Many Arab governments grumbled quietly in 2011 as the United States left Iraq, fearful it might fall deeper into chaos or Iranian influence. Now, the United States is back and getting a less than enthusiastic welcome, with leading allies like Egypt, Jordan and Turkey all finding ways on Thursday to avoid specific commitments to President Obama\u2019s expanded military campaign against Sunni extremists.<\/span>
<\/span>As the prospect of the first American strikes inside Syria crackled through the region, the mixed reactions underscored the challenges of a new military intervention in the Middle East, where 13 years of chaos, from Sept. 11 through the Arab Spring revolts, have deepened political and sectarian divisions and increased mistrust of the United States on all sides.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cAs a student of terrorism for the last 30 years, I am afraid of that formula of \u2018supporting the American effort,\u2019 \u201d said Diaa Rashwan, a scholar at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a government-funded policy organization in Cairo. \u201cIt is very dangerous.\u201d<\/span>
<\/span>The tepid support could further complicate the already complex task Mr. Obama has laid out for himself in fighting the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: He must try to confront the group without aiding Syria\u2019s president, Bashar al-Assad, or appearing to side with Mr. Assad\u2019s Shiite allies, Iran and the militant group Hezbollah, against discontented Sunnis across the Arab world.<\/span>
<\/span>While Arab nations allied with the United States vowed on Thursday to \u201cdo their share\u201d to fight ISIS and issued a joint communiqu\u00e9 supporting a broad strategy, the underlying tone was one of reluctance. The government perhaps most eager to join a coalition against ISIS was that of Syria, which Mr. Obama had already ruled out as a partner for what he described as terrorizing its citizens.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nYou can have a successful war, or you can continue to overthrow the Assad regime.<\/p>\n
I don’t think that you can have both.<\/p>\n
Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran, are about the only participants in this little adventure who are truly enthusiastic about helping to put ISIS down.<\/p>\n
You fight the war with the allies you have, not the allies you want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What a shocker. Obama wants the folks who have supported Jihadis in Syria to take a lead roll in fighting the Jihadi group that has gotten out of hand, ISIS\/ISIL\/IS, and rather unsurprisingly, their response is f%$3 you white man: Many Arab governments grumbled quietly in 2011 as the United States left Iraq, fearful it …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1078,1034,1063,986,1076,1098,1173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-disaster","category-iran","category-iraq","category-middle-east","category-terrorism","category-war","category-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185663"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185663\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}