Under the “no American boots” plan, a very stable, cohesive and inclusive regime is required in Baghdad to fight like a military juggernaut on the ground under leadership consensual enough to dismantle the Islamic State. [icopyright one button toolbar]
If this is the plan’s long haul backbone, the Islamic State is unlikely to be crushed definitively. At best, it may be contained and denied more territory.
That means a heavily militarized IS would continue to exist in one form or another at the Gulf region’s heart.
Its deep ideological and theological enmity with the West and any Muslim dissidents will inevitably turn it into a safe haven for terrorists and exporter of terrorism to neighboring Muslim countries, Europe and the US.
Here are some of the reasons why.
As President Barack Obama desired, Iraq has a new Shia Prime Minister in Haider al-Abadi. But he is from the same pro-Iranian Dawa party as the now reviled Nouri al-Maliki, who got the job because of American pressure eight years ago.
Al-Abadi is not a popular national leader with a wide voter base across factional lines. Yet, the White House wants him to establish an unprecedented democratic government so inclusive and even-handed that Sunnis and Kurds, who loath Shia preeminence, will readily die for a Shia-led Baghdad in a bloody long haul ground war against the Salafist Sunni Islamic State.
Beyond that, the White House wants Iraq’s numerous Shia militias known for bloody fratricidal conflicts to miraculously bury the hatchet and make nice not only to one another but also to local Sunnis, who brutally oppressed them for centuries.
It also expects Iraqi Sunnis and Shias to embrace Kurds. That is a leap since Arabs have disdained Kurds for centuries as yokels of despicable ethnicity and murky Sunni credentials.
Currently, Washington is wooing the Kurdish Peshmerga as its bulwark against IS warriors. But they are self-interested helpers.
They are rescuing the Yazidi Kurdish clan from massacre on American insistence and for military favors from the West. They do not much like Yazidis — who they and local Muslims and Christians have long reviled as devil worshippers.
After securing the Yazidis, the Peshmerga may fight only to defend Kurdistan’s 900km border with the Islamic State.
They are currently pushing back against IS in the area of dams near Mosul partly because of American pressure. Their main motivation may be reversing the results of Saddam Hussein’s 1987-1988 “Anfal” campaign when local Sunni tribes drove out Kurds from some of those areas.
Saddam conducted that campaign with the help of Sunni tribes, reportedly killing 182,000 Kurdish children, women and men including 5,000 with chemical weapons.
Despite this awful recent history, the White House expects the Peshmerga to defeat IS in cooperation with the same tribes because they comprised the “Sunni Awakening” that helped a US troop surge to oust “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” from the western Anbar province in 2007-2008.
It thinks the Peshmerga, who are sworn to serve Kurds, will put heart into liberating the territories of Sunnis who humiliated and tortured the Kurdish people repeatedly for so long in the past.
With more hope than realism, Washington also thinks that several “Sunni Awakening” tribes that supported the recent IS takeover of Anbar are now so horrified by IS barbarism as to choose rebellion backed by US air power and advisers.
It assumes that the tribes, which have their own history of barbarism, have suddenly become principled about human rights violations by Islamic zealots – as if their version of the same Salafi Islam is fundamentally more secular and moderate.
In time, the White House may discover that the tribes played it to use American power to reconquer their own territories without much interest in advancing Obama’s “inclusive” agenda for a Shia-led Baghdad.
They may also not pursue thorough destruction of IS warriors because having a hardline safe haven for merciless terrorists that hate America and the West is not unwelcome provided it lives in peace with their territories. They, too, have no love lost for the US and the West.
They also do not care for a united Iraq in which the Shia is first among equals. Nobody in the entire region has experience of living under a Constitution or willingly enforcing Constitutional laws about power sharing. Always, gun barrels have decided power and tyrants have imposed unity.
It may be a step too far to expect lawyerly veneration of Western-style Constitutional order just a decade after the last tyrant’s violent elimination, in a region where no regime ever allowed a Constitution to interfere with its lust for power. Most local nations do not have Constitutions.
It is also a step too far to expect the Peshmerga to die for unity in an Iraq where Kurdish security and prosperity would depend entirely on Shia and Sunni dedication to an untried power-sharing Constitution.
Neither the Peshmerga nor the Sunni tribes may disband their loyal militias to surrender monopoly control to the army and police of an Iraqi State where vengeful Shia groups are resurgent after centuries.
Such reluctance is likely since negative experiences during the past eight years with the Shia in Baghdad drove the Sunni tribes into IS arms. In turn, the Kurds carefully kept Baghdad at arm’s length.
The American occupation awarded autonomy to Iraqi Kurds after centuries of particularly humiliating subjugation. They would rather be independent than bossed again by Arab Sunnis or Shias.
The Peshmerga dream is an independent Kurdistan that unites Kurds from Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey. They will vigilantly husband military power to advance their own dream, rather than that of Washington.
At this time, the alignment of fortune that the White House desires looks unlikely.
Obama’s plan also seems to disregard Iraqi Shia fervor for a strong Shia state to deter Sunnis from ever trying to dominate them again. Fertile central plains and Basra’s oil would ensure the state’s viability.
The 2003 American invasion broke the Sunni minority’s ancient yoke over Shias. They are determined never to submit again. In this endeavor, theocratic Iran is their very powerful ally.
For Iraq’s Shia, all Sunnis are hostile to their faith and independence — whether Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s barbarians, Saudi Salafists or Iraqis. Establishing an Iraqi Shia state within truncated borders but contiguous to Iran may be their preferred option.
So far, Al-Baghdadi’s warriors have avoided frontal attacks on Shias. They have also not attacked the Shia-affiliated regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. For now, they are enemies primarily of the West, the regional order established by Western powers, and the Gulf’s staunchest US ally — the Saudi King.
It remains conceivable that a strong Shia Iraq could hold the Islamic State in check with help from an independent Kurdistan, a federation of Iraq’s Sunni tribes, Syria’s Assad and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. But even such an alliance can only contain the IS, not erase it.
Here’s another dream! All the independent groups in the post Sykes/Picot Iraq — Shia, Sunni and Kurd — would owe their new autonomy to US help.
They might live in peace with one another and in friendship with the US. They might also help to blunt the rump Islamic State’s bite.