Contain, degrade, destroy ISIS? It's a timeline

[Update 9/5, 12:15 p.m. ET: in a press conference in Wales that just ended, Obama added "ultimately" at least thrice to the phrase "degrade and ultimately destroy" and variants, reinforcing the 'timeline' theme below.]

I'm not qualified to assess the efficacy of Obama's past or current conduct of policy with respect to Syria and Iraq. But I am well attuned to Obama's rhetoric and the thinking it reflects. On that basis, I can tell you that the media angst over whether he's signaled intent to contain, degrade or destroy ISIS is a lot of hooey.

Current U.S. policy, as Obama has described it and to the extent it can be disclosed, is pretty straightforward. U.S. air power will contain ISIS, and begin to degrade its warmaking capacity, while regional actors get their act together, with the help of U.S. prodding and incentives. To the extent that they do so, efforts will escalate to destroy ISIS.

Contain, degrade and destroy are stages in a process, timeline uncertain and dependent on strategic goals such as winning Sunni Iraqi buy-in to the new government and getting Gulf states to act in concert in finding viable Syrian opposition to back (while also, I would guess, working to leverage and to some extent covertly coordinate with warfare against ISIS conducted by Iran and Syria).

It's true that Obama's rhetoric has served to temper more overheated pronouncements by Biden, Kerry and others. And there was a real division between Powers' denunciation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Obama's refusal to call it that. But his own rhetoric with respect to Iraq, Syria and ISIS can be cast as  inconsistent or conflicted only if you break apart the implicit and contingent timeline he's outlined with the help of various verbs.

The Obamaiad

Early this month, Obama favored Jeffrey Goldberg for a second time with a deep dive into his thinking about the Middle East. This time (for once) I'm going to keep my precis short.* And dear reader, please help me out of a metrical jam by internally pronouncing "neocon" really fast:

Obama, to clear neocon fog,
unburdens himself to Gold blog.
"Though our power's not puny.
we'd have to be loony
to get between Gog and Magog."

And then we were whipsawed off to another quarter:

Are gays Putin's Jews?

Copping to next to no prior knowledge here, a claim about Putin's motives and world view caught my eye once, then twice in my weekend reading about the Ukraine crisis:

First, from Timothy Snyder:

Russian intervention in Ukraine is directed against the EU, which Moscow has now decided is a threat to its interests and indeed a civilizational challenge. President Putin’s global crusade against gays has become, during these last few weeks, a specific foreign policy doctrine directed against the EU. The Kremlin has made clear that control of Ukraine is one step towards the creation of a Eurasian Union, a rival organization to the EU which will reject European “decadence” in favor of a defense of Christian heterosexuality etc. For months press organs close to the Kremlin have referred to Europe as “Gayropa.”

Fertile ground for Iranian paranoia

The Times' Lede blog, noting that the Russian Government's English Language satellite news channel Russia Today creates "balance" in coverage of U.S. affairs by interviewing Americans on the extreme left and extreme right, relays this bit of fuel for Iranian (and Russian) paranoia featured on a video report released by the station:

Craig Roberts, a former member of the Reagan administration, said that the C.I.A. was behind the whole thing. Wayne Madsen, an investigative journalist, agreed with the Russia Today anchor that Mir Hussein Moussavi’s green movement had “all the hallmarks” of an American-orchestrated “color revolution.” Mr. Madsen added that, given the heavy coverage of what is happening in Iran by American news organizations, “it seems like there is a coordinated and concerted effort to try to stir things up using the Western media.”

The old Soviet-bloc counter-narrative, in which U.S. aggression foments repressive counterrevolutions worldwide, maintains a vigorous half-life. Both the Russian and the Iranian powers that be view the color revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgystan as CIA-fomented coups designed to extend Western hegemony.

While blaming the West for the mass protests in Iran may this time prove to be an old trick played once too often, Khamenei and co. can find plenty of genuine fuel for paranoia -- not only in the CIA's toppling of Mossadegh in 1953 and its quarter century of propping up the Shah, but in the very real U.S covert action to destabilize the regime that was operative at least up to Obama's inauguration. It was only last August that Seymour Hersh reported:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.

Coming even nearer to the Iranian government allegations were these actions, reported by ABC News in May 2007:

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert "black" operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a "nonlethal presidential finding" that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions.

Of course,such action was at least partly in response to U.S. commanders' claims of constant Iranian support for insurgent groups in Iraq that were killing U.S. soldiers and destabilizing the government. It was also authorized in the context of -- and perhaps, as time ran out for the Cheney faction in the Bush Administration, as a substitute for -- contemplated bombing of Iranian nuclear installations. The point is that most Iranians doubtless have no trouble believing that the U.S. would try to destabilize their government. Most just don't believe that U.S. influence destabilized this election. Their own government for the moment has less credibility than Obama's.