Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
What if Baghdad Falls to ISIS?
There are now reliable reports that ISIS forces are a mile or so from the Iraqi capital. While CNN, NPR, ABC, and the rest have been celebrating our president as the second coming of Douglas MacArthur — with his “gutsy” air strikes and his diplomatic skill in pulling together a coalition to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State — the Islamic State has been quietly gaining ground over the past several days, and closing the noose around Baghdad.
Although the U.S. and U.K. are desperately bombing away to keep ISIS at bay, it’s not clear who or what can stop them from taking the capital. “They said it could never happen, and now it almost has,” according to Canon Andrew White of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East. His people face mass slaughter if the radical Islamists take over, as do thousands of others.
So what’s the larger impact if and when Baghdad falls? Some quick thoughts.
First, strategically and geopolitically for the U.S., it’s a catastrophe of the first order. Like the fall of Saigon in 1975, it will be an overwhelming setback for U.S. prestige, not to mention honor, and our hopes of ever being a strategic presence in the Middle East and South Asia again.
Second, it will be a humanitarian catastrophe, starting with the massacre of anyone who has ever cooperated with the Americans or the previous governments. Before the fall of Saigon, we were at least able to evacuate 50,000 personnel and refugees in the greatest airlift in history. It’s very likely that there will be no time for any comparable operation, even if the Obama administration had the will do it. Expect an ISIS bloodbath that will make their previous massacres look like playground kickball.
Third, it will be an irrevocable blow to this president’s credibility. The media and the administration will try to shift the blame to Bush of course, e.g., “if he hadn’t lied about WMD’s and invaded in the first place, none of this would be happening.” Unfortunately for them, no one will believe it now.
If this had happened in the first year or so of the administration, maybe. Not now; five years is more than a “decent interval.” It was Obama and Biden, after all, not Bush, who declared victory in Iraq and listed it as a major foreign policy accomplishment; it was Obama, not Bush who pulled out American troops and had half a decade to bring the Iraqi army up to adequate standards — which it clearly hasn’t met and isn’t going to meet anywhere near in time to save Baghdad.
Furthermore, the entire air war against ISIS, and Obama’s phony coalition, will be revealed to be a sham at best, and at worst a campaign to deliberately deceive Americans as to what is actually happening on the ground.
It’s no good taking pleasure in seeing Obama and his clueless foreign policy team finally exposed for the hapless frauds they are. The fall of Baghdad will be a blow to our country’s credibility that, like the fall of Vietnam, will take years to recover from.
Fourth, it would spell the effective end of Iraq. Like Syria, it would exist simply as a geographical expression. Meanwhile, ISIS will consolidate its gains in the north and around Kobani; press ahead with their genocidal campaign against the Kurds; and use control of Baghdad to extend its war on other parts of Iraqi society. That will also prompt the Shia majority in the south to look to Iran for protection; as I wrote in the Washington Examiner this morning, the entire Obama foreign policy has given a tremendous boost to Iran’s expansion of power and influence. The fall of Baghdad will put the capstone on it.
Fifth, it will be a major recruiting tool for ISIS. They will have seized one of the great capitals of Islamic civilization while the Great Satan, America, ran away and did nothing. Expect more young men to flock to enlist in its blood-stained ranks, especially in Western countries.
After all, if a small band of fanatics can reestablish the Caliphate in one ancient Islamic capital through bold ruthless action, why not another? Istanbul perhaps. Mecca and Medina certainly. Why not Cordoba in Spain or Palermo in Sicily?
Or Dearborn in Michigan?
If that sounds wildly improbable, you haven’t been paying attention these past five years.
We are living in an extended episode of the Twilight Zone—and our president has hidden the remote.
Just be glad you’re not in Baghdad right now.
Published in General
A lot of you are falling into the trap of extrapolating in straight lines. It doesn’t work like that.
ISIS has (and the estimates vary widely) 80 to 100,000 troops.
They have commitments elsewhere, so they can’t throw that full number at Baghdad. But even if they could, and even if they took the city, they don’t have the resources to hold onto a city of 7,000,000 people. And half the city is Shia, and ISIS are unambiguously Sunni, so there would be fighting in the streets that would last months if not years.
But you’re all missing two additional key elements.
First, the US government won’t let Baghdad fall. Because it would be like the Fall of Saigon. The one thing that governments cannot tolerate is being embarrassed. Saigon fell because Congress passed a law forbidding us from stopping it. To do that today would require one party at least to be anti-war, or barring that, war skeptics. Usually that would be the Democrats, but the president is a Democrat and he can do no wrong. The Republicans seem unable to fulfill that role, because it would require them to actually [expletive] vote on something, which they are unwilling to do.
Most of you seem to think Obama is some kind of chicken who is afraid to use military force. You give him too much credit. To me it looks like he never met a country he didn’t want to bomb.
Second, even if Barack Obama refused to pull the trigger and do what is necessary to stop ISIS from taking the city, Baghdad (and this is according to Google maps, someone with local knowledge is welcome to correct the details, but it won’t change my point) is 100 miles, a two hour drive from the Iranian border.
Do you really think Iran, which is ass-deep in Iraq and Iraqi politics, is going to sit back and let a Sunni army, led by a man with the nom de guerre of Abu Bakr, that claims to be the new caliphate, walk into a half Shia city and begin a wholesale slaughter?
My opinion is China is communist, therefore definitely an opponent to capitalism and to us. Enemy? Yet to be proven I suppose and that is more up to them than us.
They’re less and less communist each day. They’re going to have a soft transition into a market economy. It’s already well underway.
Becoming a free society might take longer, but they’ll get there.
I agree with all five of your points. It will essentially break up Iraq and create the three nations that Biden thought were the natural divisions with the exception that the Sunni division will be a pernicious entity. This is the fruit of our terrible leadership, leading from behind. If Bagdad falls we are looking at a catastrophe from many angles.
We wouldn’t get a revanchist neo-Ottoman empire because the last thing they want is a bunch more Kurds and the second last thing they want is a bunch more Arabs. Turkey made a couple of small and shockingly under-reported invasions into Syria to support the FSA and AQ (they distracted a Syrian army deployment that was fighting both) before international intervention in Syria was cool. I strongly suspect that future intervention would take similar forms. Turkey very much wants to be thought of fondly by its Arab and Persian neighbors, but has even stronger desires not to get bound up in conflict that could turn simmering domestic tensions into overt catastrophe.
We wouldn’t see Iran annexing Iraq because what the heck would Iran want with a bunch of Persian hating Arabs? Iran’s generally done well in Iraq by doing good; they took in many refugees from Saddam, meaning that quite a lot of the opposition, and hence quite a lot of the current Iraqi government, owes them deeply. They also gained favor by doing evil; equipping (generally) Arabs to kill Americans. An allied Iraq that, unlike Maliki, did not enforce international sanctions against them, making those sanctions worthless, is pretty much ideal for them, offering all the benefits of rulership with few of the terrible costs.
Physician, heal thyself.
Chinese society is peaceful because brutal oppression has tamed them and prosperity makes them happy. You can paper over a lot of social cracks with 8% gdp growth.
The people are being told they’ll never have a recession. Worse, they haven’t had one since Mao died. A healthy western economy that put off its recessions for 37 years would be due an Black Death scale bad day. A systematically dishonest system with most of the economy being owned by the government or by government officials in their private capacity is worse. The ghost cities valued as if they will become fantastic investments with lots of enthusiastic buyers aren’t just a bubble; a bubble is believed in by its participants.
If China does have an enormous crash, there’s a tremendous weight of social strife and anger just waiting to break through the dam.
Or maybe it won’t. It’s one of the great unknowns, a sword of Damocles hanging over the world. If everything is still, maybe the horsehair will hold, but the collapse of North Korea, their Muslim, Communist, or Tibetan minorities doing something truly stupid, plague, drought, First Island Chain tensions, and other issues should remind us that even if the Party manages to keep its rotten economy aloft like incredibly expert Jenga players, it’s not only endogenous shocks that they have to fear.
None of us can draw straight lines into the future saying what will happen (there are some things that almost certainly won’t happen, but nothing that is certain to happen).
So how does ISIS fit that paradigm, as a defeated entity in a new Iraq that is grateful to it’s elder brother Iranian neighbor, or as a partner of a partial state in the region allied with Iran?
Forgive my astonishing ignorance.
Exactly, I was shocked when I was in China 10 years ago how many empty new buildings there was. They basically have construction to prop up the construction industry and then let the buildings fall into disrepair. I guarantee if you published real occupancy rates, other than expensive areas to live, you would rarely break 50% occupancy (ignoring all the office space used for storage). Most importantly from a disaster stand point, their banking sector is on as shaky if not more shaky ground as we were in 2007.
Also China is no longer communist, they are a fascist nation and their is no way one can claim they are getting less fascist. I mean we have more welfare than they do. They don’t even have a social security system.
To be fair to China, that’s a manner in which they’re communist, not fascist. Fascism expanded welfare. The Soviet Constitution vilified the bible but still adopted the idea that he who does not work should not eat.
I’ve found Turkish politics tough to follow lately, but I’d say that their priority was to avoid being in the spotlight. They’re struggling at the moment because, like a lot of the locals objecting to ISIS, they also really object to Assad. Previous attacks were on Assad, and were designed to avoid Turkish troops seeing any actual action (just deploying into Syria was pretty helpful, though). Unlike Assad, ISIS would probably be quite happy to escalate things.
This helps explain why Turkey hasn’t been helping the Kurds. The conflict is a political nightmare for Erdogan, who is seeing his Kurdish minority (18% of the electorate) radicalized against him, along with many of his Arabs and other minorities (another 10%; imagine Obama with a third term available and seeing blacks and Hispanics becoming third partiers) but who is finding it impossible to do anything about it. My guess is that they will be doing as much as they can below the radar, but that their overt help with anything other than supporting the Free Syrian Army will be pretty limited, but that they’ll eventually make more of an effort there, since helping them is the one course of action that offends no domestic constituencies.
I don’t think you’re ignorant. Quite a lot of the media makes efforts to turn these things into two sided conflicts with uniform interests on each side, which can make events hard to follow. One example is AQ and ISIS. Iran has been able to work with AQ, and is the chief sponsor of Hamas, so Iran can work with Sunni groups, including Sunni groups who kill Shia. For the most part, the Sunni-Shia split isn’t a useful way of categorizing Middle Eastern groups. Go back 40 years and it becomes almost entirely irrelevant (yes, yes, go back 1300 years and it’s relevant again, but there’s a long stretch of irrelevance between those points). Unfortunately for Iran, where AQ generally treated the killing of Shia as instrumentally useful in achieving other aims, ISIS is much more interested in demonstrating that diversity is not essential for strength. Iran could work with AQ because both were somewhat focused on messing with moderate Sunni governments (Saudi etc.), and Westerners. ISIS has defeating, torturing, and murdering Iran’s only non-Latin American friends as its highest priority.
As such, I think Iran wants to do all it can to protect Iraq and Assad from ISIS, on altruistic, reciprocity, and realpolitik grounds. Sadly, whereas ISIS is a nightmare for Erdogan, it’s kind of a dream come true for the Iranian regime, from a governmental legitimacy perspective.
We were not driven out of Nam. We just left.
This is true. Nor did Assad run a Syria that was being occupied by ISIS.
We have, then, a natural experiment. Two countries with very similar populations (Sunni Arabs and Kurds and Shia Arabs, plus assorted small minorities), closely tied by blood, history, and economic and political bonds. One dictator remained, one fell. In Iraq, the violent death rate over 11 years has been about 2/3 of the rate in Syria, except Syria managed to get its killing packed into 1/4 the time. After quickly over taking Iraq, Syria’s butchers didn’t rest on their laurels, but are rapidly expanding their lead. While military experts are split on how long it’ll take to return Iraq to peace, I don’t recall hearing anyone suggest that Syria had a pleasant future any time soon.
Iraq has a future; most of Iraq is still functioning as an economy. A national unity government has been formed. When ISIS is kicked out, there won’t be a big crisis of authority. They’re agreed on the broad outlines of the way forward. Iraq has a flourishing free press, a vigorous political system which just changed its leader after an exciting election (right now they’re heatedly debating the proper treatment for the general who dismissed the heroic besieged ISF camp under his command as “whiners” shortly before they were overrun, tortured, and killed). They’re still striving to reform their economy along more free market lines and increasing the already prominent role of women in society. They have telephones (banned under Saddam), air conditioning (a big deal when the temperature hits 117) and economic growth. People to whom education would not have been available are going to school. In Iraq, people can always respond to bad news by pointing to the silver lining; at least we can eat Iraqi dates again; at least my children will be able to enjoy a good career; at least my cousin has a car.
None of this is true in Syria.
Of course, we should not forget that Saddam killed vastly more Iraqi Shia than ISIS seems likely to, though, and more Sunni, that Saddam’s charnel house formed the sectarian hatred that now fuels ISIS, and that Saddam trained many of the monsters now fighting for ISIS. Not only are the Iraqis better off than the Syrians now they (mostly) have freedom, but they used to be the more cruelly treated of the two oppressed peoples.
ISIS cannot and will not take Baghdad because it is mainly Shia territory. If it tried, it would spread itself so thin that it would quickly lose ground elsewhere and it would be the end of ISIS. Note that in three years, the rebels have not been able to mount a serious attack on Damascus, a city with a predominantly Sunni population which in theory is not hostile to the more moderate rebels.
With Iran on one side and Turkey (sort of) on the other side, ISIS options are not great. They are trying to take small towns to keep the momentum and propaganda going, but that too may no longer work.
It is not impossible that ISIS will disappear in less than six months, though only a pollyanna would predict it.
I sincerely hope that the loss of US credibility is not the only reason that your primary emotional response to untold bloodshed would be pleasure at Obama’s being exposed.
I don’t know if you’re reading this, Arthur, but if you are, I wonder if you’d care to place a bet. In general, I don’t think it’s a good idea to bet that things will happen the way you want, because betting against your preferences provides a natural psychic hedge. In this instance, though, the odds of Baghdad being overrun and vast massacres of Baghdadis being massacred seem so remote that I’d like to offer you a wager; drinks throughout the night on the first occasion that we meet after either you accept that ISIS isn’t likely to manage it or I accept that they have managed it.
The bet is also open to anyone else who believes that this is a plausible or, as Arthur sometimes suggests, certain, outcome.
Say what you will about the presidency of George W. Bush (my own past comments on him have often been pretty critical), his comments on the current Iraq situation are pretty classy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJqPr4vol_A
To answer the title question:
Then every last one of them will have died in vain.
Yes, but add in: two such countries next to each other. What happens in one will have an impact on the other. Not so?
[Setting aside the differences: Syria’s fault lines a la Hama have been confessional, which is meat and drink to AQ, Iraq’s have been, a la Halabja, more linguistic. Though obviously there is some of each kind in both countries.]
Let’s say that the US had invaded Syria, and not Iraq, and deposed Assad and not Saddam.
Do you think their situations would be somewhat reversed? I’m not “blaming everything on Bush”, just pointing out that blow back doesn’t always stop at a border. Fair call?
I think that if your facts were right, your conclusions would be, too. Saddam’s chief victims were not the Kurds, however, who were protected by the US during the years of his bloodiest direct efforts to murder his citizens (as opposed to the years when he did so indirectly by fighting the Iranians). We know that faced with revolt, Saddam was ready to kill in Assad like numbers, because he did kill in Assad like numbers during the 1990s.
That doesn’t mean that if we’d toppled Assad but not Saddam we’d see Iraq in a similar situation to Syria today. Instead, Saddam would have developed nukes when the sanctions, which were already beginning to crumble in 2003, came down. He had already given chunks of his country over to Sunni terrorists (Al Ansar in the North East) and criminal gangs (in Anbar). Assad ran Syria through massive secret police networks and individual abuses, only turning to mass atrocities when it was too late. Assad permitted telephones and relatively easy travel.
If we’d not invaded Iraq, I think it unlikely that we’d have seen the same horrors as we’re seeing in Syria, but I don’t think that the different horrors would have been better, either. On balance, I’d suspect at least as many dead domestically, but with Saddam more stable than Assad is, and a high chance that either Tel Aviv or a Western city had passed into history.
Just in from the War Nerd:
James – I know he gives you hives, but what do you think? The maps of Baghdad’s changing spatial demographics seemed relevant.
Sorry to miss this. I think it’s a funny article, filled with just shots at easy, stupid, targets, with the BBC being, unsurprisingly, his easiest and stupidest target. That said, he’s no better than they are.
“without even trying to conquer turf belonging to the stronger competing tribes like the Shia.”
Do you think there’s a justification for referring to the Shia as a tribe? I think there’s a much stronger justification for referring to Brecher as a racist [expletive].
“The new Sunni base is far from the center of town, off to the west, in Al Mansour”.
This was where I lived, on a Shia compound (the map makers had us as Sunni, because it’s a terrible map; there’s actually a good deal more mixed communities than it suggests). Still, although my chunk was Shia, it’s always been the cultural center for Sunni Baghdad. It’s where Saddam was building his “Biggest Mosque in the World”, and where the Iraqi Hunting Club, by far the most famous social club for the powerful in Iraq, is based (about 30 yards from my home, which had a front gate opposite its front gate); it was always irritating to me that I couldn’t spend time there. It was the base in the 1920s, and has been ever since.
He’s like John Stewart; he’s kind of funny; he’s clearly read at least a few articles, but you can’t trust him to be honest or accurate because he’s not trying to be. He’s trying to show you he’s clever and persuade you of his view.
J of E, what is your appreciation of the current military situation? The air campaign seems to me too little to be effective and that sooner the infantry will have to start walking. I remember from earlier posts that you thought that we should not have to send our combat troops; I fear that we will soon have no other alternative.
That’s worth knowing. Thank you. (Or should I say….shukran ya James?)
I think we need to send more aid, and have our bombing stepped up somewhat. I’ll admit to being a little surprised by the number of times we see stories about masses of air strikes and a single vehicle or a couple of guys hit. Apparently Turkey will send troops if we promise to support the Turkish efforts against Assad, which seems like a good idea to me. The efforts of our partners have been scaling up, and that seems helpful. To the extent that we can have the fight against ISIS being led by Muslims, we should do that; this is very much a hearts and minds campaign, and it’s important that when ISIS kill westerners, they’re murdering guys who tried to bring food to starving Syrian children, not soldiers.
If Turkey enters the war, hopefully they’ll stop being a key source of funds for ISIS (through the kidnapping ransoms that they would hopefully stop paying). The Muslim world has consistently condemned ISIS, which operates more independently (oil, ransoms, lootings, etc.) and less on donations as a result, but the attitude has been hardening. I remain optimistic although, yes, I’d hoped that the initial strikes would have more effect. I was also surprised and disappointed by the public emphasis on also hitting AQ, which seems to have helped AQ and ISIS reconcile.
Thank you is fine. I remain pretty embarrassed by my lack of Arabic.
Are AQ and ISIS seriously at odds? They seem to me pretty much birds of a feather.
I have wondered whether the Kurds are the key for the immediate future and how we can resist their wishes for their own state (which I think that the Turks would oppose) and yet rely upon them for the heavy lifting on the ground.
Given the rampant tribalism in that part of the world, I question whether any long-lasting and secure nation-state can be constructed that is not homogeneous. Would it be possible to redraw the boundaries to preserve tribal unity and reasonably equal access to the mineral riches available?
They have been killing each other in fairly large numbers. They’ve now reconciled, but it’s entirely possible they’ll go back to opposition; this isn’t their first reconciliation. There are similarities, certainly, but there are pretty big differences, too. For instance, AQ were happy to destroy Shia religious stuff and kill minorities to make a point, but they didn’t do a heck of a lot of that for its own sake (at least not on the scale that ISIS do. Thus the Iraq war was deadlier for Muslims than for Christians, whereas the current conflict actively targets us.
Like Scottish independence, Kurdish separatism is routinely overstated. Neither of the two big parties favors secession. Rather, they want more power devolved to the regional government. Being part of Iraq works out a lot better for them than being independent would, despite the Government of Iraq being kinda jerky to them. They probably will get some devolution out of this crisis.
I do think it’s worth noting, though, that the Kurdish Regional Government initially took a position of neutrality regarding the invasion of their country, only taking part when ISIS attacked the Peshmerga and made it clear that neutrality wasn’t an option. The US media really likes the Kurds, but they’re not likely to do much heavy lifting that isn’t directly defending Kurds, other than those (numerous) Kurds who fight for the Iraqi military rather than the Peshmerga.
In Iraq? Most people are not tribal in identity; the rural areas are pretty tribal. It’s not really possible to draw the boundaries in ways that preserve ethnic unity at all, let alone while preserving mineral rights, too. The Kurds in Baghdad, for instance, are never going to see a state in which Baghdad is run by Kurds. You can draw boundaries to increase racial disparities, as if gerrymandering, but those boundaries look ugly if they’re effective at that (Sunnis dominate most of the area around Baghdad, for instance, but not Baghdad itself.
I don’t think it would be a great idea even if we could, though. Setting up minorities to be more easily persecuted by the majorities in their gerrymandered states and weakening those states’ ability to resist extremists seems like a bad deal for everyone.
And not to contradict James at all, but just add to his comments,
You gotta appreciate that ISIS and AQ are rival entities fighting for the same market space. They’re Coke and Pepsi. Very similar, but different entities, and competing for the same market. And they both want to be #1.
The other thing is, like competing criminal/terrorist organizations, but unlike Coke and Pepsi, they’re unscrupulous about using violence against their competitors. So sometimes they can work together, but they’re also willing to murder each other for market share,.
And I’m using economics terms for this and it’s not out of place. AQ has shown some pretty sophisticated organizational tendencies for guys with a rep of living in caves. They franchised out local branches. They’re also very brand savvy. They’s conscious of the Al Queda® brand. That’s part of why they excommunicated ISIS, because they were damaging the brand.
But unlike Starbucks or Hasbro, they’re willing to murder people to protect their brand.