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6/16/2014 @ 11:28오전 |2,218 views
Iraq Crisis: Six Reasons Why America's Military Should Not Re-Engage
There are plenty of places in the world where aggression would require an American military response. Mexico, NATO, and South Korea to name a few. However, Iraq does not belong on that list. As most Americans understand all too well, U.S. forces should never have been sent there in the first place. Having finally been extricated after nine years of trying to fix Iraq’s dysfunctional political culture, re-engaging in response to recent advances by Sunni extremists would be a mistake. I’m not just talking about putting American “boots on the ground,” which President Obama has ruled out, but also playing any other on-going military role in supporting the corrupt and sectarian government of Nouri al-Maliki.
There isn’t much doubt that applying U.S. air power would slow the advance of ISIS, the radical Sunni militia that has seized control of several northern cities. It is easy to see why many Americans might feel that some sort of military response is required to blunt the brutality of the extremists. But one reason history will remember Barack Obama as a better president than George W. Bush is because he is able to grasp what the late Townsend Hoopes called the limits of intervention, and look beyond the emotions of the moment to see the long-term consequences of military action. Here are six analytic reasons why avoiding any visible military role in Iraq’s latest crisis would be a wise move.
1. The military situation will stabilize on its own. The collapse of Iraqi forces in the country’s northwestern quadrant was caused less by the tactical brilliance of ISIS than by the political and military incompetence of the Maliki regime. The number of ISIS fighters that have entered the country from Syria at most represents 3-4% of the Iraqi military’s active-duty strength, and that’s not counting reserves that swell the ranks of the military to nearly a million personnel. Baghdad’s forces melted away because they were poorly trained, poorly led, and hated by the predominantly Sunni population in the area. The further south ISIS moves, the more it will enter predominantly Shia areas where the military and local residents are motivated to put up a fight. About 60% of Iraqis are Shiites who hate ISIS just as much as Sunnis in the northwest hate Baghdad. And if ISIS pushes east, it will get mauled by the Kurdish Peshmerga. Either way, the situation will stabilize without American intervention.
2. We shouldn’t be taking sides in a religious war. Describing what is happening today in Iraq as a “civil war” is like calling the Crusades a military intervention. The fundamental divide in Iraq that makes it ungovernable by anybody other than dictators is the split between the Sunnis and the Shiites, the two major sects within Islam. That struggle traces its origins back to the death of Muhammed in 632, and is so deep-seated that it defies rational discourse. Nearly 90% of the world’s Muslims are Sunnis, but the dividing line between predominantly Sunni and predominantly Shiite areas in the Persian Gulf region runs right through the middle of Iraq (Iran to the east is 90% Shiite). Until America invaded Iraq in 2003, the country had always been ruled by Sunnis — just like every other Arab nation. With all the countries in the region lined up on one side or the other of this religious divide, any U.S. aid to Maliki’s sectarian regime amounts to taking sides in a religious struggle.
3. We don’t need the oil. Twenty years ago, maintaining stability in the Persian Gulf region was deemed essential to the health of the global economy because that’s where most of the world’s recoverable oil reserves were located. Times have changed. New drilling techniques and changing consumption patterns have made Persian Gulf oil less important than it used to be. Not only is America on a path to energy independence in the next decade, but two of the top three countries in terms of recoverable petroleum are now located in the Western Hemisphere — Venezuela (Number 1) and Canada (Number 3). Although Iraq still ranks high on the list of countries with extensive reserves, its government is so hard to deal with that it only contributes about 4% of current global production. If its oil were cut off other countries could cover the shortfall, and since Iraq’s biggest oilfields are in the south, far from the fighting, it probably won’t be cut off anyway.
4. Re-engaging would make America a target of extremists. The Sunni extremists who have invaded Iraq hate America, but they don’t have a good reason right now to attack it. Quite the opposite: having made headway in both Syria and Iraq because America is not actively engaged, they are strongly incentivized to avoid provoking U.S. military action. However, if the U.S. visibly took the side of Baghdad in repulsing ISIS attacks, its followers would draw the obvious conclusion that Americans needed to be punished — either in their homeland or somewhere overseas where they are more exposed. Either way, the U.S. might suffer the kind of devastating attack that forces a massive military response or derails the economic recovery. Steering clear of further military involvement in Iraq might not be emotionally satisfying, but it would have tangible benefits for America’s economy and political culture.
5. Iraq needs to be partitioned, not propped up. Iraq is a mess because its borders were drawn a century ago by outsiders who knew little about the people that lived there. As David Fromkin recounts in his book A Peace To End All Peace, the British officials who took over from the Ottomans after World War One inherited an area in which 75% of the population was tribal, with no history of obedience to a central government. The Brits sowed the seeds of future dissension by favoring Sunni Arab overseers even though they were outnumbered locally by Shiites, and almost completely ignoring the interests of Kurds included within the arbitrary borders they laid out. The Iraq they fashioned from three pre-existing Ottoman provinces can never be democratic in the sense of protecting individual rights, because it has no such traditions and leaders like Maliki maintain power by exploiting sectarian loyalties. It needs to be broken up, not preserved with U.S. military power.
6. The U.S. public opposes military action. Popular opinion in the U.S. views the Bush Administration’s military campaign in Iraq as a big mistake and favors reducing the nation’s exposure to new foreign conflicts. President Obama would have maintained a residual military presence in the country if the Maliki government had assented to a status-of-forces agreement protecting U.S. warfighters from being charged with crimes, but no such agreement was reached and U.S. forces departed. Any new military action would thus mark the beginning of the third U.S. campaign involving Iraq in a quarter century, and would be strongly opposed by a majority of Americans. Past experience indicates that the U.S. probably could not sustain an effective military operation in the absence of popular support at home, especially given the likely news reports of civilians being killed by U.S. bombs aimed at ISIS fighters. It won’t help that few if any U.S. allies will be inclined to join us.
General James M. Dubik, the officer who oversaw training of Iraqi forces during the U.S. military surge seven years ago, made a trenchant comment about Iraq’s military and political system in the June 12 New York Times: “If the Iraqis could solve their problems by themselves, they wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in.” He went on to state that “they need sustained help in both the security and policy areas. This means a concerted diplomatic and security advisory mission.” Or said differently, it means Americans would need to go back to Iraq for an indefinite period of time, with no assurance in the end that Maliki or whoever replaces him could hold the place together. That is not what the American public wants, nor is it what America’s global strategy requires. The joint force should not be used to save failed states from the consequences of their own incompetence. Rather than re-engaging in Iraq, America needs to move on.
