Tag: Iraq
How to prevent Iraq’s breakup
The American commentariat is offering lots of advice these days on Iraq. The consensus is that Baghdad needs a broad, inclusive, national unity coalition that will have the confidence of Kurds and Sunni as well as Shia. The corollary is that Nouri al Maliki has to go.
That may be what has to happen, but it won’t happen because Kurds, Sunni and Shia have a kumbaya moment.
Iraq is already fractured: there are three distinct polities. In none of them is reaching across ethnic or sectarian lines a popular proposition right now. Kurds are grabbing what they need to be independent, which yesterday meant the oil fields in Kirkuk. Tribal Sunni and secular Ba’athists are making common cause with jihadists. Shia gave Maliki more than twice as many seats in parliament as his nearest competitor–and over 700,000 personal preference votes–because he was seen as leading a strong crackdown on Sunni insurgency.
The solution to Iraq’s current problems lies within each of the polities, not between them. Reconciliation at the national level is for later, not now.
The Shia community is primary. Its representatives in parliament will choose the next prime minister. Maliki commands the largest part of these representatives, but his Shia rivals Ammar al Hakim and Moqtada al Sadr together can stop him. They need not only say nay to a third term (as they have already done) but also choose his successor. That’s where they keep getting tripped up. Ditto the power behind them, which is Ayatollah Ali al Sistani. He has made it clear he doesn’t think Maliki has done well, but he needs to go further to manage the process of choosing his replacement.
That alone will not solve Iraq’s problems. There will still be a Sunni insurgency and a Kurdistan land-grab. If Iraq is to be prevented from breaking up, and a foundation laid for future reconciliation, portions of each of these communities will need to restrain their comrades in arms.
In Kurdistan, the moderating force is likely to be Iraq President Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Electoral underperformance and Talabani’s incapacitating illness have weakened the PUK in recent years, but its peshmerga forces control Kirkuk. Unless they are willing to stand and fight, a referendum and declaration of independence would be foolhardy. The PUK depends a good deal on Tehran, which will want to block secession, lest it lead to rebellion in Eastern Kurdistan, an Iranian province that borders Iraqi Kurdistan and PUK-controlled territory.
In the Sunni provinces, the question is whether the traditionally Arab and Iraqi nationalist tribes and Ba’athists will break with the jihadist leadership. The tribes and Ba’athists recognize that Sunnis lose if Iraq is broken up, because the Sunni-populated portion has little oil and gas. They want self-governance, not independence, whereas their jihadist allies want an Islamic caliphate that dismantles Iraq, Syria and possibly several other countries. That is a good reason for the Sunni population to think twice before following the jihadists over the cliff.
I am all for national reconciliation. After the war, there will be a time and a place. It takes years to make it happen. Right now the best that can be hoped for is factional moderation. Preventing Iraq’s breakup means empowering those within each community who will resist it.
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Help, or else
Things are not going well for Iraqi President Nouri al Maliki, whose calls for foreign assistance have grown increasingly frantic. While Iraqi Kurds agitate for an independent state, the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) consolidates power in northern and western Iraq. At the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Iraqi Ambassador to the United States Lukman Faily Tuesday tried to make a case for increased military assistance to Iraq. His argument came down to this: if you don’t help us, someone else will.
The Obama Administration is understandably reluctant to send weapons into what has become an increasingly sectarian conflict. However, the ambassador said that his country needs American assistance “to turn the tide against ISIS.” Until more robust US aid materializes, Iraq cannot decline offers of assistance from other countries, including Iran, Syria, and Russia. Iraq will not get involved in the Syrian conflict, but he said that Maliki “welcomes” Assad’s help. He added that Iran and Iraq have a shared history, and Iran considers many of Iraq’s Shi’a shrines as within their sphere of influence. “Their expertise is welcome.” The two will continue to cooperate as long they face a shared enemy.
He claimed that ISIS has been cleared in Tikrit, contradicting a number of media reports. The area remains heavily booby-trapped, however, and Iraq’s security forces cannot win with ground troops alone. Echoing Maliki’s earlier statements, Faily said that air supremacy is key to defeating these insurgents. A political solution must arrived in tandem with military force.
Faily, who is Kurdish, said that the Iraqi constitution was written to ensure Kurds are adequately represented, and 95% of Iraqi Kurds agreed to these provisions. While acknowledging Kurdish president Massoud Barzani’s aspirations for an independent state, he said that Kurds are still expected to play a role in shaping Iraq’s future. He left open the question of whether Kurds deserved their own independent state. Still, as long as ISIS controls the border between Iraq and the Kurdish region, it will be difficult for the two sides to cooperate against ISIS. His government welcomes Kurdish cooperation, but an independent Kurdish state is not feasible in the current political situation.
I asked the Ambassador if he would be willing to involve ex-Ba’athists, including those who have colluded with ISIS, in any future reconciliation process. He answered that no members of ISIS could be included, but that he welcomes any homegrown elements of the insurgency, as long as they have “not been involved in bloodshed.”
Time Magazine’s Michael Crowley asked the ambassador about an attack on the al Askari, or Golden Dome, mosque, one of the holiest shrines in Shi’a Islam. Al Qaeda destroyed the mosque in 2006, sparking a civil war that claimed thousands of lives. Faily admitted that the outer perimeter of the mosque had been hit, and several people were killed, but would not say if the shrine itself had been damaged. He added that ISIS had been evicted from Samarra, calling the attack a “hit and run” operation.
Faily also acknowledged that dozens of Sunni prisoners had been executed while in custody of Iraqi forces and Shi’a militias, and said the government “was looking into it.”
300,000 people were displaced when ISIS came into Mosul, and 120,000 in Tal Afar. These displaced people also threaten Iraq’s stability, and his government needs material support from the US to deal with them. Last week, he told US Secretary of State John Kerry, “We need your help now. Do not put conditions” on assistance to Iraq, because the threat is to immediate. He called this an “acid test” for the US-Iraq relationship.
Both the US and Iraq are “forever tied together because of the lives we lost and the treasure we spent in the past decade in the fight against terrorism.” ISIS is not only a threat to all Iraqis, but regionally and indeed internationally. If they are allowed to consolidate the gains they have made, ISIS will have a safe haven from which to launch attacks on American interests. And if America does not help, Russia, Syria, and Iran are more than happy to step in.
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Merging battlefields
The past several weeks have revolved around the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) insurgency in Iraq and the likelihood of a future divided state. With these recent advances, many have overlooked what this ultimately will mean for President Assad and the ongoing civil war in Syria. On Tuesday, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS-US) hosted “Syria After Geneva, the Elections, and ISIS: Partition, Fragmentation, and Escalation.” Author and IISS-US Senior Fellow for Middle East Security, Emile Hokayem, led the discussion and examined Assad’s presidency and the effective merger of the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields.
President Assad’s regime is in a better situation right now than it has been at any point since 2012. The pressure on Damascus is at its lowest in years, which has given Assad the opportunity to rebuild the pretense that Syria will again be a functioning state. The presidential election in June has provided the president with the chance to put pressure on urbanites and “fence-sitters” in order to support the pretense of “rebuilding Syria.”
Hokayem highlighted that Assad’s main strategy in reconstruction lies in the conquest of land rather than of people. It has become futile for him to spend precious time and resources in an attempt to win back the loyalty of people he has left to suffer for the past several years. His priority is to push recalcitrant citizens out of important territory instead of attempting to gain control over them. This approach shifts the burden onto the international community and human rights organizations to address a massive displacement crisis.
“This humanitarian problem is not an unfortunate outcome of the ongoing civil war,” Hokayem said. It is a deliberate strategy to debilitate the people and continue the conquest of land. This is a strategy, not an accident, and need to be addressed as such.
Meanwhile, ISIS has made momentous gains in neighboring Iraq. It has now gained control of nearly half of Iraq and has declared a state. ISIS has been successful at mobilizing local resources and support in an area that transcends national borders. We are now seeing the effective merger of western Iraq and eastern Syria .
It is not clear what effect the ISIS offensive will have on President Assad. Some argue that President Assad will benefit. The ISIS success validates the narrative that Assad has attempted to craft since 2011. Assad will be satisfied with the heated debate in the West as to how to address the recent ISIS gains.
Others believe that the ISIS offensive doesn’t help Assad at all. He has failed to get Westerners to share his narrative. Secretary of State Kerry has remarked that Assad cannot be the answer to fighting ISIS because he is a magnet for terrorism.
All eyes are currently on Iraq and whether or not the country will emerge from the ISIS insurgency in one piece. The Iraqi conflict cannot be viewed as an independent issue and must be observed alongside Syria’s instability and humanitarian crisis.
The Syrian conflict can no longer be contained. The Iraqi battlefield has now merged with the Syrian battlefield and ISIS must now be addressed in this context.
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Ba’athists are running the ISIS show
For two weeks, stories of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) spectacular takeover of large swaths of territory in Iraq have captivated the world. In a matter of days, we are told, a few hundred members of an irregular militia managed to subdue an entire army and millions of Iraqi civilians. At a Freedom House discussion on Thursday, however, Iraqi pollster Munqith al Dagher offered an alternative narrative. The uprising, he suggested, is led by former Ba’athists, while ISIS fighters only play a supporting role.
Al Dagher, who is of mixed Sunni-Shia heritage, has conducted hundreds of thousands of interviews in Iraq since 2003. Thursday’s discussion was based on results a survey of 200 households in Mosul, carried out between June 19 and 21. The interviews, conducted by telephone and in person, included those who had connections to ISIS fighters.
Today, ISIS is said to control almost half of Iraq, including the entire Anbar province, and territory stretching from Nineveh to Diyala. Nonetheless, Al Dagher said, the evidence suggests that ISIS controls at most 20% of the allegedly captured territory. Their strength has been vastly exaggerated by a central government that wants to characterize its opponents as terrorists and rally international help. Bashar al Assad used the same strategy at the outset of Syria’s civil war, painting every rebel group with the same “terrorist” brush. Like Assad, Nouri al Maliki wants to portray his regime as a bulwark against religious extremism.
In fact, ex-Ba’athists are running the show. These men smoke, and some of them drink. They sit in cafes until late at night, allowing women to amble about unaccompanied. While parts of Mosul are under the sway of other factions (including Islamist groups like Ansar al Sunna, tribal rebels, and ISIS), the city is primarily under Ba’athist control. ISIS benefits from the perception that they singlehandedly defeated the entire Iraqi army. Disaffected Sunnis are joining in droves because ISIS has been cast as the victor. People like to play for the winning team.
According to the survey, 81% of the Sunnis polled support separating religion from the state, up from 60% in 2004. Sunnis were also the most likely to identify themselves as Iraqi, and not by sect. Two-thirds of all respondents cited religious extremism as a very significant problem, and both sects were equally concerned about proliferation of terrorist groups inside Iraq.
In fact, only 2% of Sunnis claimed to support ISIS, while 55% said they support the Iraqi security forces (support among Shia was at 96%). This begs the question: if a majority of Sunnis oppose terrorism and Islamic law, and almost none profess to support ISIS, then how were a handful of these fighters able to take half the country in a matter of days?
Going forward, Al Dagher said, a return to the status quo ante is untenable. The current crop of politicians, on both sides of the sectarian divide, has lost all legitimacy, and the US Administration should seek out new faces to engage with. Obama should also recognize that a failure to act at all would lead to disastrous consequences, allowing ISIS to consolidate and increase the momentum they’ve gained in the last few weeks.
While 77% of Sunnis believe Maliki should step down, he is not seen as the main driver of sectarianism in Iraq. Most believe that discrimination is embedded in the system, which was shaped by Coalition Provisional Authority’s de-Ba’athification policies in 2003. Nonetheless, most of the respondents said that only the US could play the role of “honest broker” in any future reconciliation process.
That said, US air strikes would only fuel ISIS’s propaganda machine, and boost recruitment. The only viable option, then, is to empower moderates on both sides. In 2007, General Petraeus recognized that the way to defeat al Qaeda was by cooperating with tribal leaders. The Obama administration should replicate this model, although it can only be sustained if moderate Shiites are also included.
It is difficult to know precisely what is going on in Iraq amidst the rising levels of sectarianism and enveloping chaos. Due to the survey’s relatively small size, the results should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, the conclusions are clear: Iraq’s Sunnis need a reason to fight ISIS, which is fighting the central government many Sunnis see their enemy. The answer is not to send Americans to fight on their behalf, but to enable the Sunnis to fight ISIS themselves. Iraqis will rise up to defeat ISIS when they believe their interests are served by ISIS’s defeat.
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Countering the extremist factory
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) continues to gain more power and territory with each passing day, yet the Obama administration has failed so far to take significant steps to counter this impending threat. On Thursday morning, the Atlantic Council hosted “Losing Syria and Iraq to Jihadists” to discuss Atlantic Council Fellow Faysal Itani’s findings regarding US strategy to halt ISIS in both Syria and Iraq. Ambassador Frederic C. Hof, Atlantic Council Senior Fellow, and Barry Pavel, Vice President and Director of International Security at the Atlantic Council, joined the panel.
Itani‘s report details the successes of ISIS and the few effective responses available to the United States. Due to the current weak governmental systems in both Syria and Iraq, ISIS has risen to power and laid the groundwork to create its own state. It now has control over an area that spans the size of Jordan, and the options for the US are looking especially grim.
According to Itani, the sole logical option lies within Syria: we must fight this war against ISIS through the moderate Syrian opposition. The Administration should develop a strategy to strengthen, equip and empower moderate Syrian opposition groups with resources and intelligence in order to combat ISIS gains. This is the only logical way to reverse the worst possible outcome, which is currently happening before our eyes.
Ambassador Hof contended that US involvement depends entirely on the Obama Administration’s stance, which is based on the conclusion that there is little the US can do to help Syria. Hof disagreed with this perspective. He believes that the current situation in Iraq is inspiring second thoughts in the White House. On Thursday afternoon, several hours after the panel, President Obama requested $500 million from Congress to train and equip members of the Syrian opposition. If approved, this would be the first significant move not only towards addressing ISIS’s advances, but also the ongoing Syrian civil war.
Barry Pavel then highlighted the many changes underway within the international community and how we are essentially embarking on a new era of international relations. The world is experiencing a massive shift of economic and military power to Asia, as well as a wave of trends that are empowering individuals, facilitated by new technology and the growth of the middle class. The global stage is changing significantly as non-state actors continue to have a greater impact in foreign relations.
The US nonetheless continues to focus solely on stability. The Obama administration should revamp how it addresses the world to a more “people-centric” strategy. Pavel calls this a “dynamic security strategy.” We need to reconsider our frameworks and institutions that were created in a WWII mindset. Time is not on our side if we keep our current approach with Syria. We should incorporate a more activist approach, as the situation with ISIS worsens each day.
Pavel agreed with Itani’s strategy to arm the Syrian moderate opposition in order to fight ISIS. It is the path of least resistance. He stressed that we must take action on this strategy quickly because as time goes on, ISIS will increasingly acquire what it needs to be a nation-state, which ultimately will make it far more dangerous than Al-Qaeda ever was.
“Iraq is currently a factory for extremism and it is time for the administration to take measures to address it,” Pavel said.
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Flipping SecState the bird
It’s been a bad few days for Secretary of State Kerry, on top of many bad weeks. On Sunday, he expressed the hope Egypt would take advantage of a critical moment in its transition to turn towards democracy. Then an Egyptian court popped that bubble with a trumped up verdict in a trumped up trial on trumped up charges against three Al Jazeera journalists. By Tuesday, SecState was pressing Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and Kurdistan President Barzani to proceed quickly to formation of an inclusive government. By today, Maliki said he had no such intention and Barzani is talking secession, more seriously than ever before.
This comes on top of the failed Middle East (that is, Israeli/Palestinian) peace process and Russian rejection of Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s proposed ceasefire. Not to mention the mess in Syria, where the President’s reluctance to intervene is all to obviously not pleasing to John Kerry. He has said repeatedly that a political settlement depends on changing the military situation on the ground. I won’t even mention the Asia Pacific, where China is again daring its neighbors.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that things are going badly for the Obama Administration in foreign policy. That’s precisely what the American people have decided, even if they support some of the President’s decisions on what to do and not do.
Daniels Larison and Drezner have been engaged in the why of this puzzle. Larison thinks it is due to the failure of the President to provide the resources needed to achieve his goals. Drezner thinks it is double think on the part of Americans: they want the country in general less engaged abroad (the outcome) but don’t like the specific consequences (the outputs).
I’ll leave the other Daniels to resolve that puzzle. I’m interested in what John Kerry is thinking. His behavior strikes me as out of keeping with past Secretaries of State, who have either been far more cautious in what they say or far more determined to get foreign leaders to salute when they say it. Most days, a lot of the State Department is engaged precisely in trying to line up “yes” from foreign leaders, in advance of a SecState “ask.” Secretaries don’t ask if they are not guaranteed a positive reply.
Kerry seems displeased but not angered when Maliki or Sisi says “no.” His attitude strikes me as more like that of a Senator than a Secretary of State. Senators are used to colleagues disagreeing. They are also used to being taken seriously for what they say, rather than for what they can do. There is always another day to try to win over opponents. Senators state their case but try not to burn bridges.
Hillary Clinton of course was also a senator before she was SecState, but she was notably more cautious in what she said. I don’t recall her ever hinting that she supported arming the Syrian revolutionaries, even though it is now known she did in secret. Kerry has been particularly bold in what he says publicly, but shy in deed, perhaps because there is so little Secretaries of State can actually do on their own authority other than speak. I guess that puts me more in the Larison than the Drezner camp about what is going on.
But whatever the reason, it is not good when other countries flip SecState the bird.
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