Thomas L. Friedman: Middle East fixes seem impossible

SULAIMANIYA, Iraq – Being back in Iraq after two years’ absence has helped me to put my finger on the central question bedeviling U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East today: What do you do when the necessary is impossible, but the impossible is impossible to ignore – and your key allies are also impossible?

Crushing the Islamic State, or ISIS, is necessary for stabilizing Iraq and Syria, but it is impossible as long as Shiites and Sunnis there refuse to truly share power, and yet ignoring the ISIS cancer and its ability to metastasize is impossible as well. See: Belgium.

And if all that isn’t impossible enough, our trying to make Iraq safe for democracy is requiring us to turn a blind eye to the fact that our most important NATO “ally” in the region, Turkey, is being converted from a democracy into a dictatorship by its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But because we need Turkey’s air bases and cooperation to foster a modicum of democracy in Iraq tomorrow, we are silent on Erdogan destroying democracy in Turkey today. Go figure.

And to think that in America we have all these people competing to become president to get a chance to take responsibility for this problem. Has no one told them this is absolutely the worst time in 70 years to be managing U.S. foreign policy?

President Obama has my sympathies. If you think there is a simple answer to this problem, you ought to come out here for a week. Just trying to figure out the differences among the Kurdish parties and militias in Syria and Iraq – the YPG, PYD, PUK, KDP and PKK – took me a day.

Let’s go back to the future of Iraq. “The problem in Iraq is not ISIS,” Najmaldin Karim, the wise governor of Kirkuk province, which is partly occupied by ISIS, remarked to me. “ISIS is the symptom of mismanagement and sectarianism.”

So even if ISIS is evicted from its stronghold in Mosul, he noted, if the infighting and mismanagement in Baghdad and sectarian tensions between Shiites and Sunnis are not diffused, “the situation in Iraq could be even worse after” ISIS is toppled.

Why? Because there will just be another huge scramble among Iraqi Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmens, Shiite militias, Turkey and Iran over who controls these territories now held by ISIS. There is simply no consensus here on how power will be shared in the Sunni areas that ISIS has seized.

I don’t know anymore what is sufficient to eradicate ISIS – and create a decent order in its place – but it is obvious what is necessary: The struggle between Sunnis and Shiites, fueled by Saudi Arabia and Iran, has to be tempered.

Only Arabs and Muslims can truly take down and delegitimize ISIS, and right now they are too divided, angry, ambivalent and confused to do it.

This story was originally published April 1, 2016 at 7:02 PM with the headline "Thomas L. Friedman: Middle East fixes seem impossible."