US president Barack Obama was blasted last month for lacking a strategy to fight Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq and Syria. His announcement on Wednesday to extend US airstrikes from Iraq to Syria and bolster Iraqi, Kurdish and moderate elements of Syria’s opposition was a strategy, for sure.
Strategies are all well and good for playing chess, when one can predict the movement of rival pieces. But the turbulent Middle East has so many unpredictable parts that is looks nothing like a chessboard. It more closely resembles the unpredictable flippers and bumpers on a pinball machine.
Pulling back a spring-loaded plunger, Obama cannot be sure what his shiny ball will hit. Will Congress back him? Will Iraq’s new government win Kurdish and Sunni support? Will Turkey halt jihad-tourism? Will Sunni Arab leaders rally in support? Will, at the very least, one NATO ally fly warplanes beside Uncle Sam?
Such questions are troublesome for any board game strategist. Syria, the next target for US airstrikes, could really send Obama’s ball spinning into the drain. There, a fight between government troops, IS and other Islamists, and the Free Syrian Army and more moderate militias, heaps ever-more death and destruction on millions of blameless Syrians.
America’s 154 airstrikes so far have struck mostly IS sitting ducks in wide-open Iraqi deserts. That will change when the targets are command centers and bases in IS-run cities of Iraq and Syria, and we see military mishits like those that dent US credibility in Afghanistan. The IS, also known by the acronyms ISIS and ISIL, has a slick public relations division. You Tube videos of dead children being pulled from burning schools in Raqqa would be potent propaganda tools for extremists. It will look like Hamas holding out against Israel.
During his primetime address, Obama did not venture to say what Syria should look like, two or three years down the road. The reason is simple: he does not know. Instead, he made a limp reference to a “political solution” with no indication of who will run the show in Damascus.
With so many unknowns, America riding into battle once again, with Obama speaking of a “responsibility to lead”, is unwise. Foreign leaders, even European allies, seem to be aware of this and are more cautious, this time around. They must remember the messy consequences of US bravado in Afghanistan, and the Iraq invasion of 2003 that left a power vacuum for IS to exploit.
While IS rules with zealot-like certainty, there is merit in its service delivery. IS pays wages, keeps electricity and water running and manages traffic. Libya’s descent into inter-militia chaos – in the wake of another Western-led airstrike campaign – causes some Tripolitans to wonder whether Muammar Gaddafi was such a bad bigwig after all.
None of this means that Obama is bad, for IS militiamen are truly villainous. Faced with such genocidal, intolerant thugs, he has sieved through a range of policy options that no rational commander-in-chief would relish. Sadly, a less-obvious option – to do nothing – does not appear to have been on the table.
Like the other choices, it is not pretty. Religious persecution, forced marriages and beheadings would take place in the name of a self-declared caliphate that imposes centuries-old religious edicts on some six million people. But with such barbaric governance, IS leaders will sow the seeds of their own internal destruction. Politics is about pragmatism; there is no wiggle-room in the Islamic State.
With thousands of foreigners joining the ranks of IS, perhaps we need reminding why much of humanity spent centuries overturning monolithic, puritanical dictatorships. Perhaps now, a living example of genuinely hardline Islamist rule – complete with crucifixions as weekend crowd-pleasers – would make a stronger case for democratic pluralism than another risky US intervention.
