“No one starts a war – or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so,” wrote the great Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz – “without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.” The terrifying progress of Islamic State militants through northeastern Iraq, the ensuing political instability, and the increasing likelihood that the entire country may soon be engulfed in another protracted sectarian conflict are tragic reminders of how muddled US policy in Iraq has been for more than a decade. Unsure of its strategic goals before the 2003 invasion, and internally divided as to the troop strength necessary for occupation and reconstruction, the Bush administration improvised its way through a series of failed, short-term responses to the country’s disintegration before handing off a fledgling quasi-sovereign state to a relatively unknown and dangerously inexperienced politician.
With hindsight it is easy to blame the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority that oversaw Iraq for much of what unfolded, but the lion’s share of its miscalculations were informed by an incoherent Neocon strategy emanating from ideologues in Washington. Under the influence of Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, the CPA’s first order of business was to issue a “de-Baathification” order. Shortly afterwards it disbanded the Iraqi army. Both initiatives were pursued against the advice of Jay Garner, the retired general appointed to lead the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. During the insurgency that followed, US forces – which lacked the numbers to adequately police Baghdad, much less ensure the safety of the Iraqi population – could do little more than watch as Iraq’s sectarian rivalries filled the power vacuum and almost tore the country apart.
The CPA’s failure to find leaders who could assume the task of nation-building betrayed how ill-prepared the US was for the occupation. While the Pentagon squandered vast sums of money on forward operating bases and personnel tucked away inside the Green Zone, the rest of Iraq busied itself with revenge. The absence of viable local leaders surprised nobody familiar with the long history of Saddam Hussein’s dismantling of civil society in Iraq, but it repeatedly baffled the Bush administration’s search for a plausibly democratic government, and an exit strategy.
Eventually, Washington saw in Iraq only what it wanted to see. After President Bush’s controversial “surge” and Gen Petraeus’ new counterinsurgency doctrine de-escalated the worst violence of the insurgency, there was even qualified optimism that the tide had turned. The Bush White House genuinely seemed to believe that it could make good on its fanciful slogan: “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” As it stumbled for the exits, Washington remained determinedly oblivious to the profound incompetence and deeply divisive nature of the prime minister it had installed.
The Obama administration compounded earlier miscalculations by focusing on a hasty departure rather than attempting to complete the half-finished political reconstruction. Like their predecessors, the current sages of US foreign policy have done their best to ignore the sectarian misrule of the Shia prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, and mounting evidence of a Sunni backlash. Maliki’s ruthlessness towards his political rivals is the main reason that large sections of northeastern Iraq have not resisted ISIS militants so far.
As a result of these choices the US finds itself backing into yet another ill-considered military conflict. Yesterday the New York Times reported that Gen Martin Dempsey, a senior military adviser to the White House, publicly said that ISIS could not be defeated if the US was not willing to confront Sunni forces in Syria. Dempsey spoke about the inevitability of the US confronting the group’s “apocalyptic end-of-days strategic vision.” His throwaway rhetoric is curiously similar to much of the Beltway chatter about “Islamofascism” on the eve of the 2003 invasion. Such attitudes run the risk of obscuring the underlying political crisis in Iraq, and further complicating the search for a solution.
Michael J Boyle,a professor of political science notes elsewhere in the Times: “Unlike Al Qaeda, whose dreams of forming a caliphate were little more than mysticism and hyperbole, ISIS now occupies large swaths of Syria and Iraq, administering social services and running rudimentary Shariah courts in its claimed Islamic State. In other words, it operates less like a revolutionary terrorist movement that wants to overturn the entire political order in the Middle East than a successful insurgent group that wants a seat at that table.” Presciently, Boyle adds that “moralistic language” can easily produce the sort of mission creep that allows “an air campaign first designed to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe [to morph] into an effort to roll back, or even defeat, ISIS.”
Much has been made of Hillary Clinton’s recent dismissal of President Obama’s rule of thumb for foreign policy. Mrs Clinton told an interviewer that “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” Unquestionably true, but after a decade of stupidity in Iraq, the Obama administration’s reluctance to engage in wider conflicts in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere may well prove to be wiser than it seems.
