by Mark N. Katz
All the major actors in the Middle East oppose the rise of the extremist group that calls itself the Islamic State (ISIS). In fact, ISIS has managed to incur the enmity of a highly diverse set of actors who often oppose one another. These include several sets of antagonists such as the United States and the West on the one hand and Russia on the other; Iran and the Assad regime in Syria on the one hand and Sunni states like Saudi Arabia on the other; Israel on the one hand and Hezbollah on the other; and the Kurds on the one hand and Turkey (which fears Kurdish nationalism) on the other. Even al-Qaeda opposes ISIS.
The fact that all the important actors in the region oppose ISIS has given rise to the hope that this radical Sunni group can be defeated. The experience of the Bolsheviks nearly a century ago, however, shows that this might not occur. Indeed, the current situation is reminiscent of Russia after the Bolsheviks seized power there in late 1917. The harshness of their rule quickly resulted in numerous opposition groups rising up against them inside the country. External powers also recognized the Bolsheviks as a threat, and several supported their internal opponents or even directly intervened both in the final year of World War I and for a few years afterward. But even though many internal and external actors wanted to defeat the Bolsheviks, these actors ultimately worked at cross-purposes, which helped the Bolsheviks not only survive but also gain control over most of the former Tsarist Empire and pose a threat to many other nations for years.
Today, as with the threat posed by the Bolsheviks, the common threat posed by ISIS provides no guarantee that the groups who oppose it will put aside their differences and work together to defeat it. Indeed, while hopes for a grand alliance against ISIS have been expressed in many quarters, the achievement of this goal has so far proven elusive—and will likely remain so.
Many of the principal actors in the region are worried not only about ISIS, but also other threats, including one another. Iran and Russia in particular regard the Syrian government—a minority Alawite regime—as an ally and do not want to see it replaced by a Sunni majority regime that would be hostile toward them. Saudi Arabia and several other Sunni Arab states, in contrast, see Iran—along with its Shi’a allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen—as the principal threat and accordingly regard the replacement of the Assad regime as important for their security as the defeat of ISIS. Turkey, for its part, sees ISIS as a threat but apparently regards the possibility of Kurdish forces in Syria (and, as a result, in Turkey itself) growing stronger from ISIS’s defeat as an even greater one.
The Obama administration is pursuing three contradictory sets of goals in the Middle East. First, while Washington wants to preserve American relations with Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states, it also wants to improve ties with Iran with which it hopes to achieve a nuclear accord. Secondly, while the US wants to preserve ties with a Turkish government that very much fears the growth of Kurdish separatism, Washington also sees Kurdish forces in Northern Iraq and in Syria as allies against ISIS. Finally, while the Obama administration genuinely wants to combat ISIS (and has, along with some of its Arab and European allies, launched airstrikes against ISIS positions in both Iraq and Syria), it also wants to do so without sending American ground forces back to Iraq. Yet it will be difficult for Washington to resolve any one of these contradictions—and may well be impossible to resolve all three.
Thus, while everyone wants to see ISIS defeated, the fact that so many of the actors in the region are working at cross-purposes could result in ISIS surviving and prospering despite universal opposition. Just this possibility should focus the minds of policymakers in different countries on how they can work together against the common threat before it grows even worse and becomes, like the Bolsheviks did almost a century ago, even more difficult to deal with.
]]>by Emile Nakhleh
In a speech before the United Nations on Wednesday, President Barack Obama offered a rhetorically eloquent roadmap on how to fight the Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS) in Iraq and Syria. He called on Muslim youth to reject the extremist ideology of ISIS and al-Qaeda and work toward a more promising future. Obama repeated the mantra, which we heard from former President George W. Bush, that “the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam.”
The group that calls itself the Islamic State must be defeated, but is the counter-terrorism roadmap, which the president laid out in his 40-minute speech, sufficient to defeat the extremist ideology of ISIS, Boko Haram, or al-Qaeda? Despite American and Western efforts to degrade and defeat these deadly and blood-thirsty groups for almost two decades, radical groups continue to sprout in Sunni Muslim societies.
Obama also urged the Arab Muslim world to reject sectarian proxy wars, promote human rights, and empower their people, including women, to help move their societies forward. He again stated that the situation in Gaza and the West Bank is unsustainable and urged the international community to strive for the implementation of the two-state solution.
The president did not, however, adequately address Muslim youth in Western societies who could be susceptible for recruitment by ISIS, al-Qaeda, or other terrorist organizations.
Contradictions
Arab publics will likely see glaring inconsistencies in the president’s speech between his rhetoric and actual policies. They would most likely view much of what he said, especially his global counter-terrorism strategy against ISIS, as another version of America’s war on Islam. Arabs will also see much hypocrisy in the president’s speech on the issue of human rights and civil society.
Although fighting a perceived common enemy, it’s a sad spectacle to see the United States, a champion of human rights, liberty, and justice, cozy up to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Bahrain, serial violators of human rights and infamous practitioners of repression. It’s even more hypocritical when Arab citizens realize that some of these so-called partners have often spread an ideology not much different from what ISIS preaches.
These three regimes in particular have emasculated their civil society and engaged in illegal imprisonment, sham trials, and groundless convictions. They banned political parties—Islamic and secular—and silenced civil society institutions as well as prohibited peaceful protests.
The president praised the role of free press, yet al-Jazeera journalists are languishing in Egyptian jails without any viable justification. The Egyptian government continues to hold thousands of political prisoners without indictments or trials.
In addressing the youth in Muslim countries, Obama told them “Where a genuine civil society is allowed to flourish, then you can dramatically expand the alternatives to terror.”
What implications should Arab Muslim youth draw from the president’s invocation of the virtues of civil society when they see that genuine civil society is not “allowed to flourish” in their societies? Do Arab Muslim youth see real “alternatives to terror” when their regimes deny them the most basic human rights and freedoms?
The Sisi regime has illegally destroyed the Muslim Brotherhood, and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have used the specter of ugly sectarianism to destroy the opposition. They openly and viciously engage in sectarian conflicts even though the president stated that religious sectarianism underpins regional instability.
Human Rights Watch and other distinguished organizations sent a letter to Obama asking him to raise the egregious human rights violations in Egypt when he met with Sisi in New York. Yet in his speech UN speech Wednesday, Egyptian Field Marshall Abdel Fattah el-Sisi expressed hope that the United States would tolerate his atrocious human rights record in the name of fighting ISIS.
Obama should not give Sisi and other Arab autocrats a pass when it comes to their repression and human rights violations just because they joined the American engineered “coalition of the willing” against ISIS.
New Realities
Regardless of how the air campaign against the Islamic State goes, American policymakers will have to begin a serious review of a different Middle East than the one President Barak Obama inherited when he took office. Many of the articles that have been written about ISIS on Lobelog and elsewhere warned about the outcome of this war once the dust settles.
Critics correctly wondered whether opinion writers and experts could go beyond “warning” and suggest a course of policy that could be debated and possibly implemented. If the United States “breaks” the Arab world by forming an anti-ISIS ephemeral coalition of Sunni Arab autocrats, Washington will have to “own” what it had broken.
A road map is imperative if a serious conversation is to commence about the future of the Arab Middle East. But not one deeply steeped in counter-terrorism. The Sunni coalition is a picture-perfect graphic for the evening news, especially in the West, but how should the US deal with individual Sunni states in the coalition after the bombings stop and ISIS melts into the population?
As the United States looks beyond today’s air campaign over Syria and Iraq, American policymakers should realize that ISIS is more than a bunch of jihadists roaming the desert and terrorizing innocent civilians. It’s an ideology, a vision, a sophisticated social media operation, and an army with functioning command and control.
Above all, ISIS represents a view of Islam that is not dissimilar to other strict Sunni interpretations of the Muslim faith that could be found across many Muslim countries, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan. In fact, this narrow-minded, intolerant view of Islam is at the heart of the Wahhabi-Salafi Hanbali doctrine, which Saudi teachers and preachers have spread across the Muslim world for decades.
Nor is this phenomenon unique in the ideological history of Sunni millenarian thinking. From Ibn Taymiyya in the 13th century to Bin Ladin and Zawahiri in the past two decades, different Sunni groups have emerged on the Islamic landscape preaching ISIS-like ideological variations on the theme of resurrecting the “Caliphate” and re-establishing “Dar al-Islam.”
Although the historical lines separating Muslim regions (“Dar al-Islam” or “Abode of Peace”) from non-Muslim regions (“Dar al-Harb” or “Abode of War”) have almost disappeared in recent decades, ISIS, much like al-Qaeda, is calling for re-erecting those lines. Many Salafis in Saudi Arabia are in tune with such thinking.
This is a regressive, backward view, which cannot possibly exist today. Millions of Muslims have immigrated to non-Muslim societies and integrated in those societies to escape this ideology.
If President Obama plans to dedicate the remainder of his term in office to fighting and defeating the Islamic State, he cannot do it by military means alone. He should:
If President Obama does not pursue these tangible policies and use his political capital in this endeavor, his UN speech would soon be forgotten. Degrading and destroying ISIS is possible, but unless Arab regimes move away from autocracy and invest in their peoples’ future, other terrorist groups would emerge.
The American president has over the years given memorable speeches on Muslim world engagement, but unless he pushes for new policies in the region, the Arab Middle East will likely implode with Washington left holding the bag. This is not the legacy President Obama would want to leave behind.
This article was first published by LobeLog and was reprinted here with permission. Follow LobeLog on Twitter and like us on Facebook
]]>“Those who in quarrels interpose, are apt to get a bloody nose.”
—Lord Palmerston on keeping Britain from supporting the South in the American Civil War.
This Wednesday night President Obama will lay out his strategy to “degrade and ultimately defeat” the Islamic State (also known as ISIL/ISIS). [...]]]>
“Those who in quarrels interpose, are apt to get a bloody nose.”
—Lord Palmerston on keeping Britain from supporting the South in the American Civil War.
This Wednesday night President Obama will lay out his strategy to “degrade and ultimately defeat” the Islamic State (also known as ISIL/ISIS). “It is altogether fitting and proper that [he] should do this,” especially because of the nature and possible length of the US commitment that will be involved, the variety of instruments that will need to be employed, the indispensability of American leadership if anything serious is to be done, and the number of countries and organizations whose engagement will be needed. The presentation to the nation is also important to “go over the heads” of Mr. Obama’s opponents in Congress, too many of whom oppose him no matter what he says and does—a mark of the dangerous dysfunction in today’s Washington.
His presentation, however, must not only discuss the ways and means and even the “why”—recent horrific events seem to have answered that last point. It must also offer his vision of the end game or— since this is the Middle East with all of its sharp corners and blind alleys—at least what he is trying to achieve.
US Interests and Values
The most important requirement for analysis is for the president to see the Middle East, first and foremost, in terms of our nation’s interests and as a total package, not just as a set of loosely connected, separate elements. Other countries depend on us to promote their security, and most also want things from us that do not necessarily comport with our own interests. That is not unnatural. Even in the closest of formal alliances—as in NATO or in the bilateral US relationship with Canada—every member of the alliance or coalition will see its situation differently from how others see it, and each will view the overall set of facts through its own independent, national lens.
It would take too long to recite all the factors that define US interests, though most analysts would include the following list:
Along the way we should try to promote human rights and representative governance, which we call “democracy,” though that is not necessarily the same thing, as well as economic and social advances that will promote other objectives, including stability and political modernization.
Having got that out of the way, it is important to reassess some of the elements of what we have been doing that may or not be consistent with these objectives.
Iran’s Role
We have been preoccupied with stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons, and the negotiations with Iran by the so-called P5+1 nations (US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) appear to be close to agreement. But even if the US government decides what is best for us and for keeping Iran from obtaining a “break-out” capability, and even if Iran is prepared to do what is necessary to satisfy US and P5+1 demands, there are countries working to keep the talks from succeeding. Notable among these is Israel, and some of the Persian Gulf Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, which is at best ambivalent about seeing the negotiations succeed. Israel’s preoccupation with its own security is understandable, and the US is sensitive to Israeli concerns. But the US must make its own judgments; and it should be able to make those judgments without political pressures from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or other non-Americans, especially as applied through Congress. The same can be said of both the Israel lobby and the less visible but also potent oil lobby.
For these opponents of an agreement with Iran, the issue is not about just the Iranian nuclear program, but also the geopolitical competitions that are multifarious throughout the Middle East. Keeping Iran from rejoining the international community is a key goal of several Middle Eastern states, but there is no reason for this to be America’s goal, especially since the fire in the Iranian revolution has for some time been burning lower and we need Iranian cooperation in places like Afghanistan (where our two countries worked together in overthrowing the Taliban in 2001), in countering ISIS through tangible actions, in keeping the sea lanes open through the Strait of Hormuz and countering piracy, and potentially in helping to foster a positive future for Iraq. But the US can’t do any of that if its relations with Iran are held hostage by others who not only seek to define the terms of a final nuclear deal, but also prevent Iran from becoming a serious regional power.
“Assad Must Go”
The fall of Middle Eastern dictators in the so-called Arab Spring led (though in the case of Egypt and Libya the aftermath has hardly been positive) to the belief that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should be next. We continue to talk about “arming moderates,” but no US leader has ever articulated what would come after Assad. There is a basic assumption that, when Assad is gone, all will be rosy. The opposite is more likely true. Added to the ongoing carnage would be the slaughter of the minority Alawites. The risks of a spreading Sunni-Shia civil war would increase dramatically, even more than now. The irony is that many who now worry about ISIS argue that it would not have progressed this far if we had only “armed the moderates” in Syria. But given what would have likely happened if they had succeeded, this argument is nonsense. Yet even now the administration, along with academic and congressional critics, fails to address the consequences of its own rhetoric about getting rid of Assad; that statement has become a mantra, disconnected from any serious process of thought or analysis.
Never-Ending War
Much of what challenges us today derives directly from the misbegotten US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which we blundered into willy-nilly, with intense support from an unthinking commentariat. Well, these chickens have come home to roost and have caused the hen house to overflow. The US overthrew a minority Sunni government in Iraq that was ruling over the majority Shias and the Kurds. Now, in the eyes of Sunni states, the assault on Assad and the Shia minority in Syria would simply redress the balance.
But no US interests would be served through continued US involvement in a region-wide Sunni-Shia civil war—which is what we’re really talking about here—that we have been involved in, on the Sunni side, for several years, just as we actively sided with Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran in the 1980s.
Sponsors of Terror
Whether we want to admit it or not, much of ISIS’s adherents and what they do derives from actions by putative US friends and allies in the region. Saudi Arabia can argue that the kingdom doesn’t export terrorism, but much of the inspiration and funding for the worst Islamist terrorism comes from Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf Arab states, stemming from the principle of “You can do whatever you want, but just not here at home.” For years, American and other Western troops have died in Afghanistan as a direct result of this “see no evil” policy. The US president needs to make clear that any further inspiration for terrorism, from anywhere in the Middle East, will have consequences. He has yet to do so.
Key Issues
There are many other elements that need to be dealt with in a forthright fashion, within the precincts of the White House if not in public. These include an honest assessment of the importance to the United States of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what genuinely needs to be done about it, along with beginning to devise a long-term security strategy and structures for the region as a whole. For now, here’s how the US can start:
Maybe it is already too late to get this right, in America’s interests. But President Obama can start by “getting up on his hind legs” and showing some anger—as he has been doing of late. He can finally gather around him people of experience who both understand the Middle East and the craft of strategy. And he can insist that the US put its own interests first and stop letting itself be a cat’s paw for anyone else.
There is thinking and acting to do, if, following Palmerston’s injunction, we are to avoid making worse the bloody nose we have already suffered by allowing ourselves to become part of the Middle East’s civil wars.
]]>by James A. Russell
The apparent beheading of American journalist James Foley adds a particularly gruesome and tragic twist to the sports event-like reporting of our attempts to thwart the advances of the Islamic State in Iraq over the last week. Foley’s execution will only ensure that the “what to do about [...]]]>
by James A. Russell
The apparent beheading of American journalist James Foley adds a particularly gruesome and tragic twist to the sports event-like reporting of our attempts to thwart the advances of the Islamic State in Iraq over the last week. Foley’s execution will only ensure that the “what to do about ISIS” quandary confronting US policy makers in Washington will rise to the top of President Obama’s “to do” list.
Yesterday, we blew up some Islamic State armored personnel in northern Iraq. Tomorrow, who knows where our airplanes and missiles will strike? The public sits in rapt attention. Have we stopped the Islamic State today along Route 1 or somewhere else? Who will be the next unlucky hostage to forfeit his or her life in this awful real life drama?
America’s return to military action in Iraq — this time without ground troops – bespeaks yet another attempt to rescue the country and the region from the multiple and disastrous unintended consequences of invading Iraq in 2003.
What’s left of Iraq litters the landscape like shattered glass, its people scattered in surrounding countries, and posse-like militias taking the law in their own hands amid the wreckage of military and government institutions we tried to build from the ground up at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of US lives.
We will be no more successful this time around than we were from 2003-10, when the US dumped a trillion dollars and tens of thousands of troops into what Winston Churchill described earlier in the 20th century as the “odium of the Mesopotamia entanglement.”
A strategic result today, no matter how many airstrikes we launch or how many Special Forces advisers we send in, is highly unlikely. The Islamic State cannot be “bombed” out of existence, no matter how outraged the public may be about its war crimes or Foley’s murder. Our Special Operations teams also cannot kill all the Islamic State leadership, no matter how well their skills have been honed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The ordering of airstrikes and the dispatch of more advisers to Iraq is emblematic of a central strategic problem that has faced many presidents in the post-World War II era: fighting limited wars for limited objectives in the nuclear era.
The US’ answer to the defeat of its conscript army in Vietnam was the creation of the volunteer, professional Army. For the United States, the creation of this force was in many ways the most significant strategic consequence of the country’s defeat in Vietnam.
The idea behind this army seemed sound: a smaller, better-trained force would prove more tactically proficient than its conscript-manned predecessor. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, the hope was that turning over military campaigns to the professional army would divorce the public from the mostly negative experiences of using force, which would give military and political leaders a freer hand in using it around the world.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States deployed the best-trained and equipped army in the world against guerillas. As was the case in Vietnam, the Army and Marine Corps achieved no strategic effect before returning home — except in a negative sense with the breakup Iraq. After 10 years in the field, the US Army and Marine Corps could not be any better at fighting irregular wars — yet their tactical proficiency could not alter the negative strategic and political circumstances of the wars they fought.
What’s the lesson here? President Obama looks at these interventions as having failed and, on the one hand, seems understandably reluctant to send the Army back to places like Iraq. That caution would lead you to believe that the United States is thinking more carefully about interventions that amount to policing actions in the developing world. Sadly, however, that is not the case.
Like the post-Vietnam period, the main unintended consequence of our failures in Iraq and the so-far hung jury in Afghanistan has gone largely unnoticed around the country.
While failing to impose our will on guerilla adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, we essentially doubled down by expanding the country’s reliance on Special Forces and their proficiency at irregular war.
Not only have we expanded the size of the special forces and effectively created a fifth-arm of military services, we have also empowered the now global Special Operations Command (SOCOM) to orchestrate our special forces and irregular war campaigns. SOCOM will wield the same bureaucratic, institutional, and budgetary command as the regional commander-in-chiefs.
That is a counterintuitive and strange reaction to 14 years of fighting in which we achieved tactical proficiency at irregular war but could not wield that proficiency to strategic effect. Even stranger, the expansion of US reliance on Special Forces and the creation of an associated larger bureaucratic empire have happened with little public or political debate.
Who decided to create this service with its own manpower and funding? What makes us think that being clever and tactically proficient in irregular war will be any more successful in the future than it has proven to be over the last 14 years?
Why should failure at irregular war lead to bigger budgets for SOCOM and larger numbers of Special Forces? Why can’t the Army and the Marine Corps do these missions — as they demonstrated during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? These important questions are absent from America’s broken national discourse.
As a result, we better get used to the special event-like reporting on the Islamic State, which draws on the Iraq and Afghanistan template for developing world interventions. Just don’t expect these interventions to achieve strategic effect.
The inability to think through the lessons of more than a decade of irregular war symbolizes the intellectual fog gripping the foreign and national security policy establishment that has confused and blurred the distinctions between tactics and strategy.
We will be no more successful in future developing world military interventions than we have been in the past unless we stop believing that clever tactics supported by well-trained troops will somehow achieve our objectives.
Launching airstrikes at Islamic State convoys and sending in more advisers to Iraq is just another example of the triumph of tactics over strategy and fails to grasp the political dimensions of the struggle for power in Mesopotamia. We cannot police the politics of these struggles by bombing antagonists. We should not send teams of Special Forces into these situations just because we can.
Sending in advisors and authorizing airstrikes over Middle Eastern conflict zones involves the US in the domestic politics of situations we don’t fully understand and that do not directly threaten our interests.
Until we grasp the central truths about the distinction between strategy and tactics and the limits of our military power, we will continue to thrash around ineffectually in yet another attempt to address the problem of fighting limited wars for limited objectives.
Photo Credit: DoD photo by Airman 1st Class Cliffton Dolezal, US Air Force
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