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Something to Cheer the Gloomy
Reuters/Rodi Siad
From Slate:
Residents from the northern Syrian city of Manbij are celebrating their freshly restored freedoms after U.S.–backed forces seized full control of the town from ISIS, which had been using civilians as human shields. Photographs show people pouring into the streets to celebrate after a battle that lasted 73 days. Wrestling control of Mabij from ISIS marks the biggest defeat for the group in Syria since July 2015, notes the Associated Press, and comes amid a string of territorial losses for the extremist group. […] One particularly poignant photo shows a woman burning her niqab, as women could finally walk the streets without having to cover their faces for the first time in more than two-and-a-half years. Similar scenes have become common in other towns liberated from ISIS.the expression on her face is wonderful.
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That’s true, but the group that became ISIS (i.e. Part of AQ in Iraq, which split and saw ISIS) was much smaller and pretty different in aims, ideology, and practices than ISIS today. Most of ISIS joined the movement in Syria as a result of Assad’s genocide.
It has terrorists in a bunch of states, and outlets in a handful of states. Boko Haram isn’t really integrated with the rest of the group. The warlords in Libya, Iraq, and Syria are in Libya, Iraq, and Syria; there hasn’t been all that much fighting in Lebanon, for instance, or in Jordan.
The support of the Sunni Tribes. The urbanized majority of Sunnis in Baghdad and such don’t seem to have been particularly supportive. Ramadi doesn’t seem to have had the fifth column problems that helped ISIS with the initial assault.
Sure. I wasn’t saying that this was your support for Obama showing (I don’t get the impression that your general lack of generosity in analyzing the actions and motives of the US military changed much in 2009). I was saying this was your opposition to the Iraq War leading your mind astray.
So, is your counter factual that Iraq would have been pacified in, say, 2006 instead of 2009 if there was a plan? All over in 2004? Is it then that the Iraqi element of 2012′ ISIS (mostly the theological leadership and a handful of the guys on the war council, along with a small minority of the foot soldiers) would have abandoned their unpleasant beliefs? Would they all have died? Or is it that without Bush having been disorganized in Iraq, Assad’s abuses would not have upset the Syrians so?
Not that I don’t disagree with your main point. But a solid core of ISIS are former Baathist military officers. So your counter argument does not really stand.
Some of them are, but a: they’re a pretty clear minority and b: the invasion of Iraq did not increase the number of former Baathist military officers. Quite the reverse.
edit: Pedantic correction: the invasion did not increase the number of Iraqis who were trained by the Baathists as military officers. It did turn a lot of officers into ex-officers, in one sense or another. I apologize for my inexact language.
James – would you say that, given the benefit of hindsight, it was wise to basically remove every Ba’athist from access to the levers of power? If you ban the only large secular, albeit corrupt and violent, player then who is left and what are the likely outcomes? (Where are those violent power hungry people going to turn for power?)
Which other political movement had a strong self interest in preserving some sort of secular State in the Arab two thirds of the country? I can’t think of one, and I regret that the Ba’athists weren’t kept in as participants and contenders. I’m not saying they weren’t touched by sectarian politics – of course they were – but all Ba’athists weren’t Sunnis, or even Muslims.
Unavoidably I see it through an Indian prism – only Iraqis themselves see it without any kind of overlay – but I’m sad it turned out this way, and I think it could have been avoided. Not so? Entirely in a post-invasion space.
They didn’t. I worked with people who had been in the party. They removed people who had engaged in atrocities and who weren’t essential.
You know how the guys in ISIS are the head of the theological side of things? That’s because Saddam stopped being secular and spent the late 1990s and early 2000s setting up and transforming seminaries to produce the ideology that is now so important to ISIS. The people in ISIS aren’t ex-Baathist secular socialists. ISIS was not formed in order to promote a violent and corrupt form of big government nationalism. Also, it should go without saying that the handful of people you’re talking about (the ex-Baathist officers) are far from the only players who were left in Iraq. ISIS have genuinely trashed the cities that they occupied, but most of the population of Ramadi has returned to Ramadi, and only a tiny portion of it was ever affiliated with ISIS. That’s because there’s a whole bunch of non-ISIS Sunnis there. Likewise, the Sunni neighbourhoods of Baghdad haven’t seen all that much hassle (some suicide bombings, but not much institutional damage, and those suicide bombings mostly targeting soft targets).
It’s true that the change in regime as Bush organised it was always going to leave some malcontents. Do you believe that an alternative plan existed or should have existed that would leave the guys who form the backbone of ISIS’ ideology gainfully employed as government or military officials with positive results for all?
I don’t know what you mean by “other political movement”. Again, you surely can’t be suggesting that the Baathist party that existed in Iraq in 2003 was attempting to preserve a secular state.
That’s true. Are you under the impression that the current government has no non-Shia?
I absolutely think that it could have been avoided. With a relatively small amount of support for the Free Syrian Army, ISIS would never have existed beyond a footnote in the history of Syria. I don’t think that the meltdown in Syria could have been prevented by even a perfect governance in Iraq, and I don’t see how paying Baathists and giving them the power to continue to abuse and exploit their victims is likely to later stop them from moving to Syria and killing and exploiting civilians. Is the idea that they should have kept the palaces and income they’d grown accustomed to, with all the semi-slave entertainment and such? If so, that might have reduced the numbers active in Syria by a little, but it would surely have increased the death toll in Iraq, besides being morally repugnant.
I hope you’re right, James – you’re always more optimistic about Iraq than I am, but then you’ve been there and have a feeling for the people.
Wrt secular parties in Iraq – are there any that compete in the elections, and if so how do they do? I understand that there are some ethnic Kurdish parties (?) which are not religious, but are there any Arab majority (or even Arabist?) parties as well?
I think ISIS rose out of Syria? Either way, they were emboldened by the lack of leadership by O, a strong coalition to continue the progress we and other countries made before O (he ran on ending troop presence, leaving and closing Guantanamo), and sat out many opportunities to attack when word came from our military. Not to mention the blinders to Russia’s arming up all the bad guys and becoming an established presence in the whole region, on the ground and ports. They have big plans. The spread of the radical Muslim ideology has also affected Asia, Africa and Europe much more over the last 8 years. Our guys are having to dodge Russia on top of ISIS in Syria. I think the fact that they have been trying to remove Assad for so long (2 Secretary of States have been worthless on this and the rest of the problem), and have not succeeded, creating the massive refugee problem. Now that Europe has all these refugee problems, Russia can keep moving across Eastern Europe with little trouble. Then let’s give Iran lots more fuel to throw on the fire.
Yes I am happy to see some progress, and the throwing off of this dark ideology. Great to see children smiling – this is progress and I hope it keeps going! Thanks.
@zafar @jamesofengland @mjbubba @couldbeanyone
Andrew McCarthy’s recent NRO article, “Republicans — Not Just Trump — Are Wrong to Blame ISIS’s Rise on Obama’s Iraq Policy”, relates to your discussion.
McCarthy agrees with JofE (and rebuts MJB) that the US’s withdrawal from Iraq under Obama was not what precipitated the rise of ISIS. Obama is bash-worthy, but not on this matter. McCarthy writes:
McCarthy partly agrees with Zafar that Bush’s lack of a follow-up plan in Iraq unleashed competing Shiite and Sunni “sharia supremacists”, but leans closer to JofE’s argument that ISIS was more directly the result of the upheaval in Syria. He writes:
He then says the internal Syrian uprising against the Assad regime became fertile ground for nurturing all manner of jihadists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS.
(I hope I didn’t misrepresent anyone’s views. I almost had to flowchart your arguments to understand the back-and-forth.)
The only issue with McCarthy’s analysis is that Obama failed to both negotiate and accept a status of forces agreement with the Iraqis. If he had managed to do both those things then we could have easily kept a sizable contingent of troops in Iraq and ISIS would have only been able to operate in Syria.
Bush no doubt didn’t see every outcome and he was also dealing with different circumstances such as a weak Iran being further weakened by embargo. Obama undid foreign policy with both Iran and Iraq and thus set the stage for what was to come.
This is my understanding, too. I hope James concurs.
What to make then of the counter-argument that the failure to negotiate a new SOFA was not so much of Obama’s making, but the result of Iraq’s domestic politics? Says this former Obama DOD official here:
Coming from the administration under the president which had routinely attacked the war in Iraq and had vowed he would evacuate our troops I doubt such words. Besides the Iraqis were in no position to deny us. Obama could have easily forced terms in America’s favor and he did nothing.
The alleged threat of no American legal protections was a weak cover for evacuating the nation. I doubt America’s occupation of the defeated axis were taken well by those nations’ populations and America didn’t balk then for those pitiful sentiments. America shouldn’t have balked under Obama.
Bush and Rumsfeld trusted the Neocons, who blew the call regarding the ease of establishing a replacement government in Iraq.
Bush should get major praise for figuring out the score, getting a course correction planned, and then implementing the surge and pressing Iraqi leaders harder to get a representative government in place while placing some checks on bureaucrats to keep corruption in check.
American mass media kept accentuating the negative, and then their memes got picked up by foreign journalists, creating a bitter atmosphere in which Iraqis believed the lie that Bush was there to take their oil. This made the situation difficult, but not impossible, to get an agreement in place, and the Bush drawdown plan clearly anticipated an agreement that would leave 8,000 or so American troops in country.
Obama had no interest in an agreement that would keep Americans in Iraq.
The guys who would form ISIS were already linked up and quarreling with Al Qaeda in Iraq, pressing them for greater violence, and for killings of moderates who were cooperating with the effort to keep the new government afloat. The reduction of American forces was going to allow them room to get frisky, which prompted generals and conservative observers to urge America to stay in Iraq.
It was the power vacuum that ensued that allowed ISIS to grow unchecked, and to link up with bad guys in Syria, and to cross back and forth to build their brand through brutality.
Most politicians have a reasonably clear denominational affiliation, but that isn’t necessarily the same as that of their supporters. Allawi, for instance, has long been the most prominent “Sunni” politician, but is personally Shia, and that’s not that uncommon; the relationship between denomination and party is pretty nuanced. This is probably the best summary of this stuff I’ve read recently (and, yes, I’m engaging in stereotype when I link to Musings, but there’s a reason that I do). You’ll note that denominational lines aren’t all that important in working out alliances.
If you mean not identity but policies then you’ll have to be more clear. There’s divorce in Iraq and it’s a pretty secular form. There’s traditional, western finance. Crimes are punished with jail and fines rather than Saudi style. What do you want from a secular party?
With regard to the Kurds, there are Kurdish communists and Arab communists (for the most part “communist” and “secularist” are synonymous in the region), but the biggest communist party is predominantly Arab. There are secular seeming people in many parties; it’s possible that there are more in one of the Kurdish parties, but I’m not aware of any evidence for this. Some of the more religious political folk I knew out there were Kurdish, and my mother’s sense while she was in the KRG (I’ve never been outside Baghdad in Iraq) was that significant portions of the region were fairly serious about their faith. I’ve known people who denied that, but I’ve never seen it denied by someone who was not both pretty enthusiastically anti-Islam and pro-Kurd; you’ll often hear the same people claiming that the KRG is as, or even more, democratic.