Obama's strategy to face ISIS in Iraq is in the balance

On 21 October, 2011, US President Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of the last American troops from Iraq in a systematic exit operation that began in 2007. The process ended two months later, although nearly 17,000 workers were kept on in the US Embassy in Baghdad, along with 4,500 security “contractors”.

These facts allowed Obama to announce that he had fulfilled his promise to withdraw American troops from Iraq, that he was able to provide a model for a successful and coherent Iraq, and that US troops would not be deployed to fight on Iraqi soil or anywhere else after that point.

We didn’t have to wait for long to see Iraq at its worst. The irony is that it was because of the policies of ex-prime minister Nouri Al-Malki, put in office by a US-Iran deal in Iraq, that the country was heading towards complete collapse and fragmentation. In the end we got ISIS, which represented a big problem for the Obama administration, especially after it occupied Mosul in just a few hours one year ago, because Washington knows that such a group cannot be defeated without soldiers’ boots on the ground.

Obama does not want to send US troops to fight ISIS; his strategy is based on keeping the group busy, block its advances and weaken it through the use of what is left of the Iraqi army and the Kurdish Pashmerga. This is to be done in parallel with training nine brigades of the Iraqi army and three Kurdish militant groups, a total of 24,000 people. The training will be supervised by Americans and secured with air cover. At the same time, a national guard is supposed to be created to motivate Sunnis to defend their areas and to attract Sunni tribes as a prelude to eliminating ISIS.

In September last year, the international coalition against ISIS was established. In November, Obama agreed to send around 3,000 US troops whose mission was exclusively to train and arm Iraqi forces and provide security and military consultations without carrying out any combat operations.

In January this year, members of the international coalition against ISIS held a foreign ministers’ meeting in London to assess the progress made against ISIS since September 2014. At the end of the meeting, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that the group has been stopped or is slowing down, that US weapons will arrive soon for the Iraqi forces, and that efforts against ISIS, which included launching nearly one thousand air strikes, had eventually restored about 700 square kilometres of land to government control.

Only four months after Kerry’s statement, Ramadi fell to ISIS. At that time, and in order to justify what happened, President Obama said that fall of the Iraqi city had been almost inevitable because Iraqi forces there were not trained or reinforced by the US.

An analysis of the situation shows that many believe that the Obama administration has no real strategy in the face of ISIS apart from “passing time” and getting ready to throw the problem to the next president. Some describe the strategy announced by Obama as “an illusion”; others say that it’s just a policy that aims to ensure that American soldiers do not have to fight on the ground and at the same time not lose Iraq entirely; yet others say simply that it’s not their fight. As such, it is to be expected to find that little has been achieved against ISIS after nine months of air strikes by the international coalition. There are several reasons for this.

The security and military approach dominates the policies to tackle ISIS. This may lead to relatively quick results on the ground, but the damage done will inevitably exceed the benefits and, in the medium- to long-term, produce ISIS Mk II; the emergence of ISIS after a similar approach against Al-Qaeda is evidence to back this up.

It is not enough to crack down on the organisation financially, for its military locations to be bombarded with missiles, for its leaders to be assassinated and for its ideological and intellectual sources to be dried up. The factors that led to its creation must be tackled; we must deal with causes rather than the effects. The phenomenon of ISIS is complex and complicated and it grew out of political issues. We need to deal with those by looking beyond security and military options. It is clear that the Obama administration does not see things that way.

Even if we assume that ISIS has religious and security components, how can we eliminate religious extremism at a time when terrorist operations and sectarianism by groups affiliated to Tehran across the Middle East conflict zones are being overlooked and ignored? It is undeniable that the widespread marginalisation, injustice, racial and sectarian treatment and security measures which affected the majority of Iraqis as a result of Al-Maliki’s policies, and Iran’s role in supporting these policies, helped to create something more extreme than Al-Qaeda called ISIS.

It does not look as if the current efforts to face ISIS take into consideration the need to address the situation in a way that ensures political and security stability. Nor do they give a chance to moderate forces to deprive extremists of the environment in which ISIS thrives through removing the social and political circumstances that feed and support their arguments.

The Abadi government in Baghdad seems to be no different to its predecessor. It has also made “fighting terrorism” a priority before national reconciliation. What guarantees do Sunni groups which will fight ISIS have that they will not be subjected to the same oppression that they faced after they had succeeded in the fight against Al-Qaeda? If the Iraqi government is not motivated to solve the issue now, it most likely won’t be after eliminating ISIS. We will be back to square one; it’s a vicious circle.

Washington itself is not making any effort to pressure Abadi and his government to fulfil the promises it made, upon which basis he received regional and international support. In the closed-door meeting of the anti-ISIS coalition in Paris on 2 June, for example, John Kerry did not mention the need for the Abadi government to meet its domestic obligations; he sounded like its spokesperson.

The plan to rehabilitate the Iraqi armed forces will not succeed in its current form; they were trained by the US from 2003 until 2012, and had nearly $26 billion spent on them. Nearly $40 billion was spent by Al-Maliki on arms, buying the loyalty of his followers and sectarian militias and integrating them with the army and security forces. The result was a quick collapse of the army in the simplest of confrontations with ISIS.

The Sunni tribes’ card, however, is useless because when they fought against Al-Qaeda, and defeated it, its members were rewarded with imprisonment, torture, exile and killing by Al-Maliki and his supporters. Today, they are asked to fight against ISIS, while the government and sectarian forces in Iraq oppose giving these tribes the training and arms necessary to carry out the job. At the same time, the government refuses to form a National Guard.

Relying on terrorists to fight against other terrorists is a very serious matter. Apart from being unethical and illegal it reflects a duality that groups such as ISIS have always benefited from. It also dictates the logic that says there is a specific targeting of Sunnis in the Middle East, so when they rise against injustice, no one cares for them, but when they are forced to carry weapons, they are fought against by everyone. And this logic gets utilised to recruit Sunnis who are oppressed. A key part of Obama’s strategies involves relying, whether directly or indirectly, on terrorists —Shia or Kurdish militias — in the fight against ISIS.

Since September last year, the US has grown to rely on Shia militias and Iranian Revolutionary Guards present in Iraq as well as the Iraqi army. US aircraft are, in effect, the militias’ air force. These sectarian groups are no less brutal or dangerous than ISIS, and a number are on the US terrorist list, but Washington has no shame about cooperating with them.

Such cooperation with Iran against ISIS is will continue to lead to disaster; it represents an excellent inducement for the militants to recruit more members. Assuming that this kind of cooperation has been fruitful, the direct result, if Iranian behaviour over the past few decades is anything to go by, will be to make way for the mullahs to tighten their influence in an arc from Tehran to the shores of the Mediterranean.

We must also consider that any victory over ISIS which does not involve a plan to deal with the threat of Iran’s proxies in the region, will practically and realistically lead to increasing sectarianism and the removal of any barriers to the Ayatollah’s regime becoming the master of the region. Tehran will impose its conditions in Iraq and then perhaps move to Syria; at that point it would be the only player with strong forces on the ground either directly (the Revolutionary Guard and an army of Shia militias) or indirectly (Iraqi forces); we can only imagine how that will impact on the entire region.

The bottom line is that all current plans are at the tactical level in the absence of a solid strategic perception. These plans go around in circles, and have all been tried previously and did not solve the problem but exacerbated it, all for one simple reason; they ignore completely the root causes of the issues which led to the formation and growth of ISIS.

Rather than re-training and equipping the same Iraqi forces, of which the vast majority are Shia militias, there is a need to build a National Iraqi Army. Even before that, there is a need for a national government that represents everyone and not a group of scoundrels who are cooking up a US plan in an Iranian kitchen.

Before eliminating ISIS, the cancer of Iraqi militias has to be cut out, and before talking about engaging Sunni tribes and clans, the Sunnis have to be given their legitimate rights in their Iraqi homeland. Without solving these real problems, everything will remain the same, and may become even worse.

Translated from Al Jazeera net, 9 June, 2015.

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