Our Iranian Allies

Last week pictures of Qassem Suleimani started to circulate on social media, which is always a pretty sure sign that an Iranian military campaign is about to kick off somewhere in the Middle East. And indeed not long after, Iranian-backed Shiite militias, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps units, and the Iranian Basij militia targeted Fallujah, the Sunni-majority Iraqi town under Islamic State control. If Suleimani, the IRGC commander, is able to vanquish ISIS forces, as he did in the Tikrit campaign, it will be largely thanks to U.S. air support. While no one was looking, the Obama administration bundled American and Iranian interests together.

The White House says it is fighting ISIS, but its Iranian and Iranian-backed partners say the war is about killing Sunnis. "There are no patriots, no real religious people in Fallujah," said the leader of one Iranian-backed Shiite militia. "It's our chance to clear Iraq by eradicating the cancer of Fallujah." That doesn't sound like the kind of ally the United States should be embracing. That sounds like the United States taking sides in a sectarian war, against the Sunni Arab regional majority.

There is no way to defeat ISIS unless the administration can get Sunni Arab leaders, especially tribal sheikhs, to join the fight. Only they have the local forces and knowledge to root out ISIS. But obviously no tribal leaders will enjoin their brothers to open up a Sunni civil war so that the Shiites and Iranians may profit from them spilling each other's blood. To destroy ISIS, the United States will have to move against the Shiite groups that are terrorizing Sunnis. That's precisely how the surge worked. But that hasn't happened with this White House for the same reason that the administration never moved to topple Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad—Obama doesn't want to get their Iranian patrons mad.

Never mind the fact that the Sunnis are baffled and angry. In siding with Iran and its allies against the Sunnis, the United States cannot win the campaign against ISIS. It is a phony war. The White House's fight against ISIS is cover for a political realignment. To wit: America and Iran agree (although for different reasons) that the Islamic State is really bad, and so they're allies in this fight, which will give everyone a chance to get used to the new reality. America is realigning with Iran.

There's been some confusion about the Obama administration's Middle East policy. It's typically understood as isolationist or "realist." On this reading, Obama just wants to withdraw from the Middle East. Why? First of all, he sees the allies in that part of the world as a nuisance. As he explained to theAtlantic, Obama is disappointed in his onetime pal, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Saudi Arabia keeps complaining about Iran, but, from Obama's point of view, all of Riyadh's worst problems are internal, and the Saudis brought those on themselves. And, as Obama sees it, the prime minister of Israel is in a league of his own when it comes to arrogance and ingratitude. Why deal with these guys if you don't have to?