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Fighting ISIS the right way

September 20, 2014 at 10:58 am

ISIS is a real threat to the region and internationally. But, in order to deal with them, we should not be resigned to war.

On 11 September 2014, President Obama announced airstrikes against targets associated with the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS, formally ‘the Islamic state of Iraq and a-Sham’) – a radical Sunni jihadist group which, earlier this year, asserted control over territory in Iraq and Syria and declared itself an independent sovereign entity, committed numerous atrocities, brutally murdered two American journalists (and now a British aid worker) and publicised their beheadings on social media.

The president laid out some details of the plan: the campaign’s focus will be broader than just Iraq, ISIS targets in Syria will also be hit; while there will be no ground invasion Mr Obama likened the assault to American led missions in Somalia and Yemen; US forces will be joined by both local (Kurdish and Iraqi forces) and international allies in their fight (though at present the UK’s possible involvement remains restrained while Australia and Canada are sending limited support); America will also arm ‘moderate’ rebels in Syria too. Overall the goal is to disrupt and destroy ISIS – in the same way the US continues to target al-Qaeda – though apparently there remains some confusion within the administration over the question of whether this constitutes a “war” or not.

Media reaction

Predictably, pundits and commentators from across the media and the blogosphere have responded to renewed American action in the Middle East with a range of reactions and criticisms.

For example, The Independent’s veteran Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, penned another weary column that tied the ongoing failure of American leadership to the history of foreign imperialism in the region, though he did not offer any alternatives to war. On the other hand Con Coughing – of The Telegraph – seems to come close to advocating a return to imperialism and a large-scale military campaign as a strategy, voicing blustering frustration at Obama’s reluctance to send in the troops.

A few, more nuanced, analyses offer a better caliber of argument. For example David Frum – a former speechwriter for George Bush – notes Obama’s inconsistency from the perspective of realism (an academic school of thought which argues that states should always act in their own best interests in an anarchic world).

In particular, he notes a missed opportunity to advance American interests by leveraging a de facto alliance that is emerging between the US, its allies, Syria and Iran – all of which oppose ISIS, even while they agree in little else. The US could have extracted important consessions from its major regional rivals in exchange for providing air cover to forces backed by Iran, or so Frum’s argument goes.

Others have focused on the barbarism of ISIS. Such commentaries point out how the actions of its cadres contradict with a true interpretation of Islam and how its claims to represent the restoration of the Caliphate are undermined by its intolerance and absolutism (when in fact the period of the Abbasid Caliphate – a dynasty that ruled the Islamic empire from Bagdad during the 6th and 7th Centuries – is actually notorious as a time of great tolerance and inquiry).

Thus across more-or-less all the commentary there is apparently a quiet consensus that some kind of war is necessary. Perhaps it is best understood as a kind of resignation to the fact that America’s warplanes and drones have embarked on a miserable, but ultimately necessary, mission to confront an intolerable threat.

Resignation to war

Further, this resignation seems to go beyond the sphere of professional commentators. Compare the muted reaction to Obama’s speech last week to the popular and political rejection of American, French and British plans to bomb Syria last year, and one may note a stark contrast. Indeed, the run up to that prospective bombing campaign was stifled by British MP’s rejection of their government’s plan.

In short, in the case against the Assad regime in Syria, there was a strong public and political reaction against the prospect of bombing despite the fact that the public (and the British parliament) were fully aware of the brutality of the regime and its targeting of civilians.

So what’s the difference between the two? Why do we oppose one war yet are resigned to another?

To date, Assad’s regime has brutally killed and displaced far more people than ISIS has. It has also employed utterly reprehensible tactics – not only during this long civil war, but also in the decades of oppressive rule that preceded it. Of course, Assad’s government remains – to some extent anyway – ‘a state’ with some trappings of legitimacy while ISIS only asserts a weak claim to that status.

This leaves two other possible reasons that really underlie the difference. First, that it could be ISIS’ radical pseudo-religious fervour that makes it more of a threat to the west than Assad’s professed secularism. Indeed, the existence of religious rhetoric ties into a long-standing fear among western governments that fighting abroad can and will radicalize disaffected Muslims at home.

While obviously not entirely unfounded, this claim is one driven by fear and is perhaps given more weight than is strictly necessary. More sober analyses suggests that while organisations such as ISIS do draw some support from foreign nationals, thus far these people remain far too poorly trained and equipped to carry out any kind of sophisticated attack on the homeland. And, further, they tend to be easier to track by intelligence agencies as a result of their connections to ISIS.

The second possible reason that remains is that ISIS has been so blatant in its use of brutal methods and, by killing US and UK citizens and advertising their murders so openly on social media, it has effectively thrown down the gauntlet to the US.

Again, going to war under such circumstances may be understandable. It is, of course, reasonable to expect the most powerful states in the world to use force to protect – or in this case, avenge – the lives of its citizens. But even if one accepts the legitimacy of vengeance as an impetus for this campaign, one must not be blinded to the fact that – by carrying out these beheadings and publicising them in the way that it has – ISIS was likely seeking to inspire exactly the kind of military response from the US as the one that is now forthcoming.

In other words, when one looks at these events in a more dispassionate and strategic light, one can see that the world’s most powerful military is now effectively dancing to the tune of an organisation comprising about 31,000 people and operating across two desperately war-torn countries in the Middle East.

But why would ISIS want to incur the wrath of the US? The answer is simple and is based on a logic that has been employed by various groups engaged in similar asymmetric campaigns: US bombs may indeed degrade ISIS’ infrastructure and kill its supporters, but they are also likely to feed the sense of grievance endured by local Sunnis and allow ISIS the room to claim it has some kind of moral platform, by fighting a powerful and oppressive foreign enemy.

Indeed, there is strong evidence to suggest that the oppression suffered by Sunni Muslims in Iraq and Syria has helped drive up existing levels of support for ISIS (though it is far from universally supported among Sunnis). Therefore it is relatively easy to understand that the US’ bombing campaign may well serve as a strong recruiting sergeant for the organisation.

After all, people who have no-where else to turn may well see supporting ISIS as the only option left, even if they do not accept its ideology or methodology. Such a possible outcome is made even stronger by the fact that the US’ de facto allies on the ground in Iraq and Syria have behaved so brutally in their own right.

The bigger picture

We must not forget the broader context of this war. It was American bombs and missile strikes launched against Saddam’s regime in 2003 that began this miserable episode of history. A US-led coalition engaged claimed the moral high ground and attacked – what no one can doubt was – an utterly reprehensible regime. At the time the US promised to ‘liberate’ the population but instead it unleashed a hell of civil war and competition for power that has cost approximately 195,000 lives.

This is not to say that the US is directly responsible for the formation of ISIS, nor to say that terrible violence cannot occur without the involvement of US bombs and drones. (The Syrian civil war demonstrates that oppressive regimes are perfectly capable of imploding into crisis without the help of foreign forces).

Rather, my point is simply that the example of the 2003 Iraq war and its aftermath (and the 2011 campaign in Libya and its aftermath to boot) demonstrate how limited the utility of destructive force is in terms of its ability to create stability in the long term. Indeed, I argued strongly against the possible involvement of Western forces in the war in Syria in 2013, on precisely these grounds.

Indeed the potential for unintended consequences is not limited to inspiring further support for radical enemies of the US. Rather, there are numerous potential dangers here. For example, ISIS is known to have access to even more prisoners including 49 Turks – which is particularly significant given the Turkey’s strategic significance on the boarder with Syria and Iraq – and it may chose to escalate its killing in the face of the US-led campaign.

Another threat that is tied to this strategy is that the US and its allies will not be able to keep track of the arms it sends to local allies. A report by Conflict Arms Research has already shown that US made weapons have fallen in to the hands of ISIS. Further such trafficking of arms is only made more likely by the US’ strategy of supplying more weapons to the region.

Asphyxiation

But, if fighting the fire if ISIS’ rise with the fire of airstrikes by arming its enemies is not a ‘solution’, then what is it that should be done? It surely cannot be acceptable to simply ignore this group and allow it to continue brutalising and murdering.

No. My answer is, instead of burning ISIS to the ground the organisation may be dealt with more effectively by starving it of oxygen.

As we have seen ISIS’ status as the new great threat rests on two prongs – (a) the support of disaffected Sunnis in Iraq and Syria and (b) the hyperbole and fear surrounding its brutal methods of murder and its ability to advertise them, and perhaps inspire similar violence via social media.

Combine these two elements with the fact that ISIS has a managed to develop a relatively well-organised – but not independent – financial network and we see that the organisation is by no means invulnerable.

Rather than utilizing force to attack ISIS – which brings with inherent risk of enflaming the situation further – a more comprehensive strategy of cutting off support for ISIS through political, diplomatic and economic means could be employed.

In simple terms this would comprise, first, sanctions, diplomatic efforts and police action to cut off ISIS financial supply lines. Second would be, political efforts in support of addressing the legitimate grievances of Sunnis in Iraq and renewed efforts to undermine the oppressive Assad regime in Syria.

Third would be a more realistic and common sense approach to addressing the potential threat of internationalisation of ISIS influence. Or, in other words, Western governments could simply choose to be more robust in support of their own value systems and demonstrate a more stubborn confidence in the own security services ability to deal with emergent threats – as they have done effectively over the last ten years – without succumbing to panic.

As the president pointed out in his speech, the world is a far more complicated and dangerous place that many of us in the West are comfortable with. And in this world, emergent threats like ISIS must be, of course, dealt with. But we must not allow fear and rage – however legitimate – to crowd out the necessity for rational decision-making. There are other, less rash, ways of dealing with ISIS over the long term. It would be better to embrace those rather than rush to deploy drones, bombs and arms and feed the intensity of this conflagration.

We must not be resigned to war. After all, war is what ISIS wants most of all.

Dr Philip Leech is a Lecturer at in International Relations at the University of Liverpool. He is the editor of Globalisation Cafe and is on at @phil_haqeeqa

 

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