Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (16 page)

In normal circumstances, the natural allies of the United States against Islamic State would be the governments of the two sovereign states from which it has seized its territory, Iraq and Syria, but both of these countries are problematic for Obama. The Iraqi government’s behaviour under Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki was the direct cause of the Sunni revolt that created the opportunity for Islamic State to overrun much of Iraq, and Washington was determined not to get more deeply involved in Iraq’s war until Maliki was removed. Even if he did relinquish power, however, the Iraqi government would have to go on relying on Shia militias for most of its military manpower, and that would continue to frighten Sunnis in Iraq into the arms of Islamic State. Moreover, Baghdad was getting much-needed military help from Iran in the form of air strikes and some ground units, and despite the July 2015 deal to ensure that Iran will not acquire nuclear weapons, the Islamic Republic of Iran remains a major bogeyman in American politics.

Washington’s problem with Syria was even harder to deal with. In the first flush of the “Arab Spring” the United States enthusiastically supported the non-violent protests in Syria against Bashar al Assad and perpetual Ba’athist rule. Even as late as 2012, with the civil war already in full spate, the Obama administration expected that Assad would fall quite soon, although there was a growing concern that the Sunni militias fighting to overthrow him were becoming increasingly Islamist. Washington’s solution to that was to increase the flow of arms to non-Islamist rebel groups, but that did no good at all. Weapons are a form of currency in a civil war, and a very large proportion of those American weapons eventually ended up in the hands of Islamist groups that had the money to buy them (or, if necessary, the strength to seize them). The Free Syrian Army and other non-Islamist rebel groups were already in seemingly irreversible decline by 2012, but American policy ignored this fact and continued to insist that the only way out of the civil war was the early departure of Assad from power. Indeed, when Syria was accused of using chemical weapons in the war in 2013, the United States went right to the brink of starting a bombing campaign against the Assad regime and the Syrian army.

It has not been satisfactorily proven that the Syrian regime carried out the chemical attacks on civilians that got the world’s attention. The rebels had looted many government weapons storage facilities, probably including some that held chemical weapons, so it is at least possible
that the initial attacks were actually staged by rebel forces precisely with the intention of blaming them on the Syrian regime and getting the United States to intervene militarily against it. It is, of course, also possible that the Syrian regime was extremely stupid, and used these banned but ineffective weapons on civilians despite the fact that it would bring the U.S. Air Force down on its head. At any rate, the American government concluded that the attacks were Assad’s doing, and since President Obama had previously announced that the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” for the United States, he now felt compelled to carry out his threat to punish those who had crossed it. He was obviously deeply unhappy about having to bomb Syria, however, and in the end the British and the Russians got him off the hook.

In August 2013 the British parliament voted against joining U.S. air strikes against Syria, with thirty members of Prime Minister David Cameron’s own Conservative Party switching sides to help defeat the government’s motion. This came as a shock in Washington, which had come to expect British troops to follow the American forces unquestioningly into any war that came along. So when the Russians, who had always supported their Syrian ally, suggested that Assad was willing to give up his chemical weapons stockpile entirely if the United States did not start bombing, Obama gratefully accepted the suggestion and withdrew his request to Congress to grant him authority to attack Syria. With Islamic State only two months
old at this point, it was already clear that if American air attacks drastically weakened the Syrian army, IS and its al Qaeda–linked rival, the Nusra Front, would be the main beneficiaries and might even take over all of Syria—an outcome that the United States definitely didn’t want. On the other hand, Obama’s rhetoric about the evil Assad regime during the previous two years made it very awkward for him to simply switch sides. So he resorted to fantasy instead.

Assad duly handed over all his chemical weapons and the equipment to make more of them, thereby allowing Obama to retreat from his “red line” and abstain from bombing the Syrian army. In September 2014, he also extended the U.S. air attacks on Islamic State to include its territory in Syria as well (without asking Damascus’s permission, but Assad did not protest). But rather than accept the strategic logic of the situation, which would have required him to back the Assad regime as the sole remaining bulwark against an Islamist takeover of all of Syria, Obama proposed to build up the surviving non-Islamist rebel groups into a “third force” that would be able to both destroy the Islamic State and overthrow the Syrian dictator. Nobody with any knowledge of the reality on the ground believes that this could actually succeed, but the new policy was accepted in official Washington as an essential face-saving measure. (This policy was sarcastically known among Western politicians and diplomats as, “The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.”)

United States policy is almost as muddled in Iraq. Maliki finally resigned as prime minister after eight years of misrule in August 2014 and was succeeded by Haider al Abadi, another Shia Muslim and leader of the Islamic Dawa Party. This changed the optics in Baghdad, for Abadi, who spent twenty years in exile in Britain before returning to Iraq after the American invasion, is a less abrasive character who does not openly flaunt his sectarian loyalty like Maliki. But the rebuilding of the Iraqi army after the disastrous collapse of 2014 will be a lengthy task at best, and perhaps an impossible one, for the Iraqi political system remains riddled with corruption. It is still the Shia militias who bear the brunt of the fighting against Islamic State, and their behaviour still justifies the Sunni terror of being “liberated” by them. When the Sunni city of Tikrit was recaptured from ISIS after a month-long battle in March–April 2015, only three thousand of the fighters on the government’s side were from the regular army while twenty thousand were members of various Shia paramilitary organizations commanded, in many cases, by Iranian officers on loan to Iraq. And after the city was finally secured, members of the Shia militias engaged in an orgy of looting and arson. Relatively few Sunni civilians were killed as more than 90 percent of the city’s population had fled before the battle, but a number of ISIS prisoners were killed by various means (stabbing, hanging, being thrown from the tops of buildings and the like) before April 4, when the militias were ordered out and order was restored.

The United States refrained from providing air support for the Iraqi government forces in Tikrit almost until the end of the battle, presumably out of unease at the presence of so many Iranian military. It profoundly disapproves of the conduct of the Shia militias, which it knows will make the task of recovering the rest of Iraq much more difficult (if it can be done at all). But these are the allies it has in Iraq, and it will have to live with them or leave.

This [Arab] nation, in its darkest hour, has never faced a challenge to its existence and a threat to its identity like the one it’s facing now
.

General Abdel Fattah al Sisi, president of Egypt as of June 2014
²⁹

The propaganda about the terrible threat to world order posed by Islamic State (ably assisted by ISIS’s policy of frequent and gory “executions” of Western hostages) has been having some effect on American public opinion. By the spring of 2015 opinion polls in the United States were showing that half of the respondents would support sending “limited numbers” of U.S. troops into combat against Islamic State “as part of a coalition.” But President Obama clearly has his doubts about the solidity of American public support for a new combat mission in the Middle East. In the request he sent to Congress in February 2015 for formal authority to use military force against Islamic
State, he specifically excluded “enduring offensive ground combat operations” against ISIS by U.S. troops. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a congressional panel in early March that he would consider using U.S. ground troops against ISIS in Iraq and Syria if necessary, but a spokesman hastily added that his remarks were “hypothetical.” There are about three thousand American ground troops in Iraq already, but their role is to train and advise Iraqi troops, not to fight as combat units, and everyone concerned is very conscious of the danger of the “slippery slope” (or, as it is called in military circles, “mission creep”).

There is little danger of U.S. ground troops fighting ISIS directly unless a broad coalition of Arab countries is also willing to use force on the ground, and that is very unlikely. The Iraqi and Syrian regimes could certainly cooperate militarily if that helped them in their separate struggles against Sunni Islamist rebels: both are Shia regimes and both are more or less allied to Iran. The problem is that all the other potential members of a grand Arab coalition are Sunni Muslim states that have talked themselves into the paranoid belief that there is an Iranian-led Shia offensive against Sunnis in general. Persuading them to commit ground troops to defend the Shia regimes of Iraq and Syria, even against such a hostile power as Islamic State, would be asking a great deal of American diplomacy.

There was some progress towards the creation of a grand coalition of Sunni Arab states in the early spring of 2015,
but it came in the wrong place. To almost everybody’s surprise, Saudi Arabia launched air attacks against Shia rebels in Yemen, who it alleged were backed and armed by Iran. This was pure fantasy: the Houthis, a coalition of northern Yemeni tribes, have been prominent military players for decades in the perpetual “Game of Thrones” that is traditional Yemeni tribal politics. They fought off six offensives by the central government in the first decade of this century, and nobody accused them of being Iranian-backed then, even though they are Shias (of the Zaidi persuasion, which exists nowhere but in Yemen). Moreover, Iran is far from Yemen, with no way of sending arms to the Houthis except by easily blockaded sea routes and no plausible strategic reason to want the place anyway. But in the chaos that followed the Saudi-backed removal of Yemen’s long-ruling president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, in 2012, the Houthis did very well militarily. They managed to capture the capital, Sanaa, in September 2014, and by the early spring of 2015 they were overrunning the south of the country as well. At the end of March the Saudis declared an emergency and started bombing Houthi forces (and unfortunate civilians who happened to be nearby) all over western Yemen. They also took advantage of the occasion to call a conference of the Arab League and build a new alliance of all the Sunni Arab states.

It was formally a conference to put together an Arab military coalition against the Houthis in Yemen, and almost all the Sunni-ruled states were happy to sign up for
that: Saudi Arabia and all the smaller Gulf states (except Oman), Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, even Sudan. They all promised to send token numbers of aircraft to help Saudi Arabia bomb Yemen, and there was even talk of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (not an Arab state) sending troops into Yemen on the ground. But this ad hoc coalition is also supposed to turn into a permanent joint Arab military force once the general staffs have worked things out, and the obvious and indeed only target of such a pan-Sunni Arab alliance is the evil Shias. But the “evil Shias” include the Shia governments of Iraq and Syria that are fighting Islamic State on the ground. How does this new alliance (assuming it survives) provide the United States with the political cover of an Arab anti-Islamic State coalition that will enable it to commit ground troops to the task itself? Answer: it doesn’t.

The truth is that a year after Barack Obama admitted that he didn’t yet have a coherent strategy for destroying Islamic State, he still didn’t have one. (Indeed, in January 2015 retired U.S. general James Mattis told the Senate Armed Forces Committee exactly that, declaring that the United States policy towards Islamic State is “strategy-free”). The Sunni Arab states have no serious strategy either: none of them will commit ground troops to defend the Shia regimes of Iraq and Syria even from Sunni fanatics as extreme and repellent as those of Islamic State.

What Obama could do, if he were willing to pay the diplomatic price, is to forget all his scruples and help
Bashar al Assad’s regime with arms and money, because the Syrian regime is becoming vulnerable to military defeat at the hands of Islamic State and its rivals and fellow Islamists of the Nusra Front. After four years of war the Syrian army is very tired, its manpower is running short, and after some territorial gains from the rebels in 2013–14 it is losing ground again. But the diplomatic price for America would be quite high: the alienation of its Sunni Arab allies and also of Turkey, whose pro-Sunni president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is deeply committed to the overthrow of Assad and has been allowing foreign would-be jihadis to use his country as their easy route into Islamic State. There would also be a moral price to pay, no matter how you want to calculate that.