Military strikes are always a temporary solution

If anything is guaranteed to court controversy, it is Tony Blair expressing his views on the Middle East. The former prime minister’s time in office is largely defined by his decision to join the US in invading Iraq in 2003, based on the later disproved assertion that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Those who backed the war have repeatedly claimed that, despite the country’s problems, at least things are better than they would have been under Saddam. Elections have been held; there was for a time a semblance of stability. But in recent weeks, the fragile peace of the country fell apart as militants from ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) seized control of huge swathes of the country, apparently with very little opposition from the US-trained Iraqi army. The group now controls a significant portion of land on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border, and appears to be moving swiftly towards its goal of establishing a caliphate state.

The sheer speed with which ISIS took control of so much land in Iraq has left western politicians scrambling for a response. In the UK and the US, where the memory of the long and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still fresh, there is little public appetite for renewed military intervention. Indeed, President Barack Obama has said that the US will not send ground troops back to Iraq: three years after he presided over the final US pullout in 2011, this would be a politically toxic move. The US is considering other ways of assisting the Iraqi government and military – including airstrikes and working with Iran. An American aircraft carrier and two guided missile ships have been sent to the Gulf “as a precaution”. Britain has ruled out full-scale military assistance, but has spoken about dispatching assistance in the form of military personnel and police to give “counterterrorism” advice.

When Blair entered the debate last week, it naturally caused a stir. He used a long essay on his website to set out his views on how the west should respond, and to defend his own past actions, saying that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not the cause of the country’s implosion. He urged western governments to take an active role, saying that there were many military options other than ground troops to consider, including airstrikes and drones, as used in Libya. He argued that ISIS “are not simply fighting Iraqis and they are also willing to fight us and they will if we don’t stop them”. He added: “The best policy for us to realise that whatever form of intervention we choose is going to be difficult but it’s better than the alternative. You do not need to engage as we did in Afghanistan or Iraq, but we do have interests in this.”

Of course, his comments caused controversy. Labour’s former international development secretary Clare Short, who resigned over the handling of the Iraq War, accused Blair of behaving like an American neocon, saying he had been consistently “wrong, wrong, wrong about Iraq”. She said that “more bombing will not solve it, it will just exacerbate it”.

One impact of Blair’s comments was to derail the political debate in Britain away from what should be done, and onto the causes of the current chaos. Blair’s refusal to accept that the 2003 invasion had any role in today’s vicious sectarian violence was seen by many as hubristic. The former US ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer, among others, said that the handling of the invasion was a key reason for today’s problems. Others argued that Saddam’s divisive policies laid the groundwork long before the western military operation.

No doubt these circular arguments will continue for some time, but it still leaves the question of what the best course of action is now. Given grave fears in the west about the idea of extremists taking control of a state, it seems inconceivable that there will be no military intervention at all. Some commentators have compared the ISIS sweep across the country to the Taliban seizing Afghanistan in 1996. US strikes may work in the short-term to prevent such a course of events – as we saw in Mali last year, when French military intervention stopped extremists from retaining control of the country. But military strikes are always a temporary solution, as the current chaos in Libya – a recent venue of brief, targeted strikes – demonstrates. The deep-seated problems in Iraq – poor rule of law, a weak army, sectarian tension that allows extremism to flourish and hinders day-to-day governance – must be addressed if stability is to be reached. That will take much more longer.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.