When President Obama announced the beginning of U.S. and coalition operations against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, he categorically ruled out placing U.S. combat troops on the ground. His plan eventually involves training, arming, and sending local militias to serve as a proxy for U.S. infantry. In the meantime, airstrikes are supposed to “degrade” the Islamic State and the threat it poses.
Though it would be premature to declare the air campaign against the Islamic State a failure, we can at least say that so far, this isn’t working.
If the Islamic State’s army were simply hunkering down and surviving, then complaints about U.S. strategy would seem premature. But in fact the Islamic State continues to gain ground. In northern Syria its fighters are seizing control of Kobani, a key city along the border with Turkey. In Iraq they have laid siege to Ramadi and captured much of Abu Ghraib, putting them within artillery range of Baghdad’s airport.
Experts pointed to flaws in Obama’s hands-off strategy from the beginning. In its survey of anonymous security insiders last month, National Journal found few takers for the proposition that air power alone would defeat this enemy. Sixty-three percent of respondents said it could not, with one calling it “naive to think enemies can be defeated without U.S. ground forces.”
Anthony Zinni, a former general and special envoy to the Middle East, expressed skepticism in a Fox News interview that any coalition partner with a large enough army will participate in ground operations if the United States does not.
The operation has the same “clean war” feel to it as Obama’s intervention in Libya, suggesting that the administration has failed to learn its lessons from that misadventure. After backing rebel militias against dictator Moammar Gadhafi, the United States and NATO stood idly by over the past three and a half years and watched that nation slide into chaos. Libya is wracked by a new civil war among various militias that has displaced 250,000 people this year, according to the United Nations. The country now has two rival parliaments and two prime ministers in two different cities.
It turns out that war cannot be waged so cleanly as Obama thinks. Even where the casual deployment of air power can tip the balance of a war, it cannot establish a just or stable peace afterward. The best possible outcome of this strategy in Iraq and Syria might well be prolonged war among most of the same parties, but with a different balance in terms of their relative strength and odds of victory.
The resilience of the Islamic State in the face of the air campaign to date is an argument for Obama to have a Plan B in place in case the situation does not turn around. But will politics permit it?
On Tuesday, Obama’s former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta published a book, Worthy Fights. In it, Panetta essentially blames Obama for allowing Iraq to be overrun by the Islamic State. To be precise, he attributes this error to Obama’s personal and political aversion to maintaining an American ground force there.
These same considerations seem to govern his latest refusal to send U.S. combat troops to Iraq, and they may ultimately lead to an abandonment of this fight. But if Obama truly believes it is a worthy fight and wants to follow through, he will probably have to reconsider.
