IN late 2011, when the US military left Iraq, Barack Obama said the country was “not a perfect place” but asserted America was leaving Iraq as a “sovereign, stable and self-reliant country” with a democratic government — claims now mocked by a sectarian bloodbath and efforts to redraw borders.
In an unpopular but necessary move Obama has bowed to new strategic realities and repudiated his previous position. His decision to send 300 military advisers to Iraq to help co-ordinate air strikes and military resistance against Sunni militants recognises that vital Western interests are involved and seeks to halt Iraq’s descent into full-scale religious war.
This is not the prelude to any US return to major combat forces in Iraq. But it rejects the futile mantra of those who insist that the US had to stay disengaged and allow the worst to happen.
While the current dynamic points towards the weakening or even disintegration of the Iraqi state, Obama’s decision recognises that any fragmentation of Iraq cannot be neatly achieved and will come only with an intensification of religious violence and risk of widening regional war.
The flaw behind Western intervention in Iraq in 2003 now looms even larger — the removal of brutal dictators such as Saddam Hussein became a release mechanism not for
multi-ethnic liberal democracy, but for religious and ethnic wars fanning even more violent Islamist extremism.
Having taken Mosul, Iraq’s second city, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham declared an end to the 1916 World War I British-French agreement that defined the current Iraq-Syria border. This symbolises a plan to establish a new Sunni state that spans eastern Syria and western Iraq, a dagger at the heart of regional stability and Western security.
It is both an invitation and a threat to the West: accept that the forces unleashed cannot be contained; old borders will give way; new powers will arise; and new faiths based on religious ideology and intolerance will dominate. ISIS says it will march to Baghdad. It posts images of the soldiers it has slaughtered, part of the terror tactics that strike fear into its opponents.
The geostrategic reality, however, is surely different. While the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki is under assault from nearly all quarters, its two most vital allies, Washington and Tehran, remain formidable, along with the potentially huge resources of Shia fighters it can put into the field. Ultimately, this is an imbalance of power that should halt the ISIS advance, deny it Baghdad and possibly reverse its gains. ISIS is strong only because its opponents, so far, have been so hopeless and have opposing aspirations. When it comes, the Shia counter-attack will be ferocious.
The US and the world are now being invited to a conclusion about Iraq: that the post-Saddam effort to establish a stable, inclusive state in a majority Shia country where Sunnis and Shi’ites could tolerably live together has failed.
There is no doubt the Maliki government has run a brutal, corrupt, sectarian state where sanctioned violence towards Sunnis helped to provoke the current ferocious ISIS backlash.
Such conclusions, however, cannot justify Western
non-intervention. While sensibly ruling out any return to “boots on the ground”, Obama would know the stakes are so grave that he must reveal a diplomatic vigour not previously displayed and reinforced by selective military decisions. The idea that “it’s all too hard” has a certain consequence: greater horrors for the region and, ultimately, for the West. While the British government seems near to paralysis, Prime Minister David Cameron told parliament it was wrong to think a new Sunni extremist regime in the middle of Iraq “won’t affect us” because such people are “planning to attack us here at home”. Indeed, social media is heavy with such threats.
Specific goals are not hard to identify. Yet they are difficult to realise because of internal contradictions. It is critical, first, to deny the creation of an ISIS terrorist Sunni regime spanning Iraq and Syria, giving a brand of al-Qa’ida a de facto state.
It is vital, second, to exploit the crisis to reform the Maliki Baghdad government with its Shia triumphalism. Obama’s condition of multi-ethnic governance before he authorises military action recognises this. It means, presumably, Maliki’s survival is in play because he will never meet this condition.
The other equally vital interest is that while Obama has a shared cause with Iran in defeating the ISIS advance, that he also limits as much as possible greater Iranian control of a Shi’ite-majority Iraq. Obama would know the fatal danger is being seen to team up with Iran in a war against the Sunnis thereby inflaming opinion across the entire Sunni world.
Obama opposed the Iraq war from the start. But when he quit Iraq as US President, he was forced to pretend the US had achieved the objectives George W. Bush had sought. And this was not a complete fiction — the al-Qa’ida threat seemed virtually eliminated from Iraq at that time.
Former British prime minister Tony Blair said this week that “three to four years ago al-Qa’ida in Iraq was a beaten force”. In effect, that’s what Obama said when he took out the US forces.
Yet today the al-Qa’ida brand has never been as strong. In truth, Bush went into Iraq the wrong way and Obama left Iraq the wrong way. Bush had no game plan for Iraq once Saddam fell; Obama walked out without negotiating a deal that left behind some US forces and influence. Obama was motivated primarily by US domestic politics and his integrity: determined to quit a war that he abhorred and Americans wanted finished.
It seems, however, that the Iranians, as part of their plan to dominate Iraq, told Maliki to veto any ongoing US presence. The reality is the Maliki government’s brutal sectarianism was always likely to finish in another Iraqi civil war. But this was given its urgency and ferocity by the Syrian conflict. Western non-intervention in Syria, partly a consequence of the early disastrous intervention in Iraq, was not cost-free. On the contrary, it triggered a series of lethal falling dominoes.
The Obama administration decided at an early stage to deny mainstream rebel opponents of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad the instruments needed to overthrow him. This had two consequences: it saw Assad unleash a criminal assault on his own people for his self-survival, and it saw him encourage into the rebel vacuum the more brutal al-Qa’ida offshoot, ISIS.
The record shows that ISIS spent most of its time in Syria fighting other rebel groups, not Assad. This was doubly convenient for the Syrian dictator. It helped him survive and keep control of much of Syria and it gave him a propaganda weapon: did the world really want Assad gone if the alternative was to empower the ISIS mass killers and religious-based murderers?
The recent Iraq crisis did not materialise overnight. ISIS has expanded its recruits, territory and organisation in the past year. As Blair correctly says, the ISIS victory in Mosul was organised from across the Syrian border.
This situation drove the Obama administration’s former head of policy planning in the State Department, Anne-Marie Slaughter, to ask in The New York Times: “Why is the threat of ISIS in Iraq a sufficiently vital interest but not the rise of ISIS in Syria — and a civil war that has dismembered Syria itself and destabilised Lebanon, Jordan and now Iraq?” Her charge is that had Obama acted in Syria two years ago he “could have stopped the carnage spreading today in Syria and Iraq”. Perhaps; it is a very big call. But there is no gainsaying that ISIS in the interim has developed a structure, strategy and effective propaganda outlets.
For the past year it has targeted Iraq’s Nineveh province, which contains Mosul, in a planned campaign of killings to eliminate commanders and weaken Iraq’s security forces. ISIS claims to have conducted 1000 assassinations and 10,000 operations in Iraq last year alone. It has linked up with Baathist elements of Saddam’s former military forces.
Beyond this, ISIS benefits from Sunni sentiment in central and western Iraq to create a de facto state free from the Shi’ite-dominated Maliki government.
It was Maliki who created the momentum for Sunni secessionism and it was the war against Assad that helped ISIS make this a viable objective.
The dilemma facing Obama was revealed this week by a White House spokesman talking about the Maliki government: “There’s no question that not enough has been done by the government, including the Prime Minister, to govern inclusively and that this has contributed to the situation and that crisis that we have today in Iraq. The Iraqi people will have to decide the make-up of the next coalition government and who is the prime minister.”
What is unfolding is a regional and religious power struggle of global import.
The Iranians have announced they will fight to protect the holy Shia sites in Iraq.
The Iraqi government has asked Obama to help by providing air strikes.
But Obama cannot have an Iraq response to the crisis without having a Syria response as well. This is obvious since the Syrian civil war merely fuels the ISIS recruiting ground that, in turn, feeds into Iraq.
The civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites keeps expanding, with the respective political and religious power centres being Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The West cannot take sides in this conflict because to assume a religious alignment would be wrong and because it has vital interests on both sides — the West has a deep commitment to the Saudi status quo but also needs effective ties with a Shi’ite-majority Iraq.
The West cannot determine any more the outcome of the struggles in Iraq and Syria. It once had more opportunity but those opportunities were not properly used.
It has, however, vital interests at stake that penetrate, ultimately, to its own security and that of its citizens. Western passport-holders are fighting in these conflicts, a reminder of their global nature in terms of the issues and the people.
The likeliest next big step in Iraq will be the Shia blowback. It will offer the Iranians scope to grab more power. The further shaky domino is Afghanistan, where the fear is that the Afghan army may prove to be as weak as the Iraqi army. Predictions that Iraq may split into three areas — Shia, Kurdish and a contested Sunni area — may prove true. But that will not happen neatly and will come with a guarantee of more Sunni-Shi’ite conflict.
Obama has been trapped. His disengagement from Iraq came undone long before his watch was over. That is the reason he needs to refocus now on Iraq.
This is Obama’s problem; he cannot use the excuse that it is all Bush’s fault since we have known since 2004 that Bush’s invasion was a mistake.
Obama has got to find the capacity to exert real influence without fuelling the Jihadist frenzy.
Liberals face elemental crisis
The Liberal Party’s view of Australian capitalism — the model it has known all its days — is facing a death sentence.
Let’s not give in to this threat
Australia must not allow what makes it great to be undermined by tribalism.