By Janis Siegel, Jewish Sound Correspondent
The Unites States needs to play hardball. When it engages in talks with Iran over its uranium enrichment program during the U.N.’s General Assembly meeting, which commences Thursday, it must keep air strikes on the table. So writes Michael Singh, the Washington Institute’s managing director and a Middle East expert, and it should not count Iran among its allies against the Islamic State in Syria and become its propaganda tool.
More importantly, Singh told the Jewish Sound, the U.S needs a comprehensive policy in the Middle East — one that includes institution building and political and economic reform. Singh came to Seattle On Sept. 18 as a guest of the Seattle chapter of the American Jewish Committee to speak at the University of Washington on “Nuclear Iran: Beyond the Bomb.”
“We need a broader strategy for the region,” said Singh, who answered questions from the Jewish Sound on the legality of air strikes inside of Syria, the legacy of the Bush Administration’s Middle East policies, the status of an ISIS coalition with our allies, ISIS’s threats to the U.S., and what a future strategy there might look like.
“I think there is a case to be made that the absence of a strong U.S. role and a clear U.S. strategy certainly hasn’t helped,” said Singh, “and our allies want to hear, ‘What’s the bigger picture?’”
From 2005 to 2008, Singh was the senior director for Middle East Affairs for the National Security Council. He helped formulate U.S national security policy for the Bush administration and was the assistant to Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. Singh also served as the Middle East adviser to the Romney presidential campaign from 2011 to 2012.
A proponent of defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Singh said the terrorist organization is a direct and immediate threat to the security of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and most likely Israel, too, where the Islamic State’s army is not very far from the Golan Heights.
“I can’t imagine President Obama wanted to be the fourth president in a row to be ordering military operations in Iraq, certainly not the President Obama of 2008,” said Singh, “but unless you take steps to stabilize Syria, another insurgent group could come along and replace ISIS in the future, and we’ll be dealing with this problem again.”
According to Singh, the Bush administration adopted its Freedom Agenda, a comprehensive strategy that included democratic and political reforms, after recognizing that peace there might be an elusive proposition.
He recommends the Obama administration embrace this approach.
“The idea of institution-building and political and economic reform is one that needs to be an element in our strategy, especially if you want, as President Obama said in his West Point speech, our allies to do more,” Singh said. “I don’t think we should throw the baby out with the bath water by saying that the Freedom Agenda was associated with President Bush, therefore let’s do away with it.”
While the Obama administration has recruited nation partners who have already taken part in airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, five Arab allies — Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — began attacks against ISIS in Syria along with the U.S. on Sept. 22.
Obama, who said he wants Syrian president Bashar al-Assad gone, won the financial backing of Congress to arm the so-called moderate rebels who he hopes will do the job.
Singh supports the administration’s strategy, pointing to the U.S.’s previous counterterrorism operations in Yemen and Somalia as precedent for the action and U.N. Security Council resolutions on fighting terrorism. Additionally, he said, Iraq has asked for help from the U.S.
“I think it’s the right strategy, because if you were to confine the strikes to ISIS’s positions in Iraq, ISIS could withdraw behind the Syrian border and use Syria as safe haven and allow other terrorist groups to use it as a safe haven as well,” he said.
For Obama, the fact that Assad has lost control of a significant southeastern portion of his country to ISIS has weakened him.
“From President Obama’s point of view, which I think is correct on this,” said Singh, “Assad and the Assad regime has lost the legitimacy to govern.”
Singh is quick to point out that ISIS also represents a threat to American interests.
“One is the threat of an attack on the homeland,” said Singh. “It has the aspirations to do that in the future. The second is the issue of foreign fighters who’ve gone from other countries to fight with ISIS. The third is this concern about home-grown terrorists and people who might just be inspired by ISIS.”
Defeating ISIS and groups like them, said Singh, will require continued surveillance of financial transactions, ongoing travel security, identifying accomplices, and shutting down their media presence.