British bombs will help ISIS recruit

Today, Friday 26 September, the House of Commons is slated to take yet another vote on yet another war in Iraq. This time, the putative bombing campaign (already started in both Iraq and Syria by the Americans) would target the so-called “Islamic State”, the fanatical terrorist organisation which controls large swathes of Iraq and Syria.

With support from the official opposition of Labour’s Ed Milliband, the vote looks likely to pass. The Islamic State is the bad guy de jour, having apparently replaced Al-Qaeda some time ago. The terrorist network once led by the late Osama Bin Laden now seems rather tame in comparison to the horrors of the Islamic State, with whose hideous exploits the papers and lurid TV channels regal us with on an almost daily basis.

So, launch a few good bombing campaigns at the Islamic State and the threat will be eradicated, or at least combated, right?

There is a problem with the whole scenario currently being put forward by the British government. Or rather, several problems.

What is missed in the whole current rush to bomb Iraq (yet again) is the role that American and British bombs (and other forms of “intervention”) had in creating the Islamic State in the first place, on both of its main fronts: Iraq and Syria.

The subject of the “Islamic State’s” interminable re-branding efforts is already tiresomely covered elsewhere, so I won’t revisit it. While that debate usually centres around whether to call it IS, ISIS, ISIL, or something else, what is usually forgotten is that the group was formerly known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and later, the Islamic State of Iraq.

This group simply did not exist before the US-British invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. It could never have got a foothold under Saddam Hussein. But the casual dismantling of the country under the US occupation, combined with the sectarian conspiracy at its heart (arming sectarian death squads), led to the rise of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and ultimately to what is now the Islamic State. The Americans created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State. Once again, much like Osama Bin Laden, the Islamic State is a chimera of the Americans’ own making.

And the same goes for the Islamic State’s other main arena of operations: Syria. The Islamic State now controls large and important areas of Syria – including lucrative oil resources, which it uses to help finance itself.

But it was not always this way. Much like in Iraq, such fanatical groups found it hard to gain any traction in Syria. Before the civil war started in March 2011, the Islamic State was still just the Islamic State of Iraq and was unheard of in Syria.

Although there were popular protests against the corrupt Assad regime, this was quickly undermined by outside powers and their desire to overthrow the state by force of arms. The Saudis, the Turks, Qatar, the Americans – all threw in money and arms at rebel groups they hoped would be friendly to their interests. Guns fairly sloshed around the country. In one way or another, many of these ended up in the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq, who had entered the country re-branded as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. For its part, the Iranian government armed the other side, sending weapons and military trainers to the Syrian government.

And now we are in 2014, and the US-Israeli strategy for the region seems clearer than ever to be a deliberate one of destabilisation. The US prefers a weak Syrian government, far less able to oppose Israel. But it doesn’t want Assad’s regime decisively defeated – fearful of the Islamic extremists likely to replace it.

In a similar vein, the US prefers a weak Iraqi government, all the better to control it. In fact, the sectarian system used to elect Iraqi governments was deliberately designed, under the aegis of direct US occupation, to result in a weak and divided state, highly susceptible to US imperial influence, which continues to have a decisive role in the country even after most of its troops have left.

As Patrick Cockburn, the best western journalist currently working in Iraq and Syria, put it: “US air power did not win the war in Afghanistan and is even less likely to do so in Iraq or Syria.” Far from removing the Islamic State, American and British bombing is only likely to encourage recruitment. The people likely to suffer most from this are the long-suffering civilians in Iraq and now Syria.

The British and American governments should try something new: keeping their noses out.

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