It has become the norm to bemoan the Obama administration’s lack of a strategy in the Middle East. Indeed, the wisdom is so conventional at this point that even the New York Times editorial page, always shy of criticizing this president, has embraced it.
But before we answer the question of what our strategy should be, perhaps the first question to ask is: what should the Middle East look like? After all, strategy ideally flows from a desired end game.
The days of Western diktat over the shape of the region and the placement of borders have long passed, but that hasn’t stopped many (ahem, Joe Biden) from regularly suggesting the break up of countries from Iraq to Syria to Afghanistan along religious or ethnic lines. A step away from the same neo-Sykes-Picot impulse is the repeated recommendation to arm a variety of tribal or ethnic subgroups in the region. Arm the Sunni tribes! Arm the Kurds! That’ll solve the problem.
President Barack Obama (C), flanked by Defense Secretary Ash Carter (L) and Army General Martin Dempsey (R), pauses as he delivers remarks on efforts against the Islamic State (ISIS), at the Pentagon , July 6, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst.
Some members of Congress have gone so far as to suggest the United States should cease its lackluster support of the Baghdad government and simply start dumping weapons into Kurdish territory in Northern Iraq. But to what end? Play it forward for a moment: We arm the Sunni tribes of central Iraq or the Kurds of northern Iraq or Syria and stop arming the legitimate Iraqi government. What will they do? In the gauzy vision of advocates, these stalwarts will stand up and crush ISIS. There’s not an enormous amount of proof to that proposition, though perhaps more in Syria than in Iraq, where neither Kurds nor Americans nor Iraqi troops have managed to displace ISIS from Mosul or Ramadi.
But forget that; let’s say they can do it. Then what? Do they gather up those arms and return them back to us like library books? Or do they look around and ask themselves what next? Independence, for sure. Many Kurdish leaders say as much. But independence where? Kirkuk? Turkey? Where exactly are the new borders? All right, let’s say we don’t care, let them fight over the borders they want. What about the other areas of Iraq and Syria (not to speak of Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Algeria etc) where ISIS has theoretically been defeated? Who goes there? Who governs? And having previously let the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood/al Qaeda in Iraq/Jabhat al Nusra and other lovelies in, will these Sunni rump states suddenly become oases of stability? What about the Shi’a regions? Just hand them off to Iran and forget about it?
Thought through, these ideas are tactical half-measures that threaten to unleash yet more instability that will drag the United States back into war. Don’t get me wrong. The notion of working with, — including arming and training — partners on the ground is a wise one. We cannot do everything ourselves. But such partnerships work only with a strong US leadership role, with plentiful advisers and a clear strategy and desired outcome. Working with Sunni tribes in Iraq during the surge was vital. Abandoning both them and Iraq in 2011 got us where we are today.
Rather, perhaps it is right to look at the region as a whole and recognize that each nation presents separate challenges, many of which would be of no interest to the United States to solve were it not for the willingness of both ISIS and al Qaeda to exploit the instability they cause. But because these local problems — Houthis in Yemen, Sunni tribes in Iraq, tyranny in Syria, Libya and elsewhere — cause the power vacuums that draw us back to the Middle East again and again, isn’t the right call to consider what will deliver long-term stability to the Arab and Persian world?
And contrary to those waxing nostalgic for Saddam or swooning over Egypt’s Sisi, perhaps next time we can recall that it is these dictators that have spawned the extremist opposition that now threatens Americans and Europeans at home. Isn’t the right answer a more robust form of autonomy and federalism, in which groups that aim for self government have some hope of achieving it? Isn’t the answer a group of federalized, representative governments that allocates shared resources justly, rather than on the basis of ethnic and sectarian cronyism?
What we’re doing now isn’t working. It won’t work ever. And a Russian or Iranian compact to terrorize the region with pet dictators and terrorists will be no better. Think about it. We have 16 months.
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