Obama to outline a comprehensive strategy to defeat ISIS

Jen Psaki, the state department spokeswoman, said Kerry and Iraqi government officials would “discuss how the United States can increase its support to Iraq’s new government in our common effort to defeat Isil [Isis] and the threat that it poses to Iraq, the region, and the world.”

U.S. officials told the Guardian that al-Abadi had promised to create a national guard of local fighters to secure Iraq’s eighteen provinces — each run by a governor. This would ensure that the Iraqi army, a Shi’a commanded force consisting mostly of Shi’a soldiers, would not be in charge of security in Sunni regions. Analysts note that such a move would not only increase the confidence Sunnis would have in the security forces patrolling Sunni regions – it would also bring salaried jobs, government pensions, and other benefits to Sunni areas of Iraq which were purposefully neglected by al-Maliki during his eight years in power. Both the lack of confidence in the Shi’a-dominated security forces and the denial of government jobs led Sunnis to support the ISIS insurgency.

The next stop on Kerry’s trip is Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have been funding the moderate opposition groups in Syria, but the U.S. reluctance to join in support for the Syrian moderates, and President Obama’s last-minute decision not to bomb Syrian regime’s facilities in response to the Syrian military sarin gas attack on a Damascus suburb, have caused Saudi Arabia to question the resolve of the Obama administration and the wisdom and consistency of its policies in the region.

The United States hopes that Kerry will be successful in his trip to the region this week so that a comprehensive strategy, to which all major powers in the region have subscribed, will be ready for presentation at the start of the annual meeting of the UN general assembly in New York at the end of September.

The New York Times reports that one element of the administration’s strategy is for Congress to approve $500 million in funding to train and arm moderate Syrian rebels to fight ISIS. The legislation has stalled on the Hill.

The United States has already launched more than 150 air strikes on ISIS targets in Iraq since the air campaign began on 8 August. The United States has also sent more than 1,200 Special Operations forces, and others described as military “advisers,” to the region. The purpose of these forces has been officially described as protecting U.S. interests in Baghdad and Irbil.

Obama’s speech follows weeks of internal deliberations and discussions and pressures from allies in Europe and in the region. There is a political context, too. Some of his advisers, and some leading Democrats, have urged a tougher and more decisive action against ISIS to counteract the reputation he has acquired, justifiably or not, as a weak and indecisive commander-in-chief who appears unsure when facing crises such as Ukraine and Syria.

On Monday, Obama hosted a three-hour dinner for leading national security experts from previous administrations, in which the U.S. strategy toward ISIS was discussed.

“The big picture is that this is going to be a very long-term proposition, that American leadership is necessary, and that this can’t turn into a U.S. versus Sunni battle,” one of the guests, Samuel R. Berger, who was national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, told the Times. “It has to be us helping the Sunnis battle the Sunni extremists.”

The Syria problem
The thorniest aspect the new strategy will have to overcome is whether and how to conduct military operations in Syria – and the ultimate purpose of these operations. To understand why any operation in Syria poses more problems than operations in Iraq, there is a need to understand the reasons for the rise of ISIS.

The rise of ISIS in Syria was no accident. It was the result of three related developments:

The rebellion against the Assad regime began in February 2011 and was initially led by secular and moderate Sunni forces, many of them defectors from the Syrian army. The United States and other Western powers hesitated whether and how to help these forces because of worries about their reliability and long-term viability.

While the moderate rebels were starved, two other actors in the Syrian theater had no problem receiving massive help. The Assad regime was supported to the hilt by Iran and Russia, and in the spring of 2013 Iran ordered its local agent, the Lebanese Shi’a group Hezbollah, to send thousands of fighters to aid the Assad regime which, at tht point, appeared to be losing the battle for key areas in western Syria.

On the other side, the initially small Jihadist groups – first Jabhat al-Nusra and then ISIS — received an increasingly more generous support from Qatar, a tiny Gulf sheikhdom which has made it a central element of its foreign policy to use its billions in petro-dollars to support Jihadist groups in the Middle East and North Africa.

The third major contributor to the rise of ISIS was the deliberate policies of the Assad regime (see “Assad bolsters al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria with secret oil deals, prisoner release: Western intelligence,” HSNW, 21 January 2014). Assad and his Iran supporters viewed the moderate Syrian rebels as more threatening to the regime than the Jihadists. Assad, therefore, began, directly and indirectly, to assist the Islamists in their effort to gain the upper hand in the rebellion against him:

• The regime forces stopped their attacks on the Islamists, and instead directed their fire against the moderate rebels and the communities which supported them
• Islamists leaders and commanders were released from Syrian jails so they could re-join the ranks of Islamist groups
• Assad allowed the Islamist groups not only to control, undisturbed, vast swaths of Syrian territory, but also allowed the Islamists to fill their coffers by facilitating the selling of oil from oil wells in these areas

The Islamists, in turn, reciprocated by concentrating on fighting the moderate Syrian rebels rather than the regime forces.

The result of these three developments was inevitable: The Islamists now dominate the Syrian opposition to Assad, and the moderate Syrian rebels are in tatters.

Assad’s calculation was straightforward. An anti-regime rebellion dominated by Jihadists will find it impossible to gain support in the West – and it will also find it much more difficult, if not impossible, to gain support from the majority Sunnis in Syria itself who are moderate by disposition. The rise of the Jihadists will also allow Assad and Iran to portray themselves as being on the forefront in the fight against Islamist terrorism, thus extracting concessions from the West which otherwise would have been impossible.

Assad and Iran were largely correct in their policy of allowing the Islamists to dominate the anti-Assad rebellion – except that the Frankenstein they helped create grew too big and too dangerous, as ISIS success in Iraq has shown.

The other result will be presented by Obama tonight: the creation of a united Western and regional coalition to defeat ISIS – including operations inside Syria. The problem the creation of such a coalition presents for for Iran and Russia is clear.

In the immediate run, attacks on ISIS targets in Syria will help the Assad regime. ISIS has grown sufficiently in power and confidence that it no longer needs the Assad regime for help against the moderate Syrian rebels. Thus, in the last few months ISIS forces have attacked Syrian military bases, and the organization has distributed gruesome videos of hundreds of Syrian soldiers being marched in their underwear to be machine-gunned. The Syrian air force, for the first time since the civil war began, has launched air strikes against ISIS positions in eastern Syria.

Over time, however, as the coalition’s operations against ISIS in Syria are successful and as the strength of the moderate Syrian rebels increases as a result of Western military aid, the anti-ISIS campaign will cause problems for Assad since it will infuse new life into a broadly supported moderate Sunni rebellion against the regime, this time properly equipped militarily and no longer in need of defending itself against Islamist attacks. Assad’s policy of encouraging the Islamists to dominate the rebellion against him was meant to address this problem, but a coordinated coalition destruction of ISIS will revive it.

The United States will then face a quandary: Some members of the anti-ISIS coalition – especially France, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states (except Qatar), Jordan, and Turkey – may want to exploit the weakness of ISIS and the renewed strength of the moderate rebels to drive Assad from power. Such a move, however, will create new tensions with Assad’s two supporters – Iran and Russia.