian contest continues.

So why don't the Syrian parties to the conflict themselves move quickly to an agreement on sharing power, given how horrifically costly the war is (for them, if not for their foreign backers)? There are two main strategic obstacles. First, what would the terms of an agreement be? Second, even if they could agree on terms, how could each side be assured that the terms would be implemented and upheld into the future?

The political science literature on civil war since the end of the Cold War views the second problem as dominant - "the critical barrier to civil war settlement," as Barbara Walter famously put it. I think this is basically right, although the two problems are more closely entwined than is generally appreciated.

Why does power need to be shared at all? Why can't a deal be struck in which the Assad regime, or a successor from his faction, stays in power but agrees to implement some policies that the opposition want?

In this respect the Syrian civil war is completely typical, in a way that proves the point about commitment problems being the central reason that civil wars are so difficult to end. Rebel groups almost never say, "We will fight until the regime accepts our demand that its policies should be X, Y, Z." Instead, they demand all or a share of political power. This is because they understand that if they were to stop fighting, demobilize, and disarm, the government would renege on policy concessions once the military threat diminished. In fact, once they have fought a war as intense as this one, the rebel leadership can anticipate that if it disarms, the regime would probably jail and kill the leaders as much as possible. This commitment problem drives most civil wars once they have begun. It drives rebel groups to make outright control of a government their central objective.

As a New York Times reporter wrote recently, "Abu Firas, a rebel fighter, laughed out loud at the idea of surrender [with formal amnesties]," quoting him as saying, "And the day after I will find myself in Saidnaya prison, spending 31 years in the rule of a military court or court of terrorism."

This explains why the rebels aim for power rather than just policy change, but not why government and rebels can't agree on sharing political power. Here the core obstacle is again credible commitment. How can the parties to power sharing commit themselves not to try to seize an opportunity to coup, or use some minor advantage in control of political or military institutions to convert that into total control?

In principle, one can imagine diplomats in Geneva working out a detailed agreement that preserves each side's military threat and obliges political decisions to be made by mutual agreement on important matters. In practice, such agreements are extremely difficult to construct when the parties correctly expect that the other side would kill them given a chance. Agreements are just pieces of paper, and power sharing in political institutions and the military is a complex matter that can't be reduced to a contract that anticipates all contingencies that might arise. Given enormous downside risk - wholesale murder by your current enemies - genuine political and military power sharing as an exit from civil war is rarely seriously attempted and frequently breaks down when it has been attempted.

Without significant third party intervention to credibly guarantee a power-sharing deal, then, the expectation would be that the fight continues until one side basically wins on the battlefield, or, perhaps, a de facto partition of the country solidifies.

Fighting to influence the terms of a deal, or in the hope of crushing the other side

An objection to the account above is that not every civil war ends with a decisive military victory or massive third-party intervention to guarantee a power-sharing deal. And is it even plausible that third parties can provide reliable guarantees? Would the foreigners, or the United Nations, really be willing to fight to prevent return to war? In the long run any peace deal has to be self-enforcing among the domestic parties to it. The foreigners can't normally stay or commit to intervene forever (though perhaps Bosnia is an exception).

For example, quite a few civil wars in which the government is fighting against regional rebels who want independence or greater autonomy end, or die down, with what amount to power-sharing deals that give the rebel leaders a share of local government control. The Philippine government's conflict with Moro rebel groups in Mindanao provides several in
stances. Note also that regional autonomy agreements to settle civil wars rarely involve international peacekeeping operations. Based on the arguments above, it is not clear how such agreements could work.

The short answer is that in these cases the rebels may be able to survive long enough to demonstrate that they can't be militarily crushed, so that the government will either have to pay war costs indefinitely or make a deal that reflects the rebels' ability to continue to cause trouble. "Power sharing" can then operate at a local or regional level. In effect, successful rebels - or just rebels who can survive long enough - get policy concessions that are credible because they retain an implicit threat to return to costly rebellion or opposition if the government reneges.

In this account, continued, costly warfare is driven by the government's uncertainty about whether it can militarily crush the rebels. (Or vice versa. For some cases the relevant uncertainty would be about whether the rebels can depose the government.) The government is using fighting to learn about whether the rebels can be crushed or will ultimately have to be given a serious offer. This is a version of the first strategic obstacle to civil war resolution noted above - getting to terms both sides prefer to more fighting, rather than the problem of committing to implement and abide by those terms.

Although it may take significantly more fighting to get there, an arrangement of this sort might become the most natural way that a durable peace could ultimately be achieved in both Iraq and Syria. For Iraq, hopefully Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government comes to understand that the Sunni areas have the capacity for sustained, long-running, low-level rebellion, and as a result decides to offer enough to Sunni leadership in the western provinces to buy its assent and participation in getting rid of al Qaeda affiliated groups. For Syria, population sorting and the routinization of rebel governance may ultimately make for towns and areas that are robustly controlled by Sunni opposition structures. Government forces ultimately learn that they cannot retake and control these at acceptable cost, leading to tacit deals with local bosses that allow for a return of some measure of peace.

For Maliki and Assad, however, such an approach would come with major risks. Deals that take the military pressure off might strengthen the rebels in the medium run, allowing a return to war with worse odds for the regime. This is the "standard story" commitment problem again, concerning power sharing. Alternatively, they may face lethal threats from their own side if they are perceived as giving too much to a dangerous adversary. Without a doubt, on both sides there are men with guns who believe that anything less than the annihilation or complete submission of the enemy amounts to suicide or a failure of religious duty.

In sum, a balanced agreement on sharing power in Damascus is not likely to end the Syrian civil war unless there is major third-party enforcement. And that's not likely given serious international divisions over the war and the fact that foreign intervention would be sure to attract jihadi violence in a big way. Neither is a decisive military victory by one side or the other in the offing, because this has become a proxy conflict in which Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others appear willing to calibrate their support to prevent the complete destruction of their clients. A partial military victory by the Assad regime might contribute to reducing levels of violence - which are already likely to decline some because such high intensity can only be sustained for so long. But the Islamist extremists' war would surely continue, as it has in Iraq, and victory by the regime would also probably be followed by years of bloody repression.

Without major third-party intervention, the best hope is probably that Assad (or a successor from his faction) concludes sooner rather than later that a decisive military victory is not going to happen, and as a result becomes willing to cut deals with opposition forces that have established effective control in some areas. This would amount to an "armed peace," but that would be much better than the status quo for Syria's beleaguered and abused citizens.

James Fearon is Theodore and Frances Geballe professor in the school of humanities and sciences and professor of political science at Stanford University. A version of this essay will appear in the forthcoming POMEPS briefing "Political Science and Syria's War."

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With more than 100,000 deaths in less than three years, the Syrian civil war ranks in the top 20 most intense of around 150 civil wars since 1945. Why can't the parties to the war cut some kind of negotiated deal to bring the destruction and suffering to an end, or at least reduce it?