The Real Politics Behind
the US War on IS
By Gareth Porter
January 03, 2015 "ICH"
- The US war on the ‘Islamic State in Iraq
and the Levant’ or ISIL, also known as
Islamic State of IS - the single biggest
development in US foreign policy during 2014
- continues to puzzle those looking for its
strategic logic. But the solution to the
puzzle lies in considerations that have
nothing to do with a rational response to
realities on the ground.
In fact, it is all about
domestic political and bureaucratic
interests.
Ostensibly the US-led
military effort is aimed at “dismantling”
the “Islamic State” as a threat to the
stability of the Middle East and to US
security. But no independent military or
counter-terrorism analyst believes that the
military force that is being applied in Iraq
and Syria has even the slightest chance of
achieving that objective.
As US diplomats
freely acknowledged to journalist Reese
Ehrlich, the airstrikes that the Obama
administration is carrying out will not
defeat the IS terrorists. And as Ehrlich
elaborates, the United States has no allies
who could conceivably take over the
considerable territory IS now controls. The
Pentagon has given up on the one Syrian
military organisation once considered to be
a candidate for US support – the Free Syrian
Army.
Last August,
counter-terrorism analyst, Brian Fishman
wrote that no one had “offered a
plausible strategy to defeat [IS] that
doesn’t involve a major US commitment on the
ground….” But Fishman went further, pointing
out that [IS] actually needs the war the
United States is providing, because: “[W]ar
makes the jihadist movement stronger, even
in the face of major tactical and
operational defeats.”
Furthermore, IS itself
must be understood as the consequence of the
worst of the succession of US military
campaigns since the 9/11 era - the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq. The US war
in Iraq was primarily responsible for
created the conditions for foreign Islamic
extremists to flourish in that country.
Furthermore, the groups that coalesced
ultimately around IS learned how to create
“adaptive organisations” from a decade of
fighting US troops, as then Defence
Intelligence Director, Michael Flynn
has observed. And finally, the US made
IS the formidable military force that it is
today, by turning over billions of dollars
of equipment to a corrupt and incompetent
Iraqi army that has now collapsed and turned
over much of its weaponry to the jihadist
terrorists.
After thirteen years in
which administration and national security
bureaucracies have pursued policies across
the Middle East that are self-evidently
disastrous in rational security and
stability terms, a new paradigm is needed to
understand the real motivations underlying
the launching of new initiatives like the
war on IS. James Risen’s masterful new book,
Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War,
shows that the key factor in one absurdly
self-defeating national security initiative
after another since 9/11 has been the vast
opportunities that bureaucrats have been
given to build up their own power and
status.
In addition, historical
evidence reveals a pattern of presidents
pursuing military adventures and other
policies because of the waves of public
opinion or the fear that their national
security advisers would accuse them being
soft on the enemy or national security in
general. In the case of Obama, both factors
played a role in the creation of the war on
IS.
The Obama administration
viewed IS forces’ June takeover of a series
of cities in the Tigris Valley in Iraq as
primarily a political threat to the
administration itself. The norms of the US
political system required that no president
can afford to look weak in responding to
external events that create strong public
reactions.
His
last interview before retiring as
Defence Intelligence Agency Chief –
published the very day the bombing of IS
targets began on 7 August -
General Michael Flynn commented: “Even the
President, I believe, sometimes feels
compelled to just do something without first
saying, ‘Wait! How did this happen?’”
Then, in retaliation for
US airstrikes, IS carried out the beheadings
of American journalist James Foley and
American-Israeli journalist Steven Sotloff,
raising the political cost of not taking
stronger military action against the new
villains of popular media. Even after the
first gruesome IS video, however, Deputy
National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes
told reporters on 25 August that Obama
was focused on protecting American lives and
facilities and the humanitarian crisis,
“containing” IS where they are and
supporting advances by Iraqi and Kurdish
forces.
Rhodes also emphasised
that IS was a “deeply-rooted organisation”,
and that military force could not “evict
them from the communities where they
operate”. That caution suggests that Obama
was wary of an open-ended commitment that
would leave him vulnerable to being
manipulated by the military and other
bureaucracies.
Barely a week after the
second beheading, however, Obama committed
the United States to cooperate with “friends
and allies” to
“degrade and ultimately destroy the
terrorist group known as [IS]”. Instead
of mission creep, it was a breath-taking
“mission leap” from the administration’s
policy of limited strikes less than three
weeks earlier. Obama raised the highly
imaginative justification that a long-term
military effort against IS was necessary to
prevent a threat to the United States
itself. The supposed rationale was that
terrorists would train large numbers of
Europeans and Americans who were flocking to
Iraq and Syria to return to carry out
“deadly attacks”.
Significantly Obama
insisted in the statement on calling it a
"comprehensive and sustained
counterterrorism strategy” - but not a war.
Calling it a war would make it more
difficult to control mission creep by giving
new military roles to various bureaucracies,
as well as to finally bring the operation to
a halt.
But the military services
and the counter-terrorism bureaucracies in
the CIA, NSA and Special Operations Command
(SOCOM) viewed a major, multi-faceted
military operation against ISIL as a central
interest. Before ISIL’s spectacular moves in
2014, the Pentagon and military services
faced the prospect of declining defence
budgets in the wake of a US withdrawal from
Afghanistan. Now the Army, Air Force and
Special Operations Command saw the
possibility of carving out new military
roles in fighting ISIL. The Special
Operations Command, which had been Obama’s
“preferred tool” for fighting Islamic
extremists, was going to suffer its first
flat budget year after 13 years of
continuous funding increases. It was
reported to be “frustrated” by being
relegated to the role enabling US airstrikes
and eager to take on ISIL directly.
On 12 September, both
Secretary of State, John Kerry and National
Security Adviser, Susan Rice were still
calling the airstrikes a “counterterrorism
operation”, while
acknowledging that some in the
administration wanted to call it a “war”.
But the pressure from the Pentagon and its
counter-terrorism partners to upgrade the
operation to a “war” was so effective that
it took only one day to accomplish the
shift.
The following morning,
military spokesman, Admiral John Kirby
told reporters: “Make no mistake, we
know we are at war with [IS] in the same way
we are at war, and continue to be at war,
with al-Qaeda and its affiliates.” Later
that day, White House press secretary, Josh
Ernst used that same language.
Under the circumstances
that exist in Iraq and Syria, the most
rational response to IS’s military successes
would have been to avoid US military action
altogether. But Obama had powerful
incentives to adopt a military campaign that
it could sell to key political
constituencies. It makes no sense
strategically, but avoids the perils that
really matter to American politicians.
Gareth Porter is
an independent investigative journalist and
historian writing on US national security
policy. His latest book, “Manufactured
Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear
Scare,” was published in February 2014.