Osama Bin Laden would not rejoice at US pullout from Syria (hint: that's not why the US should stay)

Now that the shock of Mattis' resignation is waning down, the liberal press is starting to praise the decision to get out of Syria and also attack Mattis record. All these attacks are based on ideology and because of the tribalism that has gripped American politics, there is dramatically less demand for facts and logic when reporting on foreign affairs issues. 

Let’s look at the facts and objectives.

America has only 2,000 troops in Syria and thus the argument could be made that such a small number of troops could not be effective in the middle of a multiparty civil war. After all, compare that to the ten or even hundred of thousands that the US has deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan without any clear “victory” in these 2 countries. So why not just leaving this dangerous zone and bring the boys back home safe?

As I just mentioned, that’s a valid argument on face value, but it doesn’t pass logical thinking. However, before I elaborate on this, let us stress that Trump has not used that argument to withdraw US troops from Syria, rather he is advancing his now recurring and deeply flawed argument that America is paying for other countries security and that it is about time that America get “respected” again.

Both the first argument and Trump’s argument are flawed on the same level: the objective of having our troops in Syria. The first argument assumes that US troops are there to destroy ISIS and stop the civilian bloodshed, while Trump’s argument assumes that US foreign policy main objective is to make money. Both cannot be farther from the truth.

First let’s look at Trump’s moneymaking argument. Take the example of US troops deployed in South Korea. Trump has repeatedly declared that America is being "ripped off" because the South Korean government doesn’t pay a dime for these troops while America ensures their security. That’s wrong. Yes, the US helps secure South Korea while providing a deterrent to North Korea’s potentially catastrophic behavior. However, the strategic objective for our troops being there is to reduce the US response time from a few hours to a few minutes in case of a North Korea ICBM launch targeting the west coast of the US (ICBMs travel at 4 miles/sec, so it would take about 20 minutes to hit Los Angeles). This example perfectly illustrates how obvious it is that the US power objective around the world is not to make money, in fact it would be extremely dangerous if it were.

Now let’s analyze why despite their relatively small numbers, our troops in Syria have had a big strategic impact. Indeed, the Pentagon’s objective in Syria is not to bring the civil war to an end, otherwise they would have deployed drastically more troops (which would have been a mistake on its own). Their objective is to check Iran’s growing hegemony in the middle east, and by the same token, provide security assistance to America’s strategic allies in that region, i.e. the Sunni Arab countries and Israel. That’s exactly why all these 2,000 troops have been deployed along the border triangle joining Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. By being stationed at that strategic junction, we have blocked Iran from taking over the Iraqi-Syria border and by doing so, preventing Iran from projecting power all the way to the Mediterranean through Iraq (now an Iranian ally), Syria (up for grabs), and Lebanon (a strong Iranian ally through Hezbollah). US troops have also used minimal effort to prevent Iranian-controlled forces from attacking Jordan, a sworn Sunni enemy of the Shia regime. With the US troops out, America is letting, indeed inviting, Iran to take control of a huge swath of land with a Mediterranean port. That may, or may not, bode well for ISIS (ISIS is a Sunni terror group ideologically at odds with Iran), but it certainly doesn’t bode well for the US, Europe and the Arab world.

When one walks back the chain of events that lead us to this point, one gets to the 9/11 attacks orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden, a Sunni terrorist. Bin Laden’s objective was always to push American troops out of the region. It’s ironic that, because of Trump’s lack of strategic compass, Bin Laden is posthumously achieving his goal but also giving Iran, his main enemy, the power to impose its version of Islam, and Islamism, on a growing part of the middle east.

The Syria Conundrum

I keep on seeing “pundits” and left-wing politicians complaining about the fact that we don’t have a strategy in Syria. But the lack of strategy is not the issue. The issue is that neither this US administration nor the one before it, have a clear objective there. 

Why are we stuck in Syria?

It’s because it’s literally an impossible conundrum to navigate.

Let’s look at some facts first. The most important one, and often overlooked in the West, is that this conflict is nothing less than existential to Assad and his family. He sees it as either staying in total control of the country or being killed. This has to do with the Alawites sect Assad and his family belong to. Syria is a predominantly Sunni country, however, the Alawites are Shiites. In 1970, when Hafez (the father of Bashar) took over the country by staging a coup, he reversed centuries of Sunni leadership over a Sunni population. To ensure his survival as President for life, Hafez basically massacred scores of Sunni dissidents (look up the 1982 Hama massacre for an illustration). This only heightened tensions between already belligerent communities. Bashar has been brought up in the belief that if he doesn’t keep total control of the country, he and his entire family will simply be eliminated by the Sunni majority. This is a major point to take into account when thinking about our objectives in Syria. It also explains why Iran is helping Syria in this conflict (Iran is the leader of Shia Islam and aspires to total hegemony of the Middle East). Finally, although non-existential to Putin, this conflict is very important strategically to Russia, as it represents a once in a lifetime opportunity for Putin to bring back Russia as the main power managing middle east affairs after Obama has left the region with his tail between his legs.

So what should be the West’s objectives in Syria?

I would suggest a few very important ones:

1. Bring back stability in the country and thus the region
2. Avoid direct military confrontation with Russia
3. Eliminate ISIS in Syria
4. Deter Assad from using chemical weapons again
5. Punish Assad for using chemical weapons

And here’s our conundrum, the last objective is at total odds with the first 4 ones. Indeed, the only real way to punish Assad is to remove him from power, aka regime change. We have seen what regime change in the ME means with our utterly failed Iraki experiment. Regime change would bring more instability, more inter-sect warfare, more ISIS soldiers filling in the vacuum, and would risk a direct military engagement against Russia. So we must forget about regime change, Assad will stay in power, at least the West won’t stop him. But that means that we are allowing a dictator to use chemical weapons, and that is now at total odds with the West’s moral values. Plus letting one dictator use WMDs is a signal to future dictators that they could get away with it. And this dilemma is taking place at a time where ISIS is NOT eliminated, contrary to what our clueless President says. ISIS, a Sunni group, is still very much alive in northern Syria and thus we should expect the next sarin gas attack to happen there. 

So even though I salute the latest strike from the US, France, and the UK, we have to be very realistic, it was akin to taking a piss in the ocean. It won’t make the ocean level rise. We struck Assad last year and he did it again last week. We are stuck. Miserably stuck.

What could we have done differently?

The root of all this goes back to Obama’s Middle East policy, which rested on 2 principles: 

1. Wholeheartedly embrace the Arab “Spring”
2. Disengage militarily and strategically from the region.

Obama should have continued the realpolitik approach that has always prevailed in ME affairs. That means choosing stability, and therefore less civilian casualties, by re-assuring Assad of US support and presence as long as he uses less violence against his people. I know it sucks, but it would have saved more than 500,000 innocent Syrians as the Arab spring, except for Tunisia, turned out in the end to be a terrible Arab winter. Something I predicted at the time.

What can we do now?

My opinion is to re-engage the US in the region, not necessarily with boots on the ground, but with a credible strategic presence and a force deterrent. And by that I mean not the twitter folklore of the current WH resident. Unfortunately, we would have to do it through Russia at this point, as Obama has let Putin insert himself credibly as the key intermediary in this conflict. It would mean non-officially giving Assad assurances that we won’t go after him and work with him to drive ISIS away and bring back stability in Syria. I know it sucks, but it’s the only way to minimize civilian casualties going forward, which is now the only objective we could aspire to.

The Future of Jihadist Groups

Let me start with an interesting observation, and one that I saw with my own eyes while growing up in Morocco: 

Muslim majority countries, where the state police is strong, breed less jihadist groups. 

This article attempts to address one of the most fundamental issues of our time: how to eliminate the conditions for new jihadist groups to emerge?

This question has frustrated many US administrations, yet we don’t see it asked often. It’s certainly because it is a very complex problem. Since the end of WWII, we have seen mainly one approach taken by US administrations, with a second one emerging recently. Historically, US foreign policy in the Islamic world has always favored supporting authoritarian regimes, exactly because of what is said above, these regimes put in place a strong police system that brings stability to a weak state. The examples are numerous. We supported the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, King Hassan II, the Saud family, Hafez el Assad, and even his son, Bashar, the current ruler of Syria. The rationale calculation for this approach is that it yields stability in the country, where jihadist groups are eliminated by force. Unfortunately, because the state is usually weak, it ends up backfiring as societies, in this globalized age, start organizing and people aspire to a better life. Which leads us to the recent developments out of the Iraq war and the Arab Spring. Recently, US administrations have made an even bigger mistake, by pushing, sometimes forcing, democracy onto people in the middle east. A famous example is Bush’s failure in post-Saddam Iraq, or his insistence to hold elections in Gaza, which resulted in Hamas, a terrorist organization, legitimately taking over. A more recent example is the Arab Spring, where Obama and Hillary Clinton made exactly the same mistake, even though they strongly criticized the Bush administration Iraq’s democracy objectives. Obama threw Mubarak under the bus, which resulted in Mohamed Morsi, a leader from the terrorist group Muslim Brotherhood to become President of Egypt until July 2013, when General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a new strongman, removed him from office. More disturbing is Syria, where the Arab Spring, again backed by the Obama/Clinton administration, led to total chaos and civil war. At least in Egypt, there was an educated middle class that helped to avoid civil war, but in Syria, we are still dealing with the aftermath of Obama’s decision.

So what is the solution? It’s actually a simple one: have these countries adopt some variant of a capitalist liberal democracy. But as discussed above, what is complex is to get there. W. Bush thought that holding elections would be enough to get there, whereas Obama and Clinton believed that an organized civil society was enough. Both were terrible mistakes that will yield more jihadist groups terrorizing the region and the world for many years to come.

But is the Muslim world, especially the Arab one, ready for liberal democracy? The answer is no. Not because they are Arabs or Muslims, but because they haven’t gone through the stages that are required to get there. Francis Fukuyama, in his book “The Origins of Political Order”, argued that economic growth, social mobilization, and the three elements of political development—the state, rule of law, and accountability—are all independent aspects of national development, which work together in important ways to allow for a capitalist liberal democracy to finally emerge. Think about it, it took Europe close to 900 years to get there, and the US had the luxury to start from scratch with a group of dedicated people who understood what was missing in Britain to have a stable democracy. Also, not all countries have moved steadily toward liberal democracy. China and the United States currently represent two alternative and potentially attractive models of political organization: 

• Effective Authoritarianism: China has an efficient and institutionalized authoritarian government with term limits and upward accountability. This permits rapid decision making and effective crisis response. Yet China is still vulnerable to the bad emperor problem: a poor leader can do much more damage in an authoritarian than a democratic system (Note: In March 2018, 3 months after I wrote this, Xi Jinping managed to change the constitution and remove the term limits instituted by Deng Xiaoping in 1981. Xi is now to rule China indefinitely. The bad Emperor has come back!)

• Checks and Balances: In the United States, the system is currently paralyzed by political polarization and unable to deal with long-term fiscal problems because of the influence of interest groups. Yet in the long term, this model is still more sustainable than the Chinese system, because it does not suffer from the bad emperor problem.

I believe that China, under the pressure of their enormously growing middle class, will move towards a democratic system with checks and balances, and this is probably the only path that the different countries in the Muslim world will have to follow. They need good emperors to emerge, à la Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who are smart politically and economically, and who are not interested in bankrupting their countries like Assad, Saddam, Nasser and all the others did by (1) funneling all of their failures towards the west, the Jews and Israel and (2) getting their legitimacy from Islam by making pacts with unhinged religious mullahs. The slightly good news is that globalization can help them. Thanks to it, economic growth and social mobilization can now take place much more rapidly, and the spread of ideas has dramatically increased. These countries could learn from foreign models to implement a strong state. They would also have to ban Sharia law by implementing the rule of law, based on enlightened ideas and not worry about being removed from office thanks to the legitimacy granted to them by their accountability to their people. This is possible but, unfortunately, all very unlikely. And most importantly, it has to happen from within, not by foreign diktat.

On Charlottesville and our President reaction

I was not born or raised in this country, so I'll happily admit that I lack perspective on certain matters, especially when they relate to either American history or culture.

So instead of commenting on the neo-Nazi demonstrations where the sacred US first amendment right was being exercised, let me take you into my culture and my history.

I'm Jewish and French. I have studied WWII history very closely, first as a European and also, perhaps more closely, as a Jew. I'd like to invite you to a simple exercise where I am going to describe a hypothetical situation that I would like you to "see through my eyes, my cultural heritage"

Suppose for a moment that we are in Berlin on a beautiful Saturday in August 2017. Berlin is, of course, part of Germany, the European country that has accepted the highest number of Muslim migrants in the last 2 years and whose economy is by far still the most solid in Europe. The scene is one of a huge demonstration filled with skinheads, but also with average Germans, carrying Nazi flags and chanting "Hitler was a hero", "Sieg Heil" and "Bring back the policies of the 3rd Reich!". On the other side, you have people horrified by the scene who decide to protest against the Nazi nostalgics in the name of tolerance and peace. The inevitable occurs and a fight between the two groups emerges. Violence ensues. It's chaos. People are hurt, some badly. The nation is shocked and Angela Merkel decides that she needs to address her compatriots. The next day, on national TV, she declares that the Nazi nostalgics had some violent people among them but most were just average Germans, in fact, good Germans, simply expressing their rightful opinions.

Now, how do you react? As a French? As a Jew? As a European? As a citizen of the world? Think about that and perhaps, just perhaps, you might start understanding the US black people perspective on Charlottesville and why most of the people with a normal sensitivity are outraged by Trump and consequently feel the line has been crossed.

Note: the hypothetical Berlin scene described above would actually never happen. Germany and most Western Europe countries have passed laws against revisionism of Nazi atrocities. Also, and obviously, you won't find one statue of Hitler, Himmler or Goebbels anywhere in Germany.

Partisanship is Killing Us

Why aren't we, as Americans, dropping the usual partisan divide, all agree that we need to know what Russia did in the last election and, most urgently, prepare our country for their next moves?

I worry that our political divisions continue to make us vulnerable to actual, sometimes lethal, threats. I have seen far too many divisions on the threats posed by Islam radicalism that follow the partisan divide. I get that we may look at solutions differently, what I don't understand though, is that we cannot agree on the nature of the threats. I fear it is the same thing happening with Russia's attack on our democracy, which in my view, is greater than any threat we have seen so far. If you rightly fear about Islam radicalism, bear in mind that it's a threat to our lives, not to our way of life. Russia, with its post-cold-war resurgence is overtly trying to attack and continuously weaken the fabric of our western democracies. Imagine if they indeed can, one day, penetrate our voting information systems? We have no idea if they can, and we need to prepare for it. While we bicker internally, Russia is still attacking the US. Last week we learned that Marco Rubio's office is currently being targeted. But the Kremlin is also deploying its nefarious will against European democracies, with a keen eye on France's upcoming presidential election. Frankly, I'm less interested in implicating Trump's campaign (although if there's proof of collusion, it needs to be dealt with) than in making sure that we are ready to wage this existential cyber warfare. We all need to realize that Russia is not doing this in a vacuum, there's a larger context at play in the world. Indeed, the middle class declines in western democracies coupled with the increase of terrorism has given rise to a right wing populism that is a direct threat to our liberal democracies based on the rule of law. Countries like China and Turkey are two other countries pushing for a 3rd way of governing, i.e. an authoritarian nationalist government with cronyism based on some level of capitalism. It's ironic though that the Republicans are now the ones minimizing that threat whereas they have always positioned themselves as hawks on national security and as guardians of our constitution. As for the Democrats, they are only outraged at bad jokes, seeing sexism and racism in all of them. They also seem to have a bigger interest in impeaching Trump than in addressing Russia's onslaught on our democratic foundations. The sad thing is that the left has been mostly intellectually absent in the western world for the last 40 years. The reason why the current populism wave is coming from the right, is in my opinion, the left's inability to articulate, first, a coherent analysis of what happened to the structure of our societies as they underwent economic change and, second, a realistic agenda that could protect a middle class squeezed by technological changes and automation.

But all this is of no interest to our politicians. They are mostly interested in keeping power and, because of us, the ideological electors, our representatives will once again fail us, but this time with dire global consequences.

Making Sense of the O'care Debate

With the debate on Obamacare being potentially repealed and if so, hopefully replaced, I tried to better understand the mechanics behind the law. I would appreciate any comments on what I got wrong or potentially missed. So, here goes. The bargain between the government in ACA is as follows:

• Private insurers can participate in ACA's exchange marketplaces (i.e. more business for them), but in return,
• Participating private insurers must accept anyone who wants to buy insurance
• To address potential profitability risks, the US government gives A.C.A. tax credits to insurers, aka carriers.

Unfortunately, here is what happened and that was not well forecast, i.e. integrated, by the Obama administration in their financial models:

• Too few enrollees, half as many as they actually projected
• The ratio between healthy vs. not healthy in the enrollee population has skewed too much on the not healthy side and beyond the range that would have made the ACA business model sustainable
• As a result, insurers hiked the premiums, which make the plans less affordable
• Another consequence is that young healthy people are being charged way more than they would outside of the exchanges, and that is to subsidize the less healthy folks that insurers are obliged to take on.

That's why it's probably not sustainable in its current form and that would explain why carriers are pulling out. It's costing them too much and the ACA doesn't give them enough tax credits to recoup their losses. So what's the way forward? I guess it first depends on your political philosophy:

1. If you are on the right, then you feel that the government has no business in insuring private citizens. That means you stop ACA and you don't care that about 40M Americans will go back being uninsured
2. If you are on the left, then you would want something like a public option. It would not be like France, where it's a single payer, but a hybrid where the public option carries enough weight to push competition on the private carriers.
3. If you are against too much government involvement but do not want to have Americans without insurance, then I guess you make the ACA more affordable for the carriers by increasing the subsidies somehow.

Personally, and if my analysis above is correct, then my heart is with #3, but I am afraid that at the end the private carriers will get so much out of the government in subsidies, that the government would be better creating a public option that will put the carriers under pressure to cut the fat in their cost structures. So in the end, #2 is probably the answer for me.

Coming Back To My Senses

This week has been surreal for me. I have seen, in my opinion, the most unfit, unqualified politician become the most important person in the free world. I went through a few stages of emotional reactions and I am finally coming back to my senses.

I am now trying to understand what happened. You can listen or read the media and have all these “pundits” explain it to you, but you will have to remind yourself that the same pundits have spent the last 18 months explaining to you that DJT had no chance of winning.

So I have looked at the data myself and this is my humble analysis of the situation.

1.     Not All Trump Supporters Are Racist- Asserting the contrary would be inflammatory and simply inaccurate. Of course that all the white racist people in America who voted on November 8 voted for Trump. He naturally attracted them with his racist and divisive rhetoric; they even made him their hero. But an analysis of the counties that Obama carried in 2012 reveals that a third of the same counties voted for Trump last week. These guys voted in office, for a second term, a black man whose name is “Hussein”. They are not racist.

2.     It’s Not Only About Jobs In Rural America- Sure the DNC and Clinton’s campaign have not spent a minute identifying with the ordeals of the globalization’s left-behinds, who usually are white blue collar folks in rural America. But a closer look at the exit polls show that 49% of white college graduates have voted for DJT versus 44% for HRC.  So something else is at play here. CNN data shows that after the economy (52% of respondents), the most important issue facing the country is terrorism (18% of respondents). Additionally, of these 18% who considered ISIS to be the key issue, 57% voted for Trump versus only 39% for Clinton.

3.     Trump Is A Good Product Marketer And His Campaign Was An Acceptable “Minimally Viable Product” (MVP)- My geek friends will understand this analogy, but for the other readers, what commentators and analysts call a good politician is a man who knows how to read what electors (i.e. the market) want and give them a campaign (i.e. a product) that would answer their expectations. In the world of product development we call this PMF, a.k.a. Product Market Fit. A MVP is a less sophisticated product that still fits the market.  DJT, as it turns out, is an apt product marketer and has put forward a MVP (i.e. campaign) whose 3 must-have features were:

a)    Emotional empathy for white blue collars. Since there’s no actual solution to these lost manufacturing jobs, Trump identified with this group by defending their values: guns and god.

b)   Acknowledgement that there is a problem within Islam. Here Obama, Clinton and the Democrats largely helped Trump by never naming the problem or using the words ‘Islam fundamentalism’.

c)    No filter. Trump’s straight talk seems to have struck a chord, especially with independents, which voted 48% for DJT vs. 42% for HRC.

All the other aspects of Trump’s campaign were overlooked by his voters. Indeed, they didn’t care that he could be racist, sexist, a liar or a conspiracy theorist. The MVP analogy explains this quite well. Imagine looking for a product that addresses your needs. As long as the key identified features are present in the product, the other features seem less important and are overlooked, i.e. not used.