Washington to Whomever: Please Fight the Islamic State
for Us
Why the Gulf States, the Kurds, the Turks, the Sunnis, and the Shia
Won’t Fight America’s War
By Peter Van BurenDecember 10, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "TomDispatch"
- In the many strategies proposed to defeat the Islamic State (IS) by
presidential candidates, policymakers, and media pundits alike across
the American political spectrum, one common element stands out: someone
else should really do it. The United States will send in planes,
advisers, and special ops guys, but it would be best -- and this varies
depending on which pseudo-strategist you cite -- if the Arabs, Kurds,
Turks, Sunnis, and/or Shias would please step in soon and get America
off the hook.
The idea of seeing other-than-American boots on the
ground, like Washington’s
recently deep-sixed scheme to create some “moderate” Syrian rebels
out of whole cloth, is attractive on paper. Let someone else fight
America's wars for American goals. Put an Arab face on the conflict, or
if not that at least a Kurdish one (since, though they may not be Arabs,
they’re close enough in an American calculus). Let the U.S. focus on its
“bloodless” use of air power and covert ops. Somebody else, Washington’s
top brains repeatedly suggest, should put their feet on the embattled,
contested ground of Syria and Iraq. Why, the U.S. might even gift them
with nice, new boots as a thank-you.
Is this, however, a realistic strategy for winning
America’s war(s) in the Middle East?
The Great Champions of the Grand Strategy
Recently, presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton openly
called for the U.S. to round up some Arab allies, Kurds, and Iraqi
Sunnis to drive the Islamic State’s fighters out of Iraq and Syria. On
the same day that Clinton made her proposal,
Bernie Sanders called for “destroying” the Islamic State, but
suggested that it “must be done primarily by Muslim nations.” It’s
doubtful he meant Indonesia or Malaysia.
Among the Republican contenders,
Marco Rubio proposed that the U.S. “provide arms directly to Sunni
tribal and Kurdish forces.”
Ted Cruz threw his support behind arming the Kurds, while
Donald Trump appeared to favor more violence in the region by
whoever might be willing to jump in.
The Pentagon has long been in favor of
arming both the Kurds and whatever Sunni tribal groups it could
round up in Iraq or Syria.
Various
pundits across the political spectrum say much the same.
They may all mean well, but their plans are guaranteed
to fail. Here’s why, group by group.
The Gulf Arabs
Much of what the candidates demand is based one
premise: that “the Arabs” see the Islamic State as the same sort of
threat Washington does.
It’s a position that, at first glance, would seem to
make obvious sense. After all, while American politicians are fretting
about whether patient IS assault teams can wind their way through this
country’s
two-year refugee screening process, countries like Saudi Arabia have
them at their doorstep. Why wouldn’t they jump at the chance to lend a
helping hand, including some planes and soldiers, to the task of
destroying that outfit? “The Arabs,” by which the U.S. generally means a
handful of Persian Gulf states and Jordan, should logically be demanding
the chance to be deeply engaged in the fight.
That was certainly one of the early themes the Obama
administration
promoted after it kicked off its bombing campaigns in Syria and Iraq
back in 2014. In reality, the Arab contribution to that “coalition”
effort to date has been stunningly limited. Actual numbers can be
slippery, but we know that American warplanes have carried out something
like
90% of the air strikes against IS. Of those strikes that are not
all-American, parsing out how many have been from Arab nations is beyond
even Google search's ability. The answer clearly seems to be not many.
Keep in mind as well that the realities of the region
seldom seem to play much of a part in Washington’s thinking. For the
Gulf Arabs, all predominantly Sunni nations, the Islamic State and its
al-Qaeda-linked Sunni ilk are little more than a distraction from what
they fear most, the rise of Shia power in places like Iraq and the
growing regional strength of Iran.
In this context, imagining such Arab nations as a
significant future anti-IS force is absurd. In fact, Sunni terror groups
like IS and al-Qaeda have in part been funded by states like Saudi
Arabia or at least rich supporters living in them. Direct funding links
are often difficult to prove, particularly if the United States chooses
not to publicly prove them. This is especially so because the money that
flows into such terror outfits often comes from individual donors, not
directly from national treasuries, or may even be routed through
legitimate charitable organizations and front companies.
However, one person concerned in
an off-the-record way with such Saudi funding for terror groups was
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton back in 2009. In a classified
warning message (now posted on WikiLeaks), she suggested in blunt terms
that donors in Saudi Arabia were the “most
significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”
One who thinks the Saudis and other Gulf countries may
be funding rather than fighting IS and is ready to say so is Russian
President Vladimir Putin. At the recent G20 meeting, he
announced that he had shared intelligence information revealing
that 40 countries, including some belonging to the G20 itself, finance
the majority of the Islamic State’s activities. Though Putin’s list of
supposed funders was not made public, on the G20 side Saudi Arabia and
Turkey are more likely candidates than South Korea and Japan.
Most recently, the German vice chancellor has
explicitly
accused the Saudis of funding Sunni radical groups.
Expecting the Gulf Arab states to fight IS also
ignores the complex political relationship between those nations and
Islamic fundamentalism generally. The situation is clearest in Saudi
Arabia, where the secular royal family holds power only with the shadowy
permission of Wahhabist religious leaders. The latter provide the
former with legitimacy at the price of promoting Islamic fundamentalism
abroad. From the royals' point of view, abroad is the best place for it
to be, as they fear an Islamic revolution at home. In a very real way,
Saudi Arabia is supporting an ideology that threatens its own survival.
The Kurds
At the top of the list of groups included in the
American dream of someone else fighting IS are the Kurds. And indeed,
the peshmerga, the Kurdish militia, are actually on the battlefields of
northern Iraq and Syria, using American-supplied weapons and supported
by American air power and advisers in their efforts to kill Islamic
State fighters.
But looks can be deceiving. While a Venn diagram would
show an overlap between some U.S. and Kurdish aims, it’s important not
to ignore the rest of the picture. The Kurds are fighting primarily for
a homeland, parts of which are, for the time being, full of Islamic
State fighters in need of killing. The Kurds may indeed destroy them,
but only within the boundaries of what they imagine to be a future
Kurdistan, not in the heartlands of the Syrian and Iraqi regions that IS
now controls.
Not only will the Kurds not fight America’s battles in
parts of the region, no matter how we arm and advise them, but it seems
unlikely that, once in control of extended swaths of northern Iraq and
parts of Syria, they will simply abandon their designs on territory that
is now a part of Turkey. It’s a dangerous American illusion to imagine
that Washington can turn Kurdish nationalism
on and off as needed.
The Kurds, now well armed and battle-tested, are just
one of the genies Washington released from that Middle Eastern bottle in
2003 when it invaded Iraq. Now, whatever hopes the U.S. might still have
for future stability in the region shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Using the Kurds to fight IS is a devil's bargain.
The Turks
And talking about devil’s bargains, don’t forget about
Turkey. The Obama administration reached a deal to
fly combat missions in its intensifying air war against the Islamic
State from two bases in Turkey. In return, Washington essentially looked
the other way while Turkish President Recep Erdogan re-launched a war
against internal Kurdish rebels at least in part to rally nationalistic
supporters and win an election. Similarly, the U.S. has supported
Turkey's recent
shoot-down of a Russian aircraft.
When it comes to the Islamic State, though, don’t hold
your breath waiting for the Turks to lend a serious military hand. That
country’s government has, at the very least, probably been turning a
blind eye to the
smuggling of arms into Syria for IS, and is clearly a conduit for
smuggling its oil out onto world
markets.
American politicians seem to feel that, for now, it’s best to leave the
Turks off to the side and simply be grateful to them for slapping the
Russians down and opening their air space to American aircraft.
That gratitude may be misplaced. Some 150 Turkish
troops, supported by 20 to 25 tanks, have recently
entered northern Iraq, prompting one Iraqi parliamentarian to label
the action “switching out alien (IS) rule for other alien rule.” The
Turks claim that they have had military trainers in the area for some
time and that they are working with local Kurds to fight IS. It may also
be that the Turks are simply taking a bite from a splintering Iraq. As
with so many situations in the region, the details are murky, but the
bottom line is the same: the Turks' aims are their own and they are
likely to contribute little either to regional stability or American war
aims.
The Sunnis
Of the many sub-strategies proposed to deal with the
Islamic State, the idea of recruiting and arming “the Sunnis” is
among the most fantastical. It offers a striking illustration of the
curious, somewhat delusional mindset that Washington policymakers,
including undoubtedly the
next president, live in.As a start, the
thought that the U.S. can effectively fulfill its own goals by
recruiting local Sunnis to take up arms against IS is based on a
myth: that “the surge” during America's previous Iraq War brought us
a victory later squandered by the locals. With this goes a belief,
demonstrably false, in the shallowness of the relationship between
many Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis and the Islamic State.
According to the Washington mythology that has grown
up around that so-called surge of 2007-2008, the U.S. military used
money, weapons, and clever persuasion to convince Iraq’s Sunni
tribes to break with Iraq’s local al-Qaeda organization. The Sunnis
were then energized to join the coalition government the U.S. had
created. In this way, so the story goes, the U.S. arrived at a true
“mission accomplished” moment in Iraq. Politicians on both sides of
the aisle in Washington still believe that the surge, led by General
David Petraeus, swept to success by promoting and arming a “Sunni
Awakening Movement,” only to see American plans thwarted by a
too-speedy Obama administration withdrawal from the country and the
intra-Iraqi squabbling that followed. So the question now is: why
not “awaken” the Sunnis again?
In reality, the surge involved almost 200,000
American soldiers, who put themselves temporarily between Sunni and
Shia militias. It also involved untold millions of dollars of
“payments” -- what in another situation would be
called bribes -- that brought about temporary alliances between
the U.S. and the Sunnis. The Shia-dominated Iraqi central government
never signed onto the deal, which began to
fall apart well before the American occupation ended. The
replacement of al-Qaeda in Iraq by a newly birthed Islamic State
movement was, of course,
part and parcel of that falling-apart process.
After the Iraqi government stopped making the
payments to Sunni tribal groups first instituted by the Americans,
those tribes felt betrayed. Still occupying Iraq, those Americans
did nothing to help the Sunnis. History suggests that much of Sunni
thinking in the region since then has been built around the motto of
"won't get fooled again."So it is unlikely
in the extreme that local Sunnis will buy into basically the same
deal that gave them so little of lasting value the previous time
around. This is especially so since there will be no new massive
U.S. force to act as a buffer against resurgent Shia militias. Add
to this mix a deep Sunni conviction that American commitments are
never for the long term, at least when it comes to them. What, then,
would be in it for the Sunnis if they were to again throw in their
lot with the Americans? Another chance to be
part of a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad that seeks to
marginalize or destroy them, a government now strengthened by
Iranian support, or a Syria whose chaos could easily yield a
leadership with similar aims?
In addition, a program to rally Sunnis to take up
arms against the Islamic State presumes that significant numbers of
them don’t support that movement, especially given their need for
protection from the depredations of Shia militias. Add in religious
and ethnic sentiments, anti-western feelings, tribal affiliations,
and economic advantage -- it is believed that IS kicks back a share
of its
oil revenues to compliant Sunni tribal leaders -- and what
exactly would motivate a large-scale Sunni transformation into an
effective anti-Islamic State boots-on-the-ground force?
ShiasNot
that they get mentioned all that often, being closely associated
with acts of brutality against Sunnis and heavily supported by Iran,
but Iraq's Shia militias are quietly seen by some in Washington as a
potent anti-IS force. They have, in Washington’s mindset, picked up
the slack left after the Iraqi Army abandoned its equipment and
fled the Islamic State’s fighters in northern Iraq in June 2014,
and again in the Sunni city of
Ramadi in May 2015.
Yet even the militia strategy seems to be coming
undone. Several powerful Shia militias recently announced, for
instance, their opposition to any further deployment of U.S. forces
to their country. This was after the U.S. Secretary of Defense
unilaterally announced that an elite special operations unit
would be sent to Iraq to combat the Islamic State. The militias just
don't
trust Washington to have their long-term interests at heart (and
in this they are in good company in the region). "We will chase and
fight any American force deployed in Iraq,"
said one militia spokesman. "We fought them before and we are
ready to resume fighting."
Refusing to Recognize Reality
The Obama/Clinton/Sanders/Cruz/Rubio/Pentagon/et
al. solution -- let someone else fight the ground war against IS --
is based on what can only be called a delusion: that regional forces
there believe in American goals (some variant of secular rule, disposing
of evil dictators, perhaps some enduring U.S. military presence) enough
to ignore their own varied, conflicting, aggrandizing, and often fluid
interests. In this way, Washington continues to
convince itself that local political goals are not in conflict with
America's strategic goals. This is a delusion.
In fact, Washington’s goals in this whole process are
unnervingly far-fetched. Overblown fears about the supposedly dire
threats of the Islamic State to “the homeland” aside, the American
solution to radical Islam is an ongoing disaster. It is based on the
attempted revitalization of the collapsed or collapsing nation-state
system at the heart of that region. The stark reality is that no one
there -- not the Gulf states, not the Kurds, not the Turks, not the
Sunnis, nor even the Shia -- is fighting for Iraq and Syria as the U.S.
remembers them.
Unworkable national boundaries were drawn up after
World War I without regard for ethnic, sectarian, or tribal realities
and dictatorships were then imposed or supported past their due dates.
The Western
answer that only secular governments are acceptable makes sad light
of the power of Islam in a region that often sees little or no
separation between church and state.
Secretary of State John Kerry can join the
calls for the use of “indigenous forces” as often as he wants, but
the reality is clear: Washington’s policy in Syria and Iraq is bound to
fail, no matter who does the fighting.
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State
Department waste and mismanagement during the Iraqi reconstruction in
We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of
the Iraqi People. A
TomDispatch regular, he writes about current events at
We Meant Well.
His latest book is
Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent. His next work
will be a novel,
Hooper's War.
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Copyright 2015 Peter Van Buren
