MESSAGE
| DATE | 2015-11-26 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] Middle east Analysis
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Is it too late to solve the mess in the Middle East?
By Liz Sly November 17
BAGHDAD — With the attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian
passenger plane, the Islamic
State has declared war on the wider world, galvanizing new calls for an
intensified global effort to
defeat the emerging threat.
It may already be too late and too difficult, however, for any swift or
easy solution to the tangled mess
the Middle East has become in the four years since the Arab Spring
plunged the region into turmoil.
What Jordan’s King Abdullah II referred to as a “third world war against
humanity” has, more
accurately, become a jumble of overlapping wars driven by conflicting
agendas in which defeating the
Islamic State is just one of a number of competing and often
contradictory policy pursuits.
In those four years, four Arab states — Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen —
have effectively collapsed.
Civil wars are raging in all of them. World powers have lined up on
different sides of those wars. And
the chaos has given the heirs to the legacy of Osama bin Laden the
greatest gift they could have
hoped for: the gift of time and space.
Aided by the disinterest of a world wearied and wary after the failings
of the Iraq war, an assortment
of al-Qaeda veterans, hardened Iraqi insurgents, Arab jihadist
ideologues and Western volunteers
have moved into the vacuum left by the collapse of governments in Syria
and Iraq and built
themselves a proto-state. It can hardly be said to count as a real
state, but it controls territory, raises
taxes and maintains an army.
Any responses now “are very late in the game,” said Shadi Hamid of the
Brookings Institution in
Washington. “The costs of inaction have accumulated, and we can’t undo
the damage of the past four
years.”
The Islamic State is finding new footholds in Egypt, Libya and
Afghanistan as state control crumbles
there, too, confronting the world with a vastly bigger challenge than it
faced after the 9/11 attacks in
the United States, said Bruce Riedel, who is also with the Brookings
Institution.
“We have now been fighting al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda offshoots, which is
what the Islamic State is, since
1998,” he said. “We now face an enemy that has more sanctuaries and
operating space than ever
before. The battlefield is now much larger than it was before.”
It is also more complicated. At no point has any world power made
defeating the Islamic State a top
priority, including the United States, said Peter Harling of the
International Crisis Group. “Everyone’s
using the Islamic State,” he said. It’s a diversion “from what’s really
going on.”
For the Obama administration, avoiding entanglement in another Middle
East war has been the
foremost policy priority, followed closely by the pursuit of a nuclear
deal with Iran. There seems to be
little doubt that the United States has soft-pedaled its Syria policy,
ostensibly aimed at removing
President Bashar al-
Assad, in order not to jeopardize the Iran deal, Hamid said.
Russian intervention in the region has been driven primarily by
President Vladimir Putin’s desire to
reassert Russia’s stature as a global power and shore up Assad’s regime,
hence the focus on targeting
U.S.-backed moderate rebels rather than the Islamic State in the
earliest days of its intervention.
Saudi Arabia, America’s most powerful Arab ally, is preoccupied above
all by the challenge posed by
Iran and is expending its military energies on fighting the
Iranian-backed Houthi militias in Yemen.
Iran has prioritized the projection of its regional influence through
Syria and Iraq to the
Mediterranean, funding and arming proxy militias to defend its interests
in Shiite-dominated areas of
Iraq and to quell the anti-Assad rebellion mostly in the areas around
Damascus, the Syrian capital.
And Turkey’s attention is focused mainly on its domestic Kurdish problem
and on the perceived threat
posed by the emergence of an autonomous Kurdish enclave along its border
in northern Syria.
It seems unlikely that the Paris attacks will generate a more coherent
international response, analysts
say.
France has joined the United States and Russia in conducting airstrikes
in Syria, raining bombs on
the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa on two occasions
since the bloodshed in Paris on
Friday. On Tuesday, President François Hollande dispatched an aircraft
carrier to the eastern
Mediterranean, where Russian warships are already deployed for a fight
that has focused mostly on
Syrian rebels fighting Assad — some of whom also have been supported by
France.
Syrian activists with the group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently,
which maintains a network of
undercover reporters in Raqqa, say that the initial French strikes, at
least, hit only empty buildings
vacated by the militants in anticipation of retaliation.
Experience has already demonstrated that the Islamic State is unlikely
to be defeated with airstrikes
alone, and for now, there are few other alternatives on the horizon,
Riedel said.
“The Islamic State can be degraded by air power, but in the end someone
has to provide the infantry
that goes in and takes Mosul and Raqqa and restores governance and rule
of law, and I don’t see
anyone offering that.”
In America, the Paris attacks have precipitated peripheral debates about
whether the United States is
waging war on Islam and the question of whether to admit Syrian
refugees, rather than ways to
address the wider problems of the Middle East.
Although there have been calls for more robust intervention, including
boots on the ground, from
some members of Congress, President Obama has made it clear that he
thinks the current U.S.
strategy is working.
And in recent days, there has been a spurt of progress on the ground. An
alliance of Kurdish and Arab
fighters recaptured the eastern Syrian town of al-Hawl and dozens of
surrounding villages. In
northern Iraq, Kurdish fighters ejected the Islamic State from the town
of Sinjar in 48 hours. The Iraqi
army has made advances around Ramadi, the capital of the province of
Anbar, which is now almost
encircled.
The gains reflect a newly concerted effort to coordinate efforts among
the diverse local forces fighting
on the ground in order to pressure the Islamic State in multiple places
at the same time, said Col.
Steve Warren, spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic
State.
“We’re fighting them across the entire depth of the battlefield at once.
We are synchronizing and
aligning our support,” he said. “Each one of these gains is not
necessarily compelling, but when you
look at them simultaneously it’s very compelling.”
The gains nonetheless leave unaddressed the core problem confronting the
region, which is the
collapse of viable state structures in the Middle East and the absence
of any immediately apparent
alternative to Islamic State rule in the mostly Sunni areas it controls,
said Robert Ford, former U.S.
ambassador to Syria and now a fellow with the Middle East Institute.
Kurdish fighters have made most of the advances in Syria so far, but
they are unlikely to succeed in
retaking core Sunni strongholds such as Raqqa and other cities in the
Sunni Arab territories that form
the heart of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate.
“Kurds are never going to liberate Palmyra; Kurds are not going to clear
the Islamic State out of Deir
al-Zour,” he said. “Sunni Arabs are going to have to do that, and what
Arab force is going to do that?
Assad doesn’t have the forces; he can’t even take the suburbs of Damascus.”
Likewise in Iraq, Shiite militias and Iraqi Kurds have made most of the
gains so far. The Iraqi army’s
recent advances in Ramadi have isolated Fallujah, which has been under
Islamic State control for
nearly two years, leaving residents besieged and short of food.
Many residents “would like Daesh to be expelled,” said Issa al-Issawi,
the mayor of Fallujah, who left
the city when the Islamic State, also known as Daesh, overran it and is
living in government-
controlled territory. “But at the same time they have major concerns
about what would happen next.”
Obama acknowledged the problem in justifying his reluctance to commit
troops to the fight. “We can
retake territory and as long as we leave troops there we can hold it,
but that does not solve the
underlying dynamic that is producing these extremist groups,” he told
journalists in Turkey this week.
Progress is being made on standing up Arab forces to fight in both Iraq
and Syria, said Warren, citing
the creation of an Arab coalition in northern Syria and ongoing efforts
to train Sunni fighters in Iraq.
The three-to-five-year timeline for defeating the Islamic State offered
by the administration when
airstrikes were launched last year is still on track, he said. “Now it’s
two to four years.”
That may be an optimistic assessment, analysts say. The networks and
ideology generated by al-Qaeda
survived more than a decade of American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan
and are likely to endure
for at least another decade, Riedel said.
In the meantime, more attacks of the kind launched in Paris are to be
expected, a message the Obama
administration seems to be trying to convey.
“We’ve always said there’s a threat of these kind of attacks around the
world until we’ve made more
progress,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry told CNN in an interview
Tuesday.
Read more:
They freed a Syrian town from ISIS. Now they have to govern it.
As talks on Syria begin, the future of Assad will be set aside — for now
5 stories you should read to really understand the Islamic State
The politics and hypocrisy of word-policing ‘radical Islam’
Liz Sly is the Post’s Beirut bureau chief. She has spent more than 15
years covering the Middle East, including the
Iraq war. Other postings include Africa, China and Afghanistan.
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