On Wednesday, the eve of the thirteenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, President Obama will speak to the American people about his strategy for dealing with the rise of the Islamic State, the would-be caliphate bestriding Iraq and Syria, the most palpable and present threat to the region since Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and, later, Kuwait.
Presidential proxies have been broadcasting the outlines of the intended campaign plan for several days; aggregating the various statements, it appears the goal is to first degrade, then militarily defeat the IS armed forces, and finally destroy the organization politically. But most of what they’ve been saying involves what they won’t do rather than what they will do, with the critical missing element being any substantial commitment of U.S. ground forces. American “boots on the ground” are, as Secretary of State John Kerry puts it, a “red line.” Alas, this is one of the last red lines about which the administration retains credibility.
But if we were serious, what would it take to achieve the degrade-defeat-destroy goals?
It would take, first of all, a comprehensive assessment of what the Islamic State is and of its military capabilities. The IS is, or nearly is, just what is says it is: a state, the government of a vaguely triangular bit of real estate whose northern border parallels Turkey’s southern border from Aleppo in Syria to Mosul in Iraq. At that point, the IS border turns south, running along the Tigris River through the majority-Sunni areas of Iraq, through Tikrit to Ramadi and Fallujah west of Baghdad. The third leg of the IS triangle runs back up the Euphrates River valley toward Raqqa in Syria, just east of Aleppo.
That’s a substantial area – “the size of Britain,” as the British papers are fond of observing – and even now is generating something like $1 million a day in black-market oil sales and other revenues for IS. Although the area includes a lot of open desert, the cities are densely populated (Mosul holds about three-quarters of a million people) and linked by modern roads. In sum, it’s a viable geographic entity.
It could be a viable geopolitical entity, too. It’s home to the region’s dispossessed Sunni Arabs, the evicted governing class in Iraq and a long-suppressed majority in Syria. It is held together, in part by the threat from the Alawite Assad regime in the west and from Shiite Iran – and its proxies in Baghdad – to the east. It’s ethnically divided from the regions other Sunnis, the Kurds and Turks to its north. It gets support from some other Sunni states, most notably from Qatar.
Lastly, it’s a militarily defensible entity. IS forces have already exploited the road network to conduct rapid, mobile military operations that in mile-per-day terms qualify as blitzkrieg. Though not particularly large, IS forces have proven themselves effective, not only in irregular but more conventional operations. Moreover, the cities within the IS boundaries make natural strongholds – no doubt strongholds being improved and fortified by the hour – that will be very tough to clear, especially given the fervor of IS troops. Thus, while penetrating the territory of the Islamic State will be relatively easy, clearing and holding it will be a challenge. Sustaining the kind of systematic “invasion” and stabilization operation needed to defeat and destroy the Islamic State will require a massive logistical effort.
So how to crack this pretty hard nut?
Militarily “degrading” an adversary is a very low-threshold measure, indeed one we could claim to have achieved through the limited airstrikes and support actions already taken. This hasn’t been enough, however, to halt the larger IS advance – since U.S. forces started bombing in Iraq, its forces have made gains in Syria against Assad, the moderate rebels and al Qaeda-affiliate Jabhat Nusra. And if one defines the purpose of the “degradation” campaign more rigorously – as, say, isolating IS strongholds in a way that would choke off resupply or reinforcement – then the degree of difficulty rises exponentially. This is particularly true in regard to the IS lifeline to Turkey.
And, with the possible exception of the Turkish military, there is no regional force capable of projecting or sustaining the kind of land power needed to isolate and reduce IS redoubts individually, let alone the whole set. This makes the military “defeat” of the Islamic State a much taller order. Lots of U.S. air power – employing land-based aircraft; carrier air alone won’t do – is needed but won’t be sufficient. Further, creating the kind of powerful, mobile and sustainable indigenous land forces – whether from the Kurdish pesh merga or the rump of the Iraqi army, let alone anyone in Syria – would be the work of many years, and it would still take some larger entity to control or coordinate efforts across the entire IS front. And it might be a cure as bad as the disease: these are the kinds of border-changing capabilities that made Saddam Hussein such a menace. Nor are IS forces likely to present the same kind of perfect target as the Taliban did in Afghanistan; the special-operations-plus-airpower model is unlikely to produce the same kind of rapid success achieved in 2001.
One the political front, the lasting destruction of the Islamic State depends in substantial part on the speed, effectiveness and durability of the military campaign. The IS forces and leadership are a witches’ brew of ex-Saddamists and jihadists exploiting Sunni sectarian fears. They will fight and die hard, and are only too willing to stage spectacular atrocities – and should be expected to leave even more bodies in the wake of retreat, or last-stand defense of their strongholds. These people have risen from their political graves several times already, and only a thoroughgoing military effort, one that scores a timely victory that is then sustained over time, can have a hope of driving a stake through their undead hearts.
Finally, no anti-IS campaign makes sense without a larger regional strategy. The success of the Islamic State is, first and foremost, a response to the rise of Iranian power in recent years (notably in dominating the Maliki government in Iraq and saving the Assad regime in Syria) and the retreat of the United States from the forward defense of its more “moderate” Sunni allies. This is the coalition that needs to be reconstructed, but it’s also one that’s incompatible with the “Iranian condominium” so beloved by American “realists.” A serious and sustained campaign to reclaim the Islamic State as a bulwark of mainstream Sunni power in the Gulf and the Levant will, just to take one near-certain unhappy consequence, accelerate the day Iran declares itself a nuclear power. By threatening to attack the Islamic State in a serious way, we will be taking sides in the regional struggle for power – the real struggle behind the wars in Syria and Iraq. We will do ourselves no favors if we do not recognize and accept this.
Hope springs eternal, but it is hard to imagine that the president will, at this point in his career, become the war president we need and the situation demands. He’s spent six years resisting this, and the administration’s pre-speech leaks have emphasized the likelihood that the campaign will be long and slow – and, most important, one that extends beyond Barack Obama’s term in office. The buck never stops at the president’s desk.
And so in measuring the president’s speech, the final question is what kind of Middle East mess he plans to bequeath to his successor. We won’t know until he shares his strategy, but we can assume the mess will be bigger than the one he inherited from George W. Bush.
