Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (21 page)

At the time of writing, the Obama administration in Washington is trying to dodge this choice by building up a “third force” of Syrian rebels which it hopes will eventually be able to defeat both the Assad regime and the jihadis of Islamic State and al Nusra. However, the “third force” has already been tried, and it failed totally. It was called the Free Syrian Army, and bits and pieces of it still exist on the fringes of the action, but most of its members eventually either went over to the Islamists or sold their weapons and went home. Nevertheless, Washington is still pursuing its fantasy solution, and the first ninety Syrians began training in Jordan under the guidance of U.S. troops in May 2015. The Pentagon forecasts that it will take three years to train and arm around fifteen thousand Syrian rebels in its “third force,” which will probably be too little and also too late to influence the outcome.

For diplomatic reasons, since the United States is not at war with Syria, the U.S. Department of Defense insists that these troops will target only Islamic State forces, not the Assad regime. In practice, however, they would likely target Assad’s regime as well, since all of Syria’s rebels consider it their main enemy, and there would be little that Washington could do about it. But although the “third force” fighters might help bring Assad down, tainted as they are by their American sponsorship, they would be most unlikely to come out on top in the scramble for power that followed his fall. The Islamists would win it. This is a military policy destined to fail, in the service of a political strategy that has already failed, and the United States government would do better to face up to the fact that helping the Syrian regime against its enemies is the least bad of the remaining options.

The least controversial way to help the Syrian regime would be to give it lots of long-term, low-interest credit to buy arms, food, and all the other things it desperately needs. Western sanctions and arms embargoes against the Assad regime could easily be lifted by the same governments that put them in place, and there is no United Nations–backed arms embargo to get in the way: the Russians, who have stood by their Syrian ally from the start, have used their veto on the Security Council four times to block such a thing. But the one thing that might make a decisive difference to the outcome is regular Western air support for the Syrian army, which would necessarily include direct,
real-time communications between Syrian ground forces and Western air forces. And we should not imagine that such changes in Western policy would somehow persuade or force the Assad regime to behave a lot better. It is what it is, and more than forty years in power have taught it that ruthlessness is the key to survival.

Would Western military and economic aid without Western “boots on the ground” be enough to guarantee the survival of the Assad regime at this point in the civil war? Nobody knows: in the fourth year of the war, the Syrian army is very tired. It has lost almost half its pre-war strength of 325,000 as a result of deaths, desertions and draft-dodging, but it can also call on National Defence Force militias numbering 80–100,000 men, as well as the help of a large but unknown number of Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon and a smaller but also unknown number of Iranian militiamen. However, after regaining some territory from 2012 to mid-2014, it has begun losing ground again, mainly because most of its opponents are now united under the relatively competent command of the two rival Islamist organizations, Islamic State and the Nusra Front, rather than scattered among dozens of fractious and poorly trained militias.

The Nusra Front and its smaller Islamist allies took Idlib and Jisr al Shugur in the northwest in March 2015, opening a possible route down to the Mediterranean coast and the Alawite heartland. (The Syrian government claims that Turkey helped the insurgents by jamming Syrian army
telecommunications.) Islamic State took the Damascus suburb of Yarmouk in April, while the Nusra Front made significant advances in the south near the Jordanian border. In May Islamic State conquered the desert city of Palmyra, which opened the road to Homs—and if Homs fell back under rebel control, Damascus would effectively be cut off from the sea. The Assad regime is certainly in dire trouble: a military collapse in the near future is unlikely, but not unimaginable.

On the other hand, the core of the Syrian army is still intact and quite professional. With better weapons, Western air support, and a boost in morale it would still have a decent chance of reversing the current trend and containing, if not necessarily completely defeating, its Islamist enemies. If you find that distasteful, so be it; but the objective would not really be to help Assad so much as to prevent a genocide and curb the spread of a vile political and religious ideology.

The worst of both worlds would be to wait until the Syrian regime was falling, and then go in to try to save it. That way the West would pay all the costs of intervening in the conflict, and might still get none of the potential benefits.

The United States and a number of other Western and Arab air forces are already bombing targets all over Islamic State, slowly eroding IS’s economic base and preventing it from using the fast-moving columns of heavily armed pick-up trucks and Humvees that allowed it to make such rapid conquests in the summer of 2014. Russia and Iran
would welcome American military and economic support for the Syrian regime, and China probably would as well. That might be enough to hold the Islamists at bay until.… Until what?

Perhaps until open fighting between Islamic State and the Nusra Front starts up again, or until enough of the less fanatical people involved in the rebellion make their peace with the regime. Or maybe the Assad regime by now is a lost cause; but even so, Western countries would still be no worse off than if they had never tried.

There are no easy solutions to the challenge posed by Islamic State (unless you have a time machine, in which case the solution is to not invade Iraq in 2003). Openly supporting the Assad regime may just be too much for Western governments to bear, or they may quail at the notion of alienating Sunni Arab regimes that are at least notionally Western allies. Even if Islamic State is successfully contained within its present boundaries, there is no guarantee that it will eventually collapse due to internal dissension. But if supporting the Assad regime with money, weapons and air strikes would contain Islamic State and perhaps even contribute to its eventual destruction, it should be tried. A victorious Islamic State, which might well include Jordan and much of Lebanon as well as Syria and western Iraq, would be a major disaster for the Arab world’s minorities, an extremely hostile and threatening neighbour for Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel and possibly even Egypt, and an uncomfortable if distant presence for everybody else.

We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market
.

Abu Muhammad al Adnani, official spokesperson, Islamic State

Don’t panic. That’s not going to happen.

NOTES

1.
“DON’T PANIC” is what it says in large, friendly letters on the cover of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, Douglas Adams’ masterwork. It is appropriate advice in almost all situations.

2.
Senator McCain was quoting from Vince Vance and the Valiants’ 1980 parody (during the Iran hostage crisis) of the Beach Boys’ 1965 version of the song “Barbara Ann,” first recorded by the Regents in 1958. But the only country he ever bombed personally was Vietnam.

3.
John Calvert, “ ‘The World is an Undutiful Boy!’: Sayyid Qutb’s American Experience,”
Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations
11 (1) (2000): 87–103: 98

4.
El Watan
, 21 January 1996, quoted in Michael Willis,
The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History
(New York: NYU Press, 1997).

5.
The Guardian
, 8 October 2001

6.
This document was originally published in
Al-Quds Al-Arabi
, a pan-Arab daily newspaper published in London and subsequently reproduced in English by the newspaper’s then editor-in-chief, Abdel Bari Atwan, in
The Secret History of Al Qaeda
, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2006), 211.

7.
Original Arabic text published in
Al-Quds Al-Arabi
on 23 February 1998. English translation in Bernard Lewis, “License
to Kill: Usama bin Ladin’s Declaration of Jihad,” in
Foreign Affairs
, November-December 1998.

8.
Richard A. Clarke,
Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror
, (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2004).

9.
Teri McConville, “The War on Terrorism: A New Classic in Groupthink,” in Richard Holmes and Teri McConville,
Defence Management in Uncertain Times
(London: Frank Cass, 2003) p. 65.

10.
www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/14/getting-our-way-meyer-review

11.
Congressional Record
, 107
^th
Congress
, 27 February 2003, House Committee on the Budget.

12.
Both men speaking in
Dispatches: Iraq’s Missing Billions
, broadcast on Britain’s Channel Four on 20 March, 2006.

13.
The Guardian
, 30 June 2003.

14.
The New York Times
, 2 July 2003.

15.
The New York Times
, 22 July 2003.

16.
Interview with George Stephanopoulos, ABC’s
This Week
, 26 October 2003.

17.
The Guardian
, 5 February 2003.

18.
Report by Patrick Cockburn,
The Independent
, 28 November 2006.

19.
From an interview with Matsuda by Mark Wilbanks for “How the ‘Sons of Iraq’ Stabilized Iraq,” in
The Middle East Quarterly
, fall 2010.

20.
The first study, published in the respected British medical journal
The Lancet
in 2004, estimated 98,000 “excess deaths” (over the normal pre-war death rate) in Iraq in the first eighteen months after the invasion. A follow-study published in
The Lancet
on October 11, 2006 by the same team from Johns
Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD, and the Department of Community Medicine in the College of Medicine of Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, but involving a much larger sample size and including two more years of the war, estimated that about 650,000 more Iraqis died in the three-year period covered by the survey than would have been expected to die based on the pre-war death rate. It further calculated that 601,000 of those extra deaths were due to violence: gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of the violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said. Both studies were rejected by supporters of the war, but their methodology found about as many defenders as critics in the scientific community.

A further survey published in January 2008 by Opinion Research Business International, an independent polling agency located in London, estimated just over 1 million excess Iraqi deaths down to September 2007, and said that 48 percent died from a gunshot wound, 20 percent from the impact of a car bomb, 9 percent from aerial bombardment, 6 percent as a result of an accident and 6 percent from another blast/ordnance. This report, however, was widely seen as exaggerated and condemned for its shoddy methodology, and its estimate of deaths is almost certainly much too high.

The 2013 study released in the
PLOS Medicine
online journal, while probably not the last word on the subject, was conducted at a time when Iraq had been largely at peace for four years (the civil war sputtered out in late 2007), and interviewers were able to enter areas that had previously been too dangerous. The study estimated a total of around 460,000 excess deaths in Iraq in 2003–2013, almost one-third less than the figure in the second
Lancet
study of 2006. Nevertheless, this falls within the margin of error calculated by the authors of the
Lancet
article despite the much longer period studied in the
PLOS Medicine
survey, since it is well known that violence declined very steeply in Iraq in the latter half of the period. The causes of violent deaths in the
PLOS Medicine
survey were gunshots at 63 percent, followed by car bombs, 12 percent, other explosions, 9 percent, other war injuries, 9 percent, and airstrikes, 7 percent. Those most responsible were Coalition Forces, 35 percent, militias and insurgents, 32 percent, others/unknown, 21 percent, criminals, 11 percent, and Iraqi forces, 1 percent. The argument will never be satisfactorily resolved, but then casualties in wars, and especially in wars where most of the dead are civilian, are never counted accurately: even the deaths in the Second World War are not agreed to the nearest 10 million. It suffices to say, however, that a very large number of people, most of them Iraqi civilians, were killed in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of 2003.

21.
Report about Camp Bucca by Martin Chulov in the
Guardian
, 11 December 2014.