![Our Shiite allies in the war against the terrorist Islamic State [IS] also have a taste for terror, which is one reason why we probably won't destroy the IS. [Credit: Getty Images]](https://i0.wp.com/www.dougsbriefcase.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/credit-getty-images.jpg)
Our Shiite allies in the war against the terrorist Islamic State [IS] also have a taste for terror, which is one reason why we probably won’t destroy the IS. [Credit: Getty Images]
This past week, he called on the world to unite behind a “common effort to extract this cancer,” as he characterized the Islamic State [IS]. Our ever-bellicose chief diplomat shunned metaphors and spoke more directly. The IS, Kerry said, “and the wickedness it represents must be destroyed.”
Thus did our latest incursion into Iraq, which began as a mission to rescue Yazidis trapped on a mountain, become something more. But words are cheap. War is costly. The President lacks the resolve to make good on his threat to extract the cancer that is the Islamic State.
The proximate cause of his provocative rhetoric was the decapitation of an American journalist by a hooded IS executioner. Our revulsion and rage are entirely justified. But before further expanding this war, we should reflect on its origins, aims and potential costs.
Such reflection has been little in evidence. The Yazidis are safe and, as it turns out, weren’t in nearly as dire a position as we’d feared. So we then dispatched our bombers to help an uneasy coalition of Kurds and Iraqi Shiites seize control of a dam that had been held by the IS. This time our objective was not to prevent a humanitarian outrage, but to protect Americans. The IS might have blown up the dam, so the argument goes, causing the Tigris to flood and placing US embassy officials 200 miles downstream in Baghdad in danger of getting wet.
That is not to belittle the success of these efforts, only to question their purpose, which remains fuzzy. We have an undeniable interest in liberating Americans who have been captured by Muslim terrorists. The President authorized an unsuccessful effort in early summer to free American journalist James Foley from IS captivity. He chose not to pay the ransom that Foley’s captors demanded. Both decisions were sound ones, however difficult they may have been. It is galling to hear from Foley’s former prison mates – foreign journalists whose employers or governments obtained their release by paying large sums of money to the IS – knowing that their freedom was secured by bankrolling Foley’s killers.
Still, we can’t criticize others for negotiating with terrorists. We do it too, even when it requires breaking the law. The Government Accountability Office this week concluded that the Administration violated two federal laws in exchanging five high-ranking Taliban terrorists for an army private.
Nor should we yield to the fashion of branding the IS as the worst terrorist organization on earth because men wearing masks murder people in public. The IS holds no patent on atrocity. Hamas has attracted enormous sympathy around the world, in spite of – or perhaps because of – its aggression against Israel. But after Israeli strikes killed three Hamas leaders, the organization took revenge by brutally executing on a public street 18 Gazans, whom they accused of treason. “We should clean our area of these people before we cleanse it of the Jews,” an approving bystander told Reuters.
And then there are the Shiite fanatics for whom we are providing air support. On Friday, Shiite militiamen shot up a Sunni mosque during afternoon prayers, killing 65 people (and provoking a series of retaliatory bombings by Sunnis that have killed dozens more). This is no isolated incident. Our new best friends reportedly keep “hit lists” of Sunni foes and have the unpleasant habit of killing them, dragging their corpses through the streets and hanging them from utility poles.
One would think that by now we would have learned that this is what jihadists of all persuasions do. Inhumanity in the name of Allah is their calling card. While I’m willing to concede that the stonings, crucifixions and decapitations favored by the IS are more shocking to our sensibilities, I can’t escape the sense that we’re splitting hairs when we base our support for Shiite partisans over their Sunni opponents on such distinctions.
Iran is happy that we’ve taken the Shiites’ part. Our bombings, whatever their purpose, are winning the approval of the ayatollahs. Iran supports us because we’re doing their dirty work — engaging the jihadists who are seeking to overthrow their client Bashar al-Assad in Syria and preventing the dissolution of the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. We have become the air wing of the Iranian military, sparing the theocracy from the consequences of its poisonous interventions in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. Perhaps we believe that by bombing Sunni lunatics, we will persuade Iran to give up its nuclear aspirations. That seems a bit of a longshot and, in any case, a flimsy justification for war.
If we really mean to fight a war to destroy the IS, then we need to count its cost. That group, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, cannot be defeated without expanding the war into Syria, something the President’s deputy national security adviser suggests that we are prepared to do. Mr. Assad will surely thank us for that.
Such an expansion, however, won’t likely be enough. If the last Iraq War taught us anything, it is that sectarian insurgencies are not easily uprooted. Vanquishing the IS cannot be done on the cheap, in short order, or merely from the air. It will take time and almost certainly require boots on the ground. I take the President at his word that he is unwilling to do that. The majority of Americans would not back him if he did.
The President thus finds himself in an odd place: unwilling to stand aside and let the Iraqis and their Iranian patrons sort this out for themselves, but equally unwilling to do what it would take to make good on his threats against the IS. Instead, he’ll likely order up weeks or months of bombing missions, while hoping that the Iraqis somehow find a way to form a marginally functional government, reduce sectarian bloodshed, field a relatively competent army (albeit one populated by Shiite fanatics), and at least restrain the ambitions of the IS.
It will not, however, destroy the newly minted caliphate. Extracting their cancerous jihadism requires more effort than we are willing to expend.
Nicely put!
So Doug. This seems like a hopeless dilemma. And in all probability we will under act, with this current Administration, and not concretely resolve any of the problems created by the IS or the jihadists in general or Assad’s regime in Syria or the Iranian threat. What then are we to do? What out of the box response will quell the killing, lesson the threat to the US, and give the people of the Middle East a place to live with some semblance of security that they can live their own way, all variety of Muslims, Christians, Jews and others? What policies could even protect better the weak from slaughter much less bring an end to ongoing hostilities?
I don’t think there are any magic formulas or obvious solutions at this point, Chip. We could begin by repairing the traditional alliances that have frayed over the past 6 years. Our relationship with Egypt has somehow survived, although it is regrettable that their government is so repressive. Our ties to Israel and the Saudis need to be renewed. Our friends and foes, particularly in the Middle East, need to understand that we are a reliable ally. In Afghanistan, we should avoid the mistake we made in Iraq of withdrawing all our troops, and do the best we can to persuade rival parties to accept the contested election results and form some type of workable government, so that a resurgent Taliban doesn’t accomplish there what the IS has accomplished in Mesopotamia. Iraq, I’m afraid, is too far gone. Ethnic and sectarian violence have returned to their pre-surge level, as has mistrust among the various factions in Baghdad. We made a decision to bail out of Iraq; these are its consequences. They can’t be undone, in my view, without a US-led counterinsurgency, something that neither our leadership nor the voters would stomach. US intervention will be limited, marginally effective at best and will end should it become a political liability. We should protect the Kurds, who seem a reasonable group. We could begin by lifting the embargo on their oil. We are sending them arms; why not give them the benefit of our trade? We should also maintain military advisers there and make it clear that we are willing to do more to protect them from the IS, on the condition that the PKK is kept in check and that there will be no effort to expand a de facto Kurdistan into Turkish territory. Beyond that, we should stand down and let the various extremist groups fight it out. As unsatisfying as that seems, it might serve our interests to let the bad guys expend their energy on killing each other. That’s what we did during the Iran-Iraq War and what we are doing today in Libya. In the meantime, we do need some out-of-the-box thinking on combating Islamist extremism. We haven’t yet found an effective approach that is suited to our political realities. That is a project for the next President.
Our relations with Israel and the Saudis are fine, and are not a problem. Furthermore relations with those countries did not solve our Iraq or middle east problems when Bush was President. Israel is a true friend, but they have their own problems to take care of. Saudis have their own interests which are not always the same as ours. There will be normal bumps on the road, as the middle east tries to get rid of the autocrats in power there, and we are seeing that in Egypt and Libya.
The decision to pull out from Iraq was the right decision. Bush promised us a quick war which would not cost us much, but the trillions in his Iraq war nearly brought us to the brink of a great depression. We had a clear choice in the 2008 elections where Obama promised to get us out of Iraq, McCain said that he could envision us staying a hundred years in Iraq, and we voters soundly elected Obama by a big margin. That issue was decided then, and Obama did the right thing by fulfiling his election promise.
I think for the most part we are letting the bad guys fight each other. I am not aware of any embargoes we are imposing on Kurds. Cite please.
Maybe we should have respected the “Divine Right of Dictators” rather than suffer from some Wilsonian hubris that we could bring freedom to others. The violence, death, loss of property, and ways of life have increased not decreased by our actions. And, the danger to our homeland has only increased.
That has certainly been our experience in Libya, where our airstrikes helped topple Qaddafi and where the resulting strife has persuaded us to evacuate our diplomatic personnel.
In Iraq, the vast majority of voters believe that our efforts to pacify the nation after driving Saddam from office was a waste of blood and treasure. My own position is that, regardless of one’s position on the decision to invade, we did manage to suppress ethnic and sectarian strife and allow an elected government to take hold. I believe that we should have maintained a presence there, as we have in Korea and elsewhere, to maintain stability. I understand that opens me to the charge of Wilsonian hubris, but I continue to believe that would have been the correct course. That said, we chose to put Iraq in the rear view mirror and, as the President liked to say, “leave Iraq to the Iraqis.” I’m a bit mystified that he has so abruptly changed his position and remain confused as to his objectives and how he hopes to achieve them.
You’re a couple of news cycles behind in suggesting that our relations with Israel “are fine.” On the eve of the collapse of US-inspired peace talks, our Secretary of State proclaimed that if Israel walked away from the negotiations, they could be accused of “apartheid.” They walked away and were horrified by Kerry’s comments. Shortly thereafter, they went to war with the Gazans. Kerry then tried to jawbone them into a ceasefire, using the Qataris as conduits. That enraged the Israelis and our relationship with them is at a nadir. I agree with you that they have to do what they have to do to survive, but that is not the prevailing view at the White House.
As to how things are going in Egypt and Libya, I think you’re again mistaken. Egypt did depose an autocrat and elected a leader. The military dumped him and has undertaken a pretty aggressive campaign of repression against him and his colleagues in the Muslim Brotherhood.
In Libya, the President used a bombing campaign to help depose Muammar Qaddafi (kind of like his predecessor deposed Saddam). The results have been dreadful. We have joined the stampede out of that country, whose descent into barbarity makes Iraq look like a vacation destination by comparison.
Of course, things aren’t much better in the other Arab Spring countries. Nearly 200,000 have died in Syria.
As for ending the war in Iraq, the President now insists that wasn’t his decision. President Bush arranged for the end of the war. President Obama was just a bystander. http://bit.ly/XMgyiv
President Obama has started the Third Iraq War, however, although he hasn’t yet explained what he’s trying to accomplish or how he might accomplish it. Nor has he sought, much less obtained, Congressional authorization for his actions. I admire your unshakeable belief that he is nonetheless right and that this will all work out well.
As to the Kurdish oil issue, a Texas judge, at the urging of the State Department, ordered the seizure of a Kurdish tanker carrying $100 million worth of oil. He has temporarily stayed his order, so the seizure has not yet taken place. But the tanker has been forbidden to disgorge its contents in the US. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014–08-22/kurd-claim-to-stranded-oil-tanker-turns-on-iraq-control.html
The administration you were part of did manage to suppress ethnic and sectarian strife, but at what cost? Your administration promised us that the Iraq war would be over relatively quickly, and that the war would not cost us much, and that the Iraqi oil money would largely pay for the reconstruction. But the war ended up costing us in the trillions with an enormous toll to life — both US and Iraqi. The situation in Iraq was not created by Obama, but was created by Bush who started a war on false pretenses and on ideological grounds. Bush had carte blanche on Iraq for six years but did not solve the problem but continued to throw tons of money on it and apply band aids. It is disheartening to see those who created the problem to begin with now whistling past the graveyard and blaming others.
It was McCain’s position in 2008 that we should continue a presence in Iraq. That was soundly rejected by the voters. If anything Obama should be commended for getting us out of there and for fulfilling his campaign promise.
“Changing one’s position” is sometimes the right thing to do. I would much rather have a President who changed his/her position in light of changed circumstances, than have a President who stuck to their original position.
Despite your nitpicking US remains a firm and staunch ally of Israel. Sometimes being an ally and a friend requires one to deliver some harsh words or nudge someone in a direction — and those of us who are parents are well aware of this.
I never said that the situation in Egypt or Libya or Syria was ok. But there will be road bumps on the way and it will be a long haul before the folks there get rid of their dictators.
It is a fact that Bush negotiated a SOFA agreement that mandated US troops to get out of Iraq. It is also a fact that neither Bush nor Obama were able to persuade the Iraqis to allow US troops to remain. This point has been largely litigated in the 2008 elections, so it is rather moot now.
I am still not seeing how your proposals would solve the problems in Iraq or the middle east.
The oil tanker issue seems one of a disputed ownership, and does not constitute an embargo.
As a matter of law, we are seizing Kurdish cargo ships if they enter US waters. We are not allowing Americans to buy their goods. That is what an embargo does. The Kurds extracted the oil, shipped the oil and contracted for its purchase. The State Department is backing Baghdad’s efforts to block the transaction. But if you insist that it is not an embargo, as you insist that our war in Iraq is not a war, then I would amend my earlier statement to suggest that we end our non-embargo on Kurdish oil.
Time and again you talk of resolve. Your former boss George W Bush had plenty of resolve, but “resolve” did not help Bush one bit when it came to Iraq or the middle east.
We have limited options in the middle east, and there are no easy answers to some of these problems. Maybe the only thing we can do is to reduce the capabilities of the Sunni bad guys and the Shia bad guys, realizing that weaking one group strengthens the hand of the other.
No one said there are easy answers. But there are good and bad ones. We’re not reducing the capabilities of both the Sunni and Shia bad guys. We’re backing the Shia bad guys over the Sunnis. If our objective were to weaken both, one way would be for the President to return to the policy he’d pursued until a month or so ago, which was to leave Iraq to the Iraqis. Let them sort it out. But then, that would show some resolve, which you seem to view as a character deficiency.
In some cases we are backing the Shias (Iraq government) over the really bad Sunnis (ISIS), because the alternative you propose which is to do nothing would be disastrous.
Maybe you should articulate clearly and concisely what we should be doing in Iraq.
See comment to Chip Kahn above.
Pankaj: You continue to rehearse your criticisms of President Bush, which is getting a bit tiresome, and to avoid the issue of the moment, which is whether you support the Third Iraq War.
I don’t support another war in Iraq, but I am ok with limited and targeted strikes as long as our allies and Iraq don’t oppose them.
The Bush administration created the problem, so you can’t wash your hands off the problem you created.
Obama is responsible for Iraq’s deterioration. Blame-shifting and denial won’t change that.
Pankaj: this comment belittles the reality and is petty. Whatever I happened in the past, it has been the current President’s watch for many years. The implications for the world of current events in the Middle East cannot be treated as some minor affair that the previous Administration screwed up and the current one can do a bit of fixing on. Let’s be honest, the current Administration has not been serious about the extent of the events and it’s implications for world stability or the safety of millions of people, including our homeland.
I think either President Obama will come up with a strategy and nip this thing in the bud sufficiently or millions will be displaced and many will die and the world will be a very dangerous place for our children.
The score doesn’t matter…Bush… Obama, who really cares, the issue is leadership now to secure a safe world from my view.
Chip — I’ll agree with you that it matters more on how we deal with the present situation than dwell on how we got here. But it just irritates me that many of the people who engage in Obama bashing are the same people who caused this problem in the first place. I have said what I wanted to say and will leave it at that.