A jihadist cancer in Iraq and Syria is spreading, and U.S. options are flawed. Here's a way to turn the tide.
Aug. 22, 2014
http://online.wsj.com/articles/a-plan-to-fight-the-islamic-state-1408750016
When President Barack Obama called the Islamic State a "cancer" on Wednesday, the description may have been more apt than he intended. The Sunni jihadist group is indeed a malignant tumor metastasizing in the body of the Middle East. But like cancer, it will be stubbornly difficult to defeat—and some of the cures could end up killing the patient.
The spread has been shockingly quick. In June, the Islamic State surged deeper into Iraq, taking Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, advancing close to Baghdad and threatening Kurdish territory. The group even declared a "caliphate." Only Mr. Obama's Aug. 7 decision to launch U.S. airstrikes halted its advance.
The Islamic State is stalled militarily but far from beaten. But there is a way to turn the tide.
The Islamic State's evil could almost seem cartoonish if it weren't so horrible. Thebeheading of journalist James Foley was only the latest in a long line of atrocities. In Iraq, the group called for exterminating male members of the minority Yazidi group and selling Yazidi women into slavery. In Syria, the Islamic State crucified those who opposed it. The group bears the blame for much of the savagery against civilians in Syria—in a conflict that the U.N. estimates has claimed more than 190,000 lives.
This humanitarian disaster is bad enough, but the Islamic State also poses a strategic threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East that even the most hardhearted realist cannot easily dismiss. Iraq's stability, precarious even before the latest Islamic State campaign, is now in serious jeopardy. Iraq could join Syria as another failed state, and a far more important one given its oil reserves. A broader conflagration could risk more intervention by Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other neighbors. West European governments fear terrorism at home from Islamic State converts. And ironically, the terrorist threat to the U.S. is now more direct: By striking the Islamic State, the U.S. has risen higher on its (long) list of enemies.
The Obama administration, which has—with some justification—tried to avoid entanglement in Iraq and Syria, has an array of "treatments" at its disposal to attack this growing cancer. They all have one thing in common: They won't work well.
The overwhelming problem is the lack of suitable allies. Forget assembling a "coalition of the willing" against the Islamic State—the best you're likely to get is a coalition of the inept, the corrupt, the fanatical and the balky.
In Iraq, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki systematically alienated the country's Sunnis and Kurds. As the Islamic State advanced, many Sunnis rose up against his government, and U.S.-trained military forces disintegrated. Mr. Maliki is out now, but the new government in Baghdad is shaky, the Kurds are openly discussing a push for independence, and sectarian divisions plague the country.
In Syria, the problem is even worse. U.S. policy is now aimed at both overthrowing Bashar al-Assad, the country's dictator, and defeating the Islamic State—one of the toughest groups fighting to overthrow Mr. Assad. Only a year ago, the U.S. was on the verge of bombing the Assad regime; now it is bombing the Assad regime's enemy, the Islamic State. The Syrian opposition is no more unified, and the radical element in its ranks is much stronger.
Some approaches are clearly disastrous. Paying ransom money to rescue brave journalists in the Islamic State's clutches will only lead to more hostage taking. Terrorist groups prefer to kidnap Westerners from countries like France, which has given terrorists more than $50 million since 2008 in ransom payments. The more the U.S. pays, the more likely terrorist groups are to kidnap Americans. We must brace for more stomach-churning, Internet-distributed beheadings.
Another problem: Americans have no appetite for a large-scale deployment of military forces. A June poll found that most Americans didn't favor airstrikes on the Islamic State, let alone ground troops.
But there is a path ahead. A combination of middle-range options—political reform in Baghdad, a limited use of U.S. military force, and efforts to build up local capacity and prevent new infections—offers the most hope, even if this cocktail will take months if not years to take hold.
Political reform in Iraq is the foundation on which all else rests. The replacement of Mr. Maliki by Haider al-Abadi earlier this month offers some hope that Iraq's Shiite-dominated government might become more inclusive and convince some of the country's minority Sunnis to turn against the Islamic State. Iran, a Shiite neighbor that backs Mr. Abadi's government, also opposes the Sunni jihadists, which could encourage Mr. Abadi to be more conciliatory than his predecessor. But at best, we're likely to go from abysmal to simply bad: Mr. Abadi is cut from the same cloth as Mr. Maliki and shares the same Shiite-chauvinist power base.
Still, splitting the Islamic State's zealots off from the rest of Iraq's Sunnis is quite doable. The Islamic State surged in June, in part, because Sunni tribes, ex-Baathists and other Sunnis had joined the fray against the Maliki government. At the height of the troop surge that began in 2007, the U.S. had turned these fighters against the jihadists. Doing so again without a significant U.S. presence on the ground will be far harder—but if Mr. Abadi's government extends a real olive branch to its Sunni citizens, the Islamic State could rapidly lose much of its support.
The best long-term hope is to help grow local military forces and build up their capacity. Iraq's forces collapsed in the face of the Islamic State's summer offensive, and their morale and cohesion must be restored. Part of this problem is technical, and the sustained deployment of U.S. advisers can improve their performance.
But the bigger problem is political. Iraqi forces had more training and far better equipment than the Islamic State (though when they ran away, the radicals found themselves with a cornucopia of advanced U.S. military hardware), but many of them have no faith in their officers and no loyalty to their political leaders. So without political reform, military reform will fail.
Pushing the Islamic State back in Iraq does little good if it remains strong across Iraq's blurry border with Syria. Syria's beleaguered moderate opposition forces must be trained far more extensively, enabling them to oppose both the killers in the Assad regime and the fanatics of the Islamic State.
U.S. air power and special operations forces can prevent the Islamic State from growing further. But airstrikes can't evict it once and for all. Lasting successes will come only when ground forces can occupy the territory after the jihadists flee. And that means Iraq's government needs to step up—and moderate Syrian rebels need urgent help.
While working on all these fronts, Washington must try to contain the contagion. The U.S. should work with Turkey, Jordan and other neighbors to meet desperate cries for aid in the tent cities of Syrian refugees and discourage self-defeating behavior.
We're in for a long slog. Syria is a failed state, and Iraq is becoming one. In the near term, the best the U.S. can do is to put the Islamic State on its back foot. It is tempting to turn around and go home, but that would risk an even worse disaster.
—Dr. Byman is a professor in the Security Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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