The big question on ISIS: Does Obama really know what he's getting into?

President Barack Obama’s pledge to join Syrian rebels in their conflict against the Islamic State was viewed by many Democrats and Republicans on the House Floor last week as just another costly blunder by a commander-in-chief who has little idea of what he is getting into. This view was also corroborated by Middle East analysts.
"So who are the partners which the United States and the West are going to use to go in on the ground to destroy the Islamic State?” Middle East analyst Jonathan Spyer asked CBN News. “If it's the Syrian rebels, as we're seeing, it may well be we should understand many of those same Syrian rebels are themselves Sunni jihadis, are themselves Sunni Islamists."
Spyer has little confidence that the president’s presumed good intentions of choosing the lesser to two evils in Syria will amount to anything good.
"So we're looking at a situation where we're going to partner with one group of Sunni Islamists to destroy another just because the other is a little bit worse, and they certainly are dreadful,” the Middle East expert pointed out from his own experience studying Syrian rebel groups within the war-torn nation. “I'm not sure what good can come of that."
He warns of the peril in aiding and abetting what are considered “moderate” Syrian rebels.
"There are moderates and secular, democratic even, maybe forces among the Syrian armed opposition, but they are small and not particularly powerful," Spyer continued. “They are engaged in a modus operandi in which they cooperate with the Islamists and the jihadis. They regard them as common fighters."
Spyer sees little rhyme or reason behind the decision to back the less-notorious jihadis.
"I think it cannot be stated enough times and it cannot be stated clearly enough that you cannot subdivide the Syrian insurgency into moderates and Sunni Islamists," argued Spyer. "They are mixed up and you cannot take the Sunni Islamists out of the game, which means if you want to make war against the Islamic State, making use of Syrian rebel fighters as your infantry, you will be pitting Sunni Islamists on your side against Sunni Islamists on the other side."
Skepticism against Obama’s Syrian ISIS crisis abounds
Shaky support for aiding the Syrian rebels’ ISIS crisis was seen across party lines, as 85 Democrats and 71 Republicans voted Thursday against Obama’s bill that was ultimately passed by the House to join their fight.
"We're going to pick a side — or try to pick a side — and same as we did when we went into Iraq, same as we've done in Afghanistan, and that hasn't worked well for us," asserted Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.
Many have argued that that Obama’s track record of mishandling and exacerbating things in the region around the Middle East is reason enough to conclude that he will end up making things worse in Syria for all sides involved — other than the militant Islamists.
Some of Obama’s recent foreign policy failures brought up by critics included his destabilization of Libya, where the U.S. provided weapons for “moderate” jihadists, giving ISIS its new stronghold there. Also mentioned was the president’s assistance in ousting America’s long-time Egyptian ally Mubarak, which ushered in the Muslim Brotherhood’s militant upheaval that included the murders of innocent Christians within the Coptic Church. Obama’s indirect arming of ISIS, which is now armed with the weapons the U.S. gave to the Iraqi army, was one of the other arguments laid out to convince those on the fence as to why the commander-in-chief’s judgment in the Middle East cannot be trusted.
Here we go again?
Questioning Obama’s willingness to jump in the midst of another Middle East crisis and arm America’s enemies, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., posed U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel a telling question Wednesday during a hearing over the matter.
“How do we know the rebels won’t align with ISIS when they have Assad in their sights?” Gillibrand asked.
In an attempt to justify any collateral damage, the defense secretary replied: “There will always be risk in a program like this, but we believe that risk is justified by the imperative of destroying ISIS — and the necessity of having capable partners on the ground in Syria.”
Obama’s plan to arm Syrian rebels was called into question by major advocates who originally supported the general idea of assisting them.
“You don’t think that the Free Syrian Army is going to fight against Bashar Assad, who has been decimating them?” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey.” You think that these people you’re training will only go fight against ISIS?”
Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., also had her doubts.
“Many of the so-called ‘moderate’ rebels have already joined the cause of Islamic jihad, and President Obama has failed to coherently outline how he would prevent American weapons from getting into the hands of our enemies,” Bachmann insisted. “President Obama has asked the U.S. Congress to follow him in a Vietnam-style slow walked response. I will not.”
She asserts that America stands at a crossroads and needs to directly engage the enemy rather than indirectly arm it.
“Either the United States chooses to decisively defeat this brutal evil with all available resources, or we will have to answer the next generation’s questions regarding why we failed to defeat the totalitarian evil of our day,” Bachmann said.
Arming the enemy
This was along the same line of reasoning shared by Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, who stressed the grave danger behind arming the Free Syrian Army, whose leadership not only shares the religious beliefs of the Islamic State, but has expressed that it is willing to fight and kill alongside ISIS.
“The Islamists that President Obama wants to keep arming have also worked with al Qaeda affiliates in the past and will in the future,” the congressman stated on the House Floor Wednesday night.
Gohmert emphasized why he voted “no” on Obama’s plan of funding Syria’s ISIS crisis.
“[The Syrian rebels] the president wants to continue arming and training have strong ties to the very group the U.S. is supposedly fighting,” Gohmert stressed, calling the Obama administration “naïve” and pointing out that the “weapons this President has been sending to the ‘vetted moderate Free Syrian Army’ for over a year continue to end up in the hands of our sworn enemies.”
Gohmert noted what he considers a fatal flaw in the administration’s war tactics.
“One of the big problems when we go in and train, as this President wants to do for Syrians, they learn our tradecraft, they use it against us as they did at Benghazi,” Ghomert argued, reasoning that ISIS should be taken out by U.S. forces “without giving our enemies more weapons with which to murder us.”
Mideast analyst and former CIA operative Clare Lopez stresses that the politically correct stance the Obama administration has taken when it comes to Islam has led to the U.S. special forces training jihadis who they believed to be “moderates,” as they did in Jordan, where she says the U.S. “gave them tactics, intelligence and arms.”
“They vetted them and asked, ‘Did you ever belong to al-Qaida?’ and they said ‘Oh, no – not me!’” Lopez told WND. “But did they ever ask them what their ideology was? They’re not allowed to. We’re not allowed to define our enemy, so how can we even identify our enemy? So, we fall into things like this where we actually train future ISIS jihadis, according to the Jordanian security officials.”
Learn from the past
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., also warns about jumping head-first into funding Syria’s rebels.
“Because we don’t know for sure who the groups all are,” Paul said Thursday while the Senate was considering the bill, noting that approximately half of the Free Syrian Army has already defected. “Even when we think we do, loyalties shift and groups become amorphous, with alleged moderates lining up with jihadists.”
Paul made it clear that America must learn from its mistakes.
“We prove time and time again we don’t know how to vet their leaders,” Paul stated before quoting the words of the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford. “We must understand two vital points going in, the moderate armed opposition’s biggest enemy is not ISIS, it is the Assad regime… moderate forces have and will tactically coordinate with the al Qaida-linked Nusra front on the ground.”
Paul reminded other senators of a major mishap last year that he believes characterizes the White House's lack of discernment on Middle East matters.
“[The administration] and its allies on both sides of the aisle wanted the United States to join this war on the side of ISIS, against the Assad regime,” Paul recalled.
The Kentucky senator ended making his point by stressing how what many considered to be “moderate groups” sold their weapons to ISIS-run jihadist forces, who have also been known to confiscate such arms from the “moderates.”
“ISIS has grabbed up U.S., Saudi, Qatari weapons by the truckload and we are now forced to fight against our own weapons,” Paul concluded, getting some of his information from Jane’s Terrorism Center. “Reports show that the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have supplied roughly 600 tons of weapons to the militants in Syria in 2013 alone … the transfer of Qatari arms to targeted groups has the same practical effect as shipping them to Al Nusra, a violent jihadist force.”