![Iraqi security forces and Shiite militia are among the ground troops on whom we rely in our war against the Islamic State. [Credit: Reuters]](https://i0.wp.com/www.dougsbriefcase.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/credit-reuters.jpg)
Iraqi security forces and Shiite militia are among the ground troops on whom we rely in our war against the Islamic State. Their brutality rivals that of IS. [Credit: Reuters]
The men were led a few hundred yards to a field where Abu Omar said more than a hundred others had been gathered. For about two hours, they were forced to kneel and stare at the ground as the fighters selected their targets and led them to a spot behind a mud wall.
“They took them behind the wall. Less than a minute, then a gunshot,” said Abu Omar. “All we could hear was the gunshots. We couldn’t see.”
This atrocity, which claimed the lives of 72 unarmed people in a village in Iraq’s Diyala Province, was not carried out by the Islamic State (IS). It was perpetrated by our allies in the war against IS — Iraqi security forces and Shiite militia.
More than six months after he launched a bombing campaign intended to rescue members of an obscure cult known as the Yazidis from an IS siege, President Obama has asked Congress to authorize the Third Iraq War.
It’s just a courtesy, of course. The President believes that he needn’t bother with Congress concerning such matters as war and peace, immigration, health care, and other subjects constitutionally reserved to the legislature, the Constitution being the obsolete work of eighteenth century elitists. But the President thinks it important to make Congress feel relevant to governance of the Republic.
Congress has so far reacted badly to the President’s beaux geste. Republicans object to the war resolution’s prohibition of “enduring offensive ground operations” as too limiting. Democrats complain that the phrase’s vagueness makes it too expansive. Which is why the President would much rather negotiate with ayatollahs than with Congress.
Whatever comes of this exercise (our war efforts will continue with or without Congressional approval), it is a useful one. Useful because it forces a discussion of why we’ve gone to war against IS, why we are conducting the war in such a peculiar way and what we hope to achieve.
Why Are We At War With IS?
The President has variously explained his rationale for the war, but it seems to come down to this: he believes the Islamic State to be the worst terrorist group on earth. They destroy villages and massacre their inhabitants. They take Western hostages, using ransom as a principal revenue source and slaughtering those whose ransoms go unpaid. And though their resort to brutality and carnage is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from every brand of Islamist fanaticism, there is a theatricality about their executions that makes them more chilling. When we see these videos, we want IS destroyed, which is the President’s stated intention.
But is IS really the worst terrorist group on earth? I’m not convinced. If there were Academy Awards in this category, nominees might include Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Taliban, the Kurdish terrorists at the PKK and al Qaeda. All of them routinely commit atrocities and have seized control of territories within sovereign nations. And yet, we’re providing air cover to the PKK, negotiating with the Houthis (who recently overthrew the U.S.-backed regime in Yemen), have swapped prisoners with the Taliban, reportedly held secret talks with Hamas in pursuit of a failed peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, have allowed al Qaeda to operate largely unmolested in Syria, and are choosing to ignore Boko Haram and Hezbollah.
Why Are We Outsourcing Ground Combat?
Even if the Islamic State were the worst terrorists on earth, that would not be grounds for war. Perhaps the President has declared them such because his strategy involves outsourcing ground combat to a coterie of miscreants. His implicit moral justification appears to be that our cobelligerents are not quite as bad as our enemy. Maybe. But they are plenty bad, as the account above illustrates.
Our Coalition of the Ugly But Willing includes Shiite militia, Kurdish terrorists, the Iranian military, Iraqi security forces, and Assad’s Syrian army. When they win a battle, frequently with our air support, mayhem can ensue. Winning territory from IS often means that Shiites massacre Sunnis; losing that Sunnis massacre Shiites. We facilitate one and condemn the other.
And while war necessarily involves moral compromise, our strategic decision to rely on armies and factions of evil purpose and misshapen morality to prosecute this war makes us complicit in these atrocities. Our airstrikes aid their ground assaults, though we know what will happen should they – and we – succeed.
We are entrusting the conduct of our war to people we know to be untrustworthy because the President has made “no boots on the ground” the lodestar of his foreign and military policy. The President defines this war by who we are against (IS) and what we are against doing (sending U.S. troops into ground combat). Winning that war, however, requires ground combat. So we support some very bad people who do some very bad things and console ourselves with the thought that they are not as bad as the enemy.
What Happens If We Win?
The decision to engage in war is concerned primarily with ends and only secondarily with means. For the President, the discussion is almost always about means: what we will do and, far more significantly, what we won’t. The “no boots on the ground” stipulation needs to be considered in the context of another: the U.S. should not undertake military intervention unless it advances our legitimate interests.
The President has yet to identify our interests or articulate our goals, beyond degrading and destroying IS. So let’s ask ourselves, what if IS were destroyed – banished from Iraq and Syria, erased from the face of the earth, never again to inflict itself on humanity? What then?
That outcome is improbable, especially since IS, far from contracting, has spread beyond Iraq and Syria to countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa. But if IS were destroyed, there would be at least two possible outcomes, neither especially attractive. The first is that the land grab in which various of our cobelligerents have been engaged will take on some permanency. Kurds will consolidate their control over the northern portion of Iraq and proclaim independence from Baghdad. Sunni tribal chieftains, should they decide to turn against IS, also will seek liberation from the Shiite-dominated government. The consequence of victory could thus be an inherently unstable arrangement that divides territory – and control of oil production – among rival ethnic, tribal and religious groups. Further barbarity would almost certainly ensue.
The other possibility is that Islamic State’s destruction will return political borders to those drawn by the Europeans after the First World War. The map would be unchanged. Syria would still be Syria and Iraq would comprise its characteristically volatile mix of Sunni, Shiite and Kurd. Assad will have survived a civil war, his most potent enemies subdued thanks in no small measure to U.S. airstrikes. Baghdad’s Shiite-dominated government would, like Assad’s, serve as a repressive and reliable client of Tehran.
In that scenario, Iran would cement its status as a Middle East hegemon, controlling either directly or through clients territory extending from the Mediterranean to the Pakistan and Afghan frontier, and from Turkey to the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia would be bracketed between Iraq to its north and Houthi-controlled Yemen to its south, with Israel remaining sandwiched between the Iranian-backed thugs of Hezbollah and Hamas. Our traditional allies will find themselves in the shadow of a new Persian Empire.
Whether that is the President’s unspoken aim or merely an outcome with which he’s comfortable is difficult to say. To the consternation of our traditional allies in the region, he has abetted Iranian hegemony from his first days in office. Our relationship with Iran is the lone surviving fragment of the “smart” foreign policy that he and Mrs. Clinton launched in 2009. The rest has turned to rubble.
His “reset” of relations with Russia has produced a new Cold War. His “pivot to Asia” was a dud. His attempt to broker an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians came to nought. His embrace of “Arab Spring” has produced military dictatorship in Egypt and resurgent jihadism almost everywhere else (Tunisia being the notable exception). Boko Haram is spreading terror to a growing list of sub-Saharan African countries. A coup instigated by Iran has toppled the U.S.-backed government in Yemen. Al Qaeda has not been “decimated,” as presidential adviser Susan Rice once claimed, but is spreading throughout the region, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials. The Administration’s military or diplomatic support for regime change in Libya, Iraq and Ukraine has brought disaster to all three.
The only foreign policy constant has been the President’s man-crush on Iran’s Supreme Leader, kindled by exchanges of letters between the two. The President seems determined to legitimize Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and to relieve the country from sanctions, raising concerns about the theocracy acquiring nuclear weapons. As Walter Russell Mead recently observed in the American Interest, this effort has left the President virtually alone, with everyone from Henry Kissinger to the Congressional wing of his own party questioning his strategy.
Mead speculates that the White House dreams of a Persian Spring, in which moderate Iranians will topple the theocrats and govern a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-confessional empire according to Western democratic sensibilities.
Presidents, like all of us, are entitled to dream. But if he has some goal in mind, some sense of what the region would look like if IS were indeed destroyed, then he has an obligation to tell us plainly and to explain why this result is worth a war.
Congressional debate over authorizing military force is at this point academic, but if it produces a clearer understanding of why we have chosen this war, it will have served a useful purpose.
The Kurds have been a U.S. ally for years, not the Sunni nor the Shia. Either way, the land will be split unless a nuclear disaster prevents that from happening. We are taking a gamble in everything we do in the middle east. Actions carry more power than what is spoken. The Islamic caliphate has displayed a disregard for all forms of society, even their own sectarian culture. Seems as if we are at odds with who we pick as our allies in the region. So far the Kurds have shown compassion to other cultures and have stepped in where Iraq’s army has failed miserably. Clearly the Kurdish are the most competent party in the region that gives a glimmer of hope to most if the region. The Islamic caliphate militants are surely not our friends nor our allies. When I was in Iraq back in 2010, I would talk with local translators or Terps about the situation. These local terps nailed it when they spoke of violence coming in the near future from Syria, the place that most wealthy Iraqis sent their money during the Gulf War and 2005 U.S. occupation. They spoke of Jordan and Turkey being safe havens for wealthy Iraqis that fled Iraq. Here we are five years later, and it all came fruition. The plan was put well before I even arrived in Iraq in 2010. Syria was one giant sleeper cell that rise up and attacked Iraq and most likely gasses its own people just to instigate a World reaction. Well, it got a reaction to say the least. The Islamc caliphate militants’ plan has backfired and the World is angry. So, who do we trust now? We trust those that will deliver a result that is in the best interest of what we perceive as democracy. The Kurds are the force in the region that can and will deliver. If the U.S. waits too long to back the Kurdish, every gain may be a lost cause. Then we will be paying thousands of dollars per barrel of oil to the Islamic caliphate militants who will rule all of the oil fields of Iraq and then some. Iraq’s army has already proved that it does not posses the strength to win small battles. The U.S. should be taking the Islamic caliphate threat more seriously than it is right now. The U.S. should arm the Kurds with small arms and the Kurds should allow the U.N. to move into the Kurdish region with bigger weapons it has complete control over. Then, the gains made by the Kurds can be held with much higher probability of success. What if the Kurdish were totally destroyed by the Islamic caliphate militants? What then?
Thanks for your very thoughtful comments. I agree that the Kurds are the closest thing to good guys in the region. I do put the PKK in a separate category. The State Dept in 2012 declared the PKK to be Europe’s deadliest terrorist group (they count Turkey as being part of Europe). That said, we’re making a mistake to help Iran, Assad, the Shiite militia and the other bad guys over there. It will come back to bite us, particularly if the end result is to make Iran the regional hegemon.
Before I departed Iraq in 2011, the Iranians were gaining a foothold in such areas as health care for the elderly and other public services they used/use to stealthily encroach upon vulnerable Iraqis. I see an uprising in Turkey coming sometime in the future as the Shia sect is grossly underrepresented as well as other religious groups in Turkey. Why is Iran not doing anything about that? I suppose Iraq is Iran’s prize as the country wields more and more power over Iraq as time passes. Theocracy really has no place in the foundation of governance anywhere in the world. War truly is a double-edged sword. The Islamic caliphate, along with its caliph, is truly diabolical.
The IS is indeed diabolical, the closest thing to pure evil. But Iran is more dangerous, particularly if they acquire nuclear weapons.