A Political ‘Perfect Storm’

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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Is the United States heading into — indeed, has it already launched — a new war in the Middle East? Like so much else in Iraq and Syria (not to mention Washington) the answer is far from clear-cut. Put another way, there is both more and less to America’s new war against Isil than meets the eye.

US President Barack Obama must feel that the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) puts him in an impossible situation. Because Isil’s influence stretches across the border from Iraq into Syria, action against it risks helping preserve the regime of Bashar Al Assad, which the Obama administration and most of its allies want to see ousted. But because the organisation’s influence is growing in Iraq (its birthplace and the homeland of most of its senior leaders) Isil also threatens Baghdad’s fragile institutions. Since the Americans have both a moral and a political stake in preserving those institutions, standing by while the Iraqi state collapses is hard for many in Washington to contemplate.

Doing anything other than standing by, means more war in the Middle East for both a country that wants no such thing and a president elected on the promise of withdrawing from wars in the Middle East. It does not mean starting new ones. Yet standing by as Isil grows risks the creation of exactly the sort of terrorist safe haven that facilitated the September 11 attacks and thus, indirectly, drew America’s armies into the region in the first place. To act, however, requires allies. If America has learned anything over the last 30 years it is that unilateral action in the Middle East is pretty much doomed from the start. Only a coalition that includes partners drawn from both America’s traditional allies and from the region itself can have any hope of lasting success.

The problem is that partners are in short supply. In the 24 hours after Obama announced his anti-Isil coalition last week Washington’s closest global ally, Britain, declared that it had no intention of bombing anything.

Dumb war

At home, Obama is caught between hawkish Republicans for whom no military action against Isil will ever be enough and activists in his own party who oppose any military action whatsoever and often use quotes from a younger Obama (“what I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war,” Obama, then a state legislator, said of Iraq in 2002) to justify their case. In the wake of Isil’s killing of two American journalists polls show the public is clamouring for action — so long as it involves no ‘boots on the ground.’ Obama’s declaration last week that fighting Isil is likely to take years found favour with no one outside the most hawkish sections of the political right.

In Washington, some of the same Congressional Republicans who are currently suing Obama for using his executive powers without their agreement are urging him not to wait for them in Iraq and Syria. A few of them genuinely believe the situation is so dire that it cannot wait for a Congressional vote, but many more are eager to avoid taking any position on a new conflict in the Middle East with an election just seven weeks away. [The House could vote as soon as today to grant Obama the authority to train and equip Syrian rebels to battle Isil]. Obama’s Democratic Party is split over a war against Isil, but only slightly more eager than the Republicans to vote on the issue. The administration’s contention that the 2001 Congressional resolution authorising George W. Bush to fight Al Qaida also authorises Obama to launch a new campaign against Isil has particularly shocked Obama’s supporters.

It is, in some ways, a political ‘perfect storm’: A situation in which none of Obama’s options are either easy or good. At the heart of this dilemma is a deceptively simple question: Who does Isil threaten? Iraq and Syria? Obviously (with the proviso that Syria may have been irreparably broken before Isil was added to the equation). Jordan and Lebanon? Probably. Turkey? Perhaps, but not at an existential level. America itself? Well, what exactly does one mean by “threat”?

In the end, the crux of Obama’s argument is that Isil represents enough of an immediate threat to America’s friends in the Middle East, and a long-term threat to America itself, to justify military action — perhaps quite a lot of military action over a period of years.

Politically there is little doubt that time is on Obama’s side. The American public has a short attention span, and if the 1990s in Iraq proved anything it is that US military action can be sustained politically for years provided that it rarely intrudes on the public consciousness and remains largely casualty-free (for the Americans). Politically speaking, Obama and his successor can probably bomb Isil in the Iraqi and Syrian deserts for years to come. Whether that will save a single friendly government, radically curb Isil’s growth or merely make matters worse is a lot less certain.

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