By all accounts, I should have been overjoyed that the United States had finally decided this week to expand its fight against the terrorists of the Islamic State group from Iraq to Syria. At a crucial meeting in Jeddah on Thursday, US Secretary of State John Kerry announced the formation of a coalition of regional states with the US to fight the evil deeds of the Islamic State, and to put a permanent stop to their expansion in the region. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Kuwait all pledged support.
Unfortunately, key players either declined to fully sign up to the plan, or were excluded due to political reasons. Turkey, which has 49 of its citizens being held by the Islamic State in Syria, declined to participate in the bombing of terrorist positions in Syria or even allow NATO aircraft to operate from its airbases to do so. The brutal civil war that the regime of Bashar Assad started in Syria, automatically excludes it, as does its main ally Iran and the Shiite militia in Lebanon of Hezbollah.
US President Barack Obama has been an extremely reluctant president in regards to the Middle East, especially in the last two years, always wringing his hands over the hard decisions he has to make, and over the last few weeks telegraphing his intentions in advance to the whole world by announcing days in advance that he will be announcing such-and-such initiative in the Middle East in a television address on such a day. “This is such a different way of governing,” I remarked to my Syrian friend last week in Beirut. “Yeah, George W. Bush rushed into doing everything in the Middle East without thinking too much about it, while Obama overthinks every decision he takes,” she answered.
But as I have pointed out before, Obama is a consummate observer of opinion polls, and when he saw that Americans were worried after two of their citizens were brutally beheaded in IS videos that were aired around the world, he began to change his tune about expanding US military involvement in the fight against IS. Whether Obama and US public opinion can keep up this enthusiasm for US involvement in the longer term is highly doubtful, as the American public is known to quickly become tired when the price in American lives and treasury become too steep with no clear victories. As The National newspaper pointed out in a recent editorial, the US spent 11 years occupying Iraq, “at a cost of more than 4,000 American soldiers’ lives, more than a trillion dollars and a diminished respect for US leadership.”
Which points to the huge downside of US involvement in any conflict in the Middle East: There never seems to be enough planning for the future of the country being interfered with, or least the right kind of planning. Iraq is the poster child of such planning gone terribly wrong. Obama’s first instinct to drawdown US troops from Iraq, and withdraw politically too from that country, was understandable from an American viewpoint, but had disastrous consequences for Iraq and its minority Sunnis. Continued persecution and killings of Sunnis in Iraq led in part to the emergence of IS, and the American success in the de-Ba’athification of the Iraqi Army meant that its forces just turned and ran when confronted by the determined fighters of the IS.
So one must wonder what America’s plans for Syria and Iraq are after it is done bombing IS into retreat? Will it really be able to claim victory without committing US troops on the ground? That seems like a difficult task. And for sure, all of these problems have a huge political component that will only be resolved through tough negotiations and not on the battlefield.
Not having an embassy in Damascus makes it difficult for US officials to have ongoing contacts with Syrian officials. And the whole policy of trying to arm and train so-called moderate Syrian rebel forces has turned out to be more of a fantasy than reality. More moderate rebel groups in Syria have openly admitted that they have fought side-by-side with Jabhat Al-Nusra fighters because they are willing to send in suicide bombers against Syrian regime soldiers, something the more moderate rebels are reluctant to do. As my Syrian friend noted, war is an extreme and violent situation that surely does not allow moderate groups to remain moderate for very long if they want to stay in the fight.
Finally, any US military action in Arab countries always carries the risk of creating new anti-American sentiment and of perhaps pushing some of the Syrians and Iraqis into the arms of the IS and other extremist groups. This has always been true, and is perhaps why some Arab countries and Turkey do not want to seem to be too enthusiastic in joining yet another US bombing campaign of an Arab and Muslim nation. Unfortunately, despite our wealth, Arab countries still need the military might and technological sophistication of the US to defeat the gruesome threat that fanatical groups, such as the IS pose to not just Arabs and Muslims everywhere, but to the West too. We dream of the day when we will be able to defend ourselves from such horrible screeds that totally distort the message of Islam in order to attract the needy and the vulnerable.
The Islamic State ideology is truly is one of the ugliest ones that have ever emerged in the region, and we must do everything in our power to fight it and show how bankrupt it is, both ideologically and morally.
The writer is a Saudi journalist based in Brazil.
