LONDON – The capture of Mosul, arguably the most dramatic coup by jihadist militants since the September 2001 attacks on America, has raised scarcely a whimper in Western capitals.
A decade of war weariness, and a determination not to be drawn into further military adventures in the Middle East, has killed any appetite among the United States and its allies to rush to the aid of the Iraqi people.
As a bare few thousand fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) pursue their sweep through Sunni areas of the country in the path of the fleeing Iraqi army, Washington is pondering what minimal resources it can send to the government of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, its little-loved Iraqi ally.
“I don’t get the impression the gravity of the situation has fully registered yet,” Hussein Ibish, a Washington-based political analyst and Middle East expert told Rudaw.
After post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which claimed thousands of American and allied lives, jihadists look nearer to fulfilling their fantasy of re-establishing an Islamic Caliphate than at any time before or since the attack on New York’s twin towers.
Only the bulwark provided by the Kurdish Regional Government’s Peshmerga forces is preventing the situation being even worse in areas such as Kirkuk, where the Kurdish forces have taken over the abandoned Iraqi positions.
Yet Western governments appear adamant about bypassing the Kurds and dealing only, and in as far as they have to, with the dysfunctional administration in Baghdad.
In Washington, the crisis has barely hit the radar of a Congress only too happy to put Iraq behind it since the last American troops left the country at the end of 2011. At a session of the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, not a single congressman took the opportunity to ask Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel about developments in Iraq.
It was a similar story at the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee the same day, when the outgoing and incoming US ambassadors to Iraq gave low-key and relatively calming assessments of the situation.
Stuart Jones, who has been nominated to take up the post in Baghdad, said on the situation in Mosul: “We will continue to work with our international partners to meet the needs of those who have been displaced. And we will look for ways to support the government and the security forces.”
He added, however, that Washington’s top priority was to ensure the safety of the 5,300 US personnel at the embassy in Baghdad, as well as thousands of other Americans in Iraq.
President Barack Obama, who opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion, was elected in part on a promise to end America’s foreign wars and bring the boys home. It is a policy that was widely supported by the American public. However, his critics say his subsequent caution in foreign policy has amounted to a failure to use American power to counter international bullies, ranging from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad.
His administration initially opposed intervention in Libya to protect civilians from the regime of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi until he was talked into it by the British and the French.
The Assad regime in Syria last year demonstrated that it was able to cross Obama’s “red line” on the use of chemical weapons with impunity. And more recently, Putin succeeded in annexing Crimea from Ukraine at little cost beyond some low-key Western sanctions.
The New York Times on Wednesday quoted Iraqi and American officials as saying Maliki secretly asked the Obama administration to consider air strikes against ISIS staging areas as early as last month. But the appeals for a military response had so far been rebuffed by the White House.
The caution is not confined to Washington. In Britain, where Parliament last year vetoed a plan for air strikes against Assad’s chemical weapons’ stores, a spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron made clear that sending troops to help Baghdad was “just not on the table.”
Ibish told Rudaw it was possible the Obama administration might be working in the background to persuade opposing regional players to join together to defuse the crisis. “There could be real complacency, or it could be something effective is being done,” he said.
He said he doubted whether any government, including the United States, had the power to stop ISIS in its tracks. But Washington could work to reduce regional tensions. In this context, the emerging dialogue between Saudi Arabia and Iran was helpful, although problems remained.
Ibish urged the Kurdistan Regional Government not to feel Washington was leaving it out of the equation by dealing principally with Baghdad. He said Kurdistan was one of the big winners from US foreign policy in recent years, with the Kurds playing a very skilful political hand.
As events move forward, “the Kurds are very close to the inevitability of independence,” he said.
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