Crisis in Iraq: Think – Do Not Panic
Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)
That demands a reasoned change in strategy, not mindless panic.
Having served two tours Iraq, to include time in Mosul, Irbil, Baghdad and al Anbar governorate, nothing that is occurring today is shocking, disappointing, yes, but shocking? No.
We quit Iraq too soon.
The official reason was the failure of the Obama Administration to obtain from the Maliki regime an extension of essential legal protections for American troops through a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). That goal was doomed.
Why?
Politically, our bottom line was to get out. For the U.S., if a good SOFA was in the offing then that was OK, if not then that was OK too. For Maliki, if the US wanted to stay then it was to be on his terms, if not then they could leave. Reaching an obtainable compromise was simply not worth the effort.
Neither party saw the national security ramifications of failure, only the immediate political gain. In that narrow sense, both sides won when the SOFA talks failed.
Many in Baghdad and Washington celebrated and the long-term security consequences be damned.
Timing also hurt the policy makers in Washington and Baghdad.
The Obama Administration threw in the towel in October 2011.
The Syrian Civil War had only begun that March, in July the Syrian Free Army was formed and by October, it looked like they would soon oust Assad. ISIS did not even exist. There was no perceived military threat to Iraq.
Maliki also saw nothing to fear.
Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was on the ropes, a rump group of politically impotent but still-deadly malcontents and violence was down by nearly 90% from the high in late 2006.
The Iraqi economy was growing by leaps and bounds. In 2011, Iraq was the one the ten fastest growing economies in the world (an amazing 6th in the world today) and unemployment fell to under 15% in 2011, down from a crippling 45% rate in 2004.
Then things went wrong, very wrong.
Maliki proved to be a vindictive and divisive leader, systematically persecuting the Sunni minority and its political leaders.
The Sunni Awakening (when the insurgency turned on AQI and joined with the Government of Iraq) was based on the reality that AQI had given the Sunnis only violence and repression while the Government of Iraq offered a promising future.
Maliki destroyed that dynamic by punishing and disenfranchising the Sunni. They turned away from Baghdad.
Simultaneously, the Syrian Civil War turned into a disaster. The West refused to militarily support the progressives that had been the initial leaders of the resistance against Assad. Al Qaeda and its adherents filled the vacuum and that led to the rise of ISIS.
That ISIS was able to infiltrate into Iraq was no surprise at all.
In 2004, we fought a losing war to close the border with Syria but the “rat lines” continued to allow several hundred radical Islamic fighters to cross into Iraq each month. Bashar Assad wanted this to happen. Assad played Dr. Frankenstein and that al Qaeda “monster” is now threatening both his and Maliki’s regimes.
So has ISIS won? There is good reason to think that the answer is no.
Why?
All the ISIS victories are in the Sunni areas that were repressed and disenfranchised by Maliki. For the Sunni minority, rule by ISIS seems at the moment a preferable choice to continuing misrule by Maliki.
The Peshmerga in the Kurdish region are very tough and capable (I saw them in action in 2003) and ISIS had steered clear. Can ISIS defeat them on their own ground? I think not.
ISIS has yet to gain a foothold in the predominately Shi’a regions. They failed do so throughout the 2003-2011 War in Iraq and there is nothing to indicate they will succeed now.
Every time ISIS or its predecessor, AQI, attempted to govern the Sunni they failed. Have they improved so much that they will succeed now? Again, I think not.
Maliki forced the Sunni into a Hobbesian choice. As Kenneth M. Pollack sagely wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Maliki’s failures are not irreversible and it is not too late for the United States to help turn the tide (without ground combat troops).
Only time will tell if Baghdad is willing to re-right the ship of state, but an imminent ISIS victory is not preordained.
Semper Fi,
Mike
