Listening to President Obama’s speech on Sept. 10, outlining his administration’s purportedly new strategy for defeating Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, David Cortright found himself wondering what, if anything the United States has learned from its long and costly involvement in the region. Cortright, the Director of Policy Studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, heard the president detail a plan to “degrade, and ultimately destroy, [ISIS] through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy.” The president’s plan includes air strikes against ISIS targets and may mean the arming of Syrian opposition forces now fighting against both ISIS and the Assad regime, while shoring up a third, presumably moderate force in the complex Syrian civil war.
On arming opposition fighters, Cortright
pointed out that the United States should understand by now what can
happen when the weapons it brings into a conflict end up in the wrong
hands. Many of the most destructive pieces of equipment now deployed by
ISIS fighters were seized from fleeing Iraqi soldiers, who abandoned
advanced weapons, tanks and armored humvees that had been provided by
the United States. And in the not-too-distant past U.S. agents have had
to buy back weapons on the black market after they fell into the wrong
hands after U.S. intelligence agents armed the mujahedeen in
Afghanistan. Nor has the United States proved capable of creating a
self-sustaining moderate political movement in Iraq despite great effort
there over a decade. Cortright worries that a moderate middle in Syria
will likewise prove a mirage. “It’s way too late to start that now,” he
said.
But the overall problem with the
administration’s strategy to turn back the ISIS threat, he argues, is
that it once again relies mostly on military force to solve what are
primarily political problems. Many of the Sunni tribal people in
northern Iraq currently supporting ISIS have elected to do so because
they have become deeply pessimistic about their future in a nation that
has been directed by Shiites since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Their
treatment under the Maliki Shiite-dominated government has especially
not been good, he points out; Sunni grievances are real and they remain
unresolved. Military force alone will not be capable of defeating
Islamic terrorist movements, he said, when they can find sustenance from
disaffected locals.
Sunnis in the region, he points out, have
been under brutal assault from both Assad and Baghdad. “The Sunni
population feels under siege. Some of them are turning to ISIS,
beginning to see working with ISIS as a lesser of two evils.” Cortright
adds that he is concerned that President Obama may be “too quick to
judge the new government as inclusive.
“When the United States, especially, uses
force against them, it only stirs up more hatred and drums up more
support for their effort,” Cortright said. “It is counterproductive and a
lot of data can support that.” A truly winning counterinsurgency
strategy, he argues, must take into account the often complicated
underlying political conditions driving the conflict and include
creative diplomatic moves, like working with unlikely allies such as
Iran and robust economic sanctions aimed at closing off funding sources
such as oil sales.
Which is not to say that the use of force
cannot sometimes be completely justified. Cortright points out that the
military may be required to protect vulnerable, imminently threatened
groups, as was recently the case when Yazidi, Turkmen and Christian
villagers were targeted by ISIS. At such times, the president’s plan to
attack ISIS forces may mesh with Pope Francis’ recent call for
appropriate countermeasures to the extremist group. “In these cases,
where there is an unjust aggression, I can only say that it is licit to
stop the unjust aggressor,” the pope said on Aug. 18.
“He made it clear that he was not referring
to bombing or to war,” said Cortright. “The use of force is justified
and even necessary if it can save innocent people from being killed, but
that does not justify bombing as a policy or engaging in warfare as a
policy.”
Senior Editor/Chief Correspondent
Kevin Clarke returned to his native New York in 2009 after a lengthy tour of duty at Claretian Publications: first as an editor and contributor to Salt of the Earth magazine; then as senior editor, columnist and web content manager for U.S. Catholic magazine and uscatholic.org. He is an Albany State grad and has an MA in International Studies from DePaul University in Chicago. He has frequently been honored by the Associated Church Press and the Catholic Press Association for his opinion and feature writing and has been recognized by Catholic Relief Services for his reporting on international issues. In addition to SOTE and U.S. Catholic, his work has appeared in the Utne Reader, Sojourners, The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Reader.
Source: http://americamagazine.org/issue/back-iraq-white-house-preparing-repeat-past-mistakes
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