by Wayne White
Once again American observers are outbidding each other over how serious a threat the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) poses. Recent IS gains in Iraq heightened Washington’s concern, causing President Obama to huddle with coalition defense ministers. In this air of heightened crisis, the option of deploying US combat troops has been revived. Yet this supposed fix (even just talk of it) involves a host of likely problems.
The 19th Century politician, diplomat and writer Don Piatt once said, “A man’s greatness can be measured by his enemies.” If applied to the Islamic State, IS falls short in terms of the ground conflict. The radical Sunni group’s foes consist of the demoralized, ill-led Iraqi Army; Iraq’s sectarian, dysfunctional government; the better, but potentially shaky, Iraqi Kurds; the paltry forces of the rebel Free Syrian Army; and the fierce-fighting but under-armed and ill-supplied Syrian Kurds. Naturally, IS has scored successes against such weak opponents. But that does not make it the irresistible force portrayed by many.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has been virtually useless since replacing the discredited Nouri al-Maliki. Surrounded by much the same hyper-sectarian Shia politicians, Abadi has not made an earnest, good faith effort to weaken IS by wooing away many of its Sunni Arab tribal and military supporters. This is, by far, the most critical factor in Iraq on the ground. Far more pressure from the US and perhaps mediation by regional actors must be considered.
Without a Sunni Arab game change against IS, isolated western Iraqi garrisons in towns and bases have been falling. The al-Asad Airbase complex near the city of Hit may be next. Largely government-held Ramadi remains out of IS hands, but only because surrounding tribes oppose the group. And even with Baghdad at its back, the Iraqi Army’s performance has been marked by repeated failures.
Meanwhile, the Free Syrian Army has received little of the military support for which it has begged for three years. Plagued by inferior weaponry and ammunition shortages, and comprised of a welter of semi-autonomous local militias, it poses little danger to IS.
Though more determined and coherent than the Iraqi Army, Iraqi Kurdish fighters, the Peshmerga, typically advance behind heavy US air support or in relatively weakly held IS areas. Despite a few exceptions, they are generally reluctant to advance very far—and hold ground—much beyond their own borders.
Meanwhile, the US ignored heroic resistance by tougher Syrian Kurds until recently. They represent the only major contingent of highly motivated anti-ISIS boots on the ground. Probably in response to Turkish wishes, the US largely withheld air support for nearly two weeks.
Yet since declaring Kobani a humanitarian disaster on Oct. 14, the US has hammered IS positions at Kobani with waves of airstrikes, after strikes last week proved too few. Intelligence sharing between the US and the defenders of Kobani has made the strikes more effective. Had strikes this powerful been launched two weeks earlier, Kobani itself would not have become a battlefield.
Providing no military assistance whatsoever, Turkey has blocked thousands of Turkish Kurdish reinforcements from reaching Kobani. Fighters and doctors on the scene report numerous border closures and wounded combatants dying just inside Syria awaiting treatment in Turkey. Other fighters from Kobani have been arrested at the border, including some wounded.
Still, all around the Islamic State’s current holdings are countries with powerful militaries capable of dealing serious blows to IS regardless of the group’s fanaticism. Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, and Jordan to the south represent dangerous potential IS enemies if attacked. Just beyond Damascus and northwestern Jordan lies perhaps the most formidable local foe: Israel. Much of Iraq’s Shia south would become a graveyard for IS forces attempting to seize sizeable portions of this hostile area, in part because Iran would not let this area and Shia Islam’s holiest shrines fall.
The Anti-IS Front
Turkish cooperation with NATO against IS would vastly boost anti-IS operations. Air support could be based much closer to targets, Syrian and Iraqi Kurds could receive assistance, and the Islamic State’s smuggling of goods and recruits could be curbed. A Turkish volte-face might also salvage its peace process with the Kurds. Turkey has been holding its support hostage to demands such as coalition airstrikes against the Syrian regime. The coalition must keep pushing back; compliance would dissipate the air war against IS.
Other coalition partners, including NATO states like Germany, have also remained on the sidelines or provided little. This too needs to change to impose further pressure on IS.
If Kobani is an example of solid boots on the ground, Iraqi troops fighting west of Baghdad represent the opposite (despite heightened air support and attacks by US Apache helicopter gunships). In Kobani, Kurds have responded to strikes by attacking to clear IS fighters from some areas lost earlier. Heavier strikes near Baghdad barely shore up wavering defense lines.
Instead of responding to lackluster ground forces by boosting air strikes, it should be made clear that forces willing to fight hard to capitalize on air strikes will receive priority. Otherwise under-motivated forces may do even less, hoping air power would do their jobs for them—a losing proposition.
Is such a policy risky? Yes, but so is pouring in US combat troops in the numbers being discussed. Iraqi forces—with Baghdad at stake—must be forced by circumstance to stand their ground. And if densely populated Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad are threatened, they probably would.
Some have downplayed the impact of airstrikes against IS. They maintain strikes must be complimented by decent ground troops–correct where IS goes for more territory. However, a month of pounding undoubtedly has had an overall impact on IS even if that is not yet evident in some frontline fighting. The air campaign also is a long-term affair, with adjustments, mounting contributions, and accumulated impact. One plus is the Islamic State’s fanaticism, driving it to continue exposing its military assets to airstrikes along frontlines where heavy damage could be inflicted.
Committing US combat troops to battle around Baghdad would signal to Iraqi ground troops that they need not take most of the responsibility for the capital’s defense. Americans concerned that sending combat troops would escalate demand for more (“mission creep”) are correct. Reliance on US troops also would regenerate an unhealthy dependency.
More US advisors instead of line combat troops would be wiser, but competence is not the main problem; Iraqi soldiers must see they have no choice but to fight it out with IS. That goes beyond advice, and some advisors caught up in rapid, haphazard Iraqi retreats could be killed or captured by IS. Although advisors are also valuable in coordinating frontline aerial targeting, Americans would have to be prepared for losses. Some of those might well involve the ritual execution of captured US soldiers—perhaps the biggest risk involved in committing large forces.
]]>As the wobbly anti-ISIS coalition is being formed with American prodding, the Obama administration should take a strategic look at the future of the Arab world beyond the threat posed by the self-declared Islamic State. Otherwise, the United States would be unprepared to deal with the unintended chaos.
Driven by ideological hubris, the Bush administration on the eve of the Iraq war rejected any suggestions that the war could destabilize the whole region and rock the foundations of the Arab nation-state system.
That system, which was mostly created under the colonial Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916, is now being severely stressed. The Obama administration should avoid repeating the tragic mistake of its predecessor. While trying to halt the advance of ISIS by focused airstrikes, and regardless of the coalition’s effectiveness in “degrading” and “defeating” ISIS, President Obama should instruct his senior policymakers to explore possible architectures that could emerge from the ashes of Sykes-Picot.
The stresses and fault lines we are witnessing in the region today could easily lead to implosions tomorrow. Rightly or wrongly, Washington would be blamed for the ensuing mayhem.
As Secretary of State John Kerry shuttles between countries chasing the elusive coalition to fight ISIS, the administration seems to be unclear even about terminology. Is it a war or a multifaceted counter-terrorism strategy against ISIS? Whatever it’s called, if this strategy fails to eradicate the Islamic State and its Caliphate, is there a “Plan B” in the making?
Briefing senior policymakers on the eve of the Iraq war, I pointed out the possible unintended consequences of the invasion. George Tenet, former CIA Director, alludes to several of these briefings in his book, At the Center of the Storm.
One of the briefings discussed the possibility that the Iraq invasion could fundamentally unsettle the 100-year old Arab nation-state system. National identity politics, which heretofore has been managed and manipulated by autocratic regimes—tribal, dynastic, monarchical, and presidential—could unravel if the Bush administration failed to anticipate what could happen following Saddam’s demise.
The artificiality of much of those states and their boundaries would come unhinged under the pressures of the invasion and the unleashing of internal forces that have been dormant. National loyalties would be replaced by religious and sectarian affiliations, and the Shia-Sunni disputes that go back to the 7th century would once again rise to the surface albeit with more violence and bloodshed.
The briefings also emphasized Iraq’s central Islamic dilemma. While for many Sunni Muslims Baghdad represents the golden age of Islam more than 1,200 years ago, Iraq is also the cradle of Shia Islam.
Najaf and Karbala in southern Iraq are sacred for the Shia world because it was there where the fourth Caliph Ali’s son Hussein was “martyred” and buried. Iran, as the self-proclaimed voice of Shia Islam all over the world, is deeply embedded in Iraq and will always demand a central role in the future of Iraq.
Bush administration senior policymakers ignored these warning, arguing Iraqis and other Muslim Arabs would view American and coalition forces as “liberators” and, once the dictator fell, would work together in a spirit of tolerance, inclusion, and compromise. This view, unfortunately, was grounded in the neocons’ imagined ideological perception of the region. As we now know, it was utterly ignorant of ground truths and the social fabric of the different Arab Islamic societies.
Many Bush White House and Defense Department policymakers generally dismissed briefings that focused on the “morning after.” It’s safe to say they cared less about the post-Saddam Middle East than about toppling the dictator.
The region still suffers from those disastrous policies.
ISIS did not emerge in a vacuum, and its transnational ideology, warped as it may be, seems to appeal to Arabs and Muslims who have become disenchanted with the existing political order in Arab lands.
Many citizens view their states as fiefdoms of the ruling elites with no genuine respect for individual rights, personal freedoms, and human dignity. The “securitization” of politics has alienated many young Arabs and is driving them toward extremism.
If the borders between Syria and Iraq are erased by the transnational “Caliphate,” what will become of the borders of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq? Is the Obama administration ready to pick up the pieces when these nation-states disintegrate?
These are the critical questions the Bush administration should have pondered and answered before it invaded Iraq. They are the same questions the Obama administration should ponder and answer before chasing after ISIS in the Iraqi/Syrian desert.
Photo: Then President-elect Barack Obama before taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009. Credit: White House/Pete Souza
]]>US combat troops may be deployed against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) if the strategy announced by President Barack Obama last week fails to make substantial progress against the radical Sunni group, Washington’s top military officer warned here Tuesday.
The statement by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, delivered during testimony before a key Congressional committee, suggested for the first time that the administration may substantially broaden military operations in Iraq beyond air strikes and advising Iraqi and Kurdish forces far from the front lines.
“If we reach the point where I believe our advisers should accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific targets, I will recommend that to the president,” Dempsey told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“At this point, his [Obama’s] stated policy is we will not have US ground forces in direct combat,” he said. “But he has told me as well to come back to him on a case-by-case basis.”
Dempsey’s remarks, which came as Congress appeared poised to approve a pending $500 million request to train and equip Syrian rebels committed to fighting ISIS, as well as the government of President Bashar al-Assad, appeared certain to fuel doubts about Obama’s plans, particularly given his promise last week that US forces “will not have a combat mission.”
“We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq,” he declared in last week’s nationally televised speech in which he also pledged to build an international coalition, including NATO and key regional and Sunni-led Arab states, to fight ISIS in both Iraq and Syria.
While Secretary of State John Kerry has since gathered public endorsements for the administration’s strategy to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS, notably at a meeting of Arab states in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last week and from a larger group of nations in Paris Sunday, skepticism over the strength and effectiveness of such a coalition appears to have deepened.
Although Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and France appear committed to providing some air support to anti-ISIS operations, several key allies, including Britain, have remained non-committal about their willingness to help with military operations.
Turkey, whose army is the largest and most potent in the region and whose porous borders with ISIS-controlled regions in eastern Syria have been fully exploited by the group, has been particularly disappointing to officials here.
Despite repeated appeals, for example, Ankara has reportedly refused to permit US military aircraft to use its strategically located Incirlik air base for carrying out anything but humanitarian missions in or over Iraq, insisting that any direct involvement in the campaign against ISIS would jeopardise the lives of dozens of Turkish diplomats seized by the group at Ankara’s consulate in Aleppo earlier this year.
Critics of Washington’s strategy are also concerned that Kerry may have reduced the chances for co-operation with another potentially key anti-ISIS ally—Iran—which he explicitly excluded from participation in any international coalition due to its support for Assad and its alleged status as a “state sponsor of terror.”
While Kerry Monday said Washington remained open to “communicating” with Tehran—which, among regional powers, has provided arms and advisers to both Kurdish and Iraqi forces—about its efforts against ISIS, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who earlier this month reportedly authorised limited co-operation over ISIS, ridiculed the notion, insisting that it was Iran who had rebuffed Washington.
But Kerry’s exclusion of Iran from the anti-ISIS coalition, according to experts here, was motivated primarily by threats by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to drop out if Tehran were included—a reflection not only of the ongoing Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the region, especially in the Syrian civil war, but also of the difficulty Washington faces in persuading governments with widely differing interests to unite behind a common cause.
“Leaving Iran out of the collective effort to contain and eventually destroy ISIS, especially after what happened in Amerli [a town whose siege by ISIS was eventually broken by a combination of US airpower and Iranian-backed militias and Iraqi troops], defies logic and sanity and cannot be explained away by anyone in Iran,” noted Farideh Farhi, an Iran specialist at the University of Hawaii.
“It suggests to many [in Iran] that the fear of legitimising Iran’s role in regional security continues to be a driving force in US foreign policy,” she told IPS in an email exchange.
Indeed, the success of Obama’s strategy may well depend less on UA military power than on his ability to reconcile and reassure key regional actors, including Iran.
“To have any hope of success, “America’s do-it-yourself approach needs to be replaced with an effort to facilitate co-operation between the region’s great Muslim powers,” according to Amb. Chas Freeman (ret.), who served as Washington’s chief envoy to Riyadh during the first Gulf War.
“… As long as Saudi Arabia and Iran do not make common cause, any coalition to combat Islamist fanatics will be half-hearted at best and unrooted in the region at worst,” he told IPS.
Despite these difficult diplomatic challenges faced by Obama, most of the skepticism in Washington revolves around his military strategy, particularly its reliance on air power and the absence of effective ground forces that can take and hold territory, especially in predominantly Sunni areas of both western and north-central Iraq and eastern Syria.
While US officials believe that Kurdish peshmerga forces and the Iraqi army—with Iranian-backed Shi’a militias—can, with US and allied air support, roll back most of ISIS’s more-recent gains in Iraq, it will take far more time to wrest control of areas, including cities like Fallujah and Ramadi, which the group has effectively governed for months.
Obama announced last week that he was sending nearly 500 more military personnel to Iraq, bringing the total US presence there to around 1600 troops, most of whom are to serve as trainers and advisers both for the peshmerga and the Iraqi army.
According to Dempsey, however, these troops have not yet been authorised to accompany local forces into combat or even to act as spotters for US aircraft.
As for Syria, Washington plans to train and equip some 5000 members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a fractious coalition of “moderate” fighters who have been increasingly squeezed and marginalised by both pro-government forces and ISIS and who have often allied themselves with other Islamist groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
It will take at least eight months, however, before that force can take the field, according to Dempsey and Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel.
Even then, they said, such a force will be unable “to turn the tide” of battle. Dempsey said he hoped that Sunni-led Arab countries would provide special operations forces to support the FSA, although none has yet indicated a willingness to do so.
Hawks, such as Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have argued that these plans are insufficient to destroy ISIS in either country.
Some neoconservative defence analysts, such as Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, have called for as many as 25,000 US ground troops, including thousands of Special Forces units to work with “moderate” Sunni forces, to be deployed to both countries in order to prevail.
They have also warned against any cooperation with either Iran or Assad in the fight against ISIS.
Paratroopers of the 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade depart Lielvarde Airbase, Latvia, Sept. 8, 2014, at the conclusion of NATO Exercise Steadfast Javelin II.
]]>“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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