En route to Tokyo late Monday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter came back to take questions from the press traveling with him, preferably for him to talk about the importance of the Asia Pacific.
But no one asked about Japan. With so few opportunities of late to get candid information from the Pentagon’s top civilian leader when the U.S. is engaged now in three different Middle East battlefields, the reporters worked to try and get Carter to answer a key strategic question: What is the U.S. strategy for the region, when it is simultaneously cooperating with and fighting against Iranian-backed militias there?
Either way, the answer revealed more about the fact that the U.S. has no easy answers there.
“The common denominator in our actions in all parts of the region … is the pursuit of our national security interests,” Carter replied. “One way we advance that is by stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon … we do it by assisting a long-time partner, Saudi Arabia, to defend itself and also to help us in our continuing campaign against al Qaeda in Iraq.”
“So we are following our national security interests in the region – that’s the common denominator to our actions throughout.”
But U.S. security interests have a treacherous path ahead. At the strategic level, Carter would not answer whether he still considered Iran a strategic foe now that the framework of a nuclear deal has been tentatively reached, or what that might mean for follow-on U.S. security decisions in the region, noting only that he continued to be concerned “about many aspect of Iranian behavior that are outside their pursuit of their nuclear program.”
At the operational level, Carter’s response was reflective of the fact that whether or not the U.S. has an overall strategy to achieve its security interests — while balancing between the Shiite-Sunni divide, it is having to call each shot individually — because the region isn’t waiting for a U.S. strategy before it proceeds on its own.
Later this year, the U.S. will encourage the Iraqi government to advance on Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and the current headquarters of the Islamic State.
“We will be discussing that with them. Mosul as a military objective, we’ve said before, will be the subject of an offensive to retake it when we are ready — that is, specifically when the Iraqi security forces are ready,” Carter said, correcting himself.
Already in Tikrit — a battle that the U.S. watched from the sidelines as Iraq indicated its preference to fight that front with thousands of Shiite militias who were a key support for Iraqi Security Forces — reports have begun to surface of militia and Iraqi Security Forces’ abuse of Islamic State fighters, who are largely Sunni, and members of the Tikrit civilian population, who are also largely Sunni. On Monday, Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said the U.S. does not have a role in investigating the abuses, that the Iraqi government would lead that effort.
If the U.S. looks the other way as it tries to play both sides, will it not engender new sectarian enemies? As one of the reporters traveling with Carter asked, “How do we make that balance work without bringing back the past?”
“Do we worry about sectarianism rearing its head again in Iraq? Absolutely we do,” Carter responded. “But that’s the reason why we are supporting a multisectarian Iraqi government, why we are trying to work with them closely so that it is conducting itself in a way that is truly multisectarian. Because it was sectarianism that brought us where we are.”
