In the absence of a U.S. ‘strategy’, Middle East braces for ‘the big war’

Special to WorldTribune.com

U.S. President Barack Obama referred early last year to Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) as a JV team.

ISIL’s subsequent rampage through Iraq and Syria proved Obama wrong, but analysts cited by a McClatchyDC report think the worst has yet to come.

“The conditions are very much like 1914,” said Michael Stephens of the Royal United Service Institute in London. “All it will take is one little spark, and Iran and Saudi Arabia will go at each other, believing they are fighting a defensive war.”

Iraqi fighters battle ISIL on the outskirts of the Baiji oil refinery on May 25.  /AFP/Getty Images
Iraqi fighters battle ISIL on the outskirts of the Baiji oil refinery on May 25. /AFP/Getty Images

Iraqi Kurdish commentator Hiwa Osman believes “the whole region is braced for the big war, the war that has not yet happened, the Shiite-Sunni war.”

The Obama administration’s detachment from the current Middle East conflicts has been widely noted – in Syria and Iraq; in Yemen, where Saudi forces are bombing pro-Iranian Houthi rebels; and Libya, where Egypt has mounted airstrikes against ISIL-aligned jihadists.

Though the international system is very different from 1914, when the two competing European alliances went to war, some see similarities.

That was “a crisis nobody wanted to have. When it came, it would be over in a few months’ time. It would end all wars. Everybody knows what happened,” said Thorbjorn Jagland, a Norwegian politician and secretary general of the Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog body.

“I don’t want to call the leaders today sleepwalkers, but maybe they have entered into a situation that nobody intended or wanted,” Jagland said.

The absence of a U.S strategy or even plan to stabilize the Middle East, has been in the news this week after Obama said at the G-7 Summit in Germany on June 8 that his administration did not yet have a “complete strategy” to defeat ISIL, a comment the White House later said was misinterpreted.

“We really don’t have a strategy at all. We’re basically playing this day by day,” Robert Gates, former defense secretary under Obama, said.

The U.S. continues to send weapons and military advisers to Iraq with little to show for it as Iraqi forces have suffered several devastating defeats, most recently losing the Sunni city of Ramadi.

Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, now serving as envoy to the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIL, said “will be a long campaign” and defeating ISIL’s ideology will take “a generation or more.”

Osman said that ISIL “cannot be ended by Kurds, Shiites, Americans or Iran. It has to be done by Sunni Arabs. You need to present them with a deal for the day after ISIL is defeated. And no one has managed to articulate that vision for them.”

Toby Dodge, a scholar on Iraq who teaches at the London School of Economics, said an Iraqi civil war “is almost unavoidable.”

“I am extremely pessimistic,” he said, adding that he doubts Prime Minister Haider al Abadi, “a very decent man, a smart man,” could save Iraq. “He’s hostage to his own constituency, radical Shiite Islamism. What he needs is to appeal to the disenfranchised Sunnis of the northwest.”

Other analysts say Iraq, with the help of the U.S., can be saved if it commits to the decentralization of power, reconciliation with Baathists and other concessions that would motivate Sunnis to drive out ISIL.

That would be “feasible, absolutely,” says Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, but he added that the Obama administration is not making the effort.

“I believe it is negligence,” he said. “They continue to insist we can’t want this more than the Iraqis. . . . This is historical nonsense. If you leave it to the Iraqis, they won’t do the right thing even if they want to.”

Gen. Allen’s recent comments did not cover a strategy for Syria, where pro-Western rebels are willing to take on ISIL but seek to oust President Bashar Assad, who has allowed ISIL to seize and hold territory, mostly without a fight.

ISIL recently launched an offensive near Syria’s largest city of Aleppo and Assad’s response was to bomb rebel forces and not ISIL. The U.S. answered with just one air strike on ISIL, which was not coordinated with rebels on the ground. Experts believe the U.S. likely won’t block ISIL from advancing on Aleppo.

“I just don’t think they care,” said Pollack.

“There are too many actors and too many unknowns. Everyone seems to be stuck in his own way,” said Altay Cengizer, director of policy planning at the Turkish Foreign Ministry. “We are playing with fire. You cannot all day long play with fire. A fire will start.”

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