My opinions about war and Iraq keep changing. As I see war from a long term perspective, the realities of war and what it accomplishes are not pretty. The reality is that many people lose their lives, sanity, property, money, become badly injured in wars. America was spending 12 billion a month just to keep a presence in Iraq when there was no major fighting which really adds up over the course of a decade. We don’t have the money. Additionally, I felt (past tense) that we didn’t have an ethical right to be there in the first place. If they want to destroy their country, let them do it — not us, was my line of thought.
The truth of American warfare is that many of the wars we fought were to remove someone evil or some evil agency from power. The problem with this is that every single time we succeeded in getting rid of someone, an even worse organization took over afterwards. The same applies to the Arab countries that had revolutions. They had brutal dictators, overthrew them, and now have militant Islamists in control who are completely unruly and brutal. They were better off with their dictators.
The United States removed Saddam Hussein, the butcher of Baghdad from office. What we were too naive to understand is that most politicians in Iraq and many/most other Arab countries are absolutely ruthless, violent, and have no qualms about administering the use of torture, even to those who don’t merit it. What we didn’t realize at the time was that Saddam held Iraq together at a time when few if any others would have been able to do so.
Iraq is a country with three main social divisions. There are Shiites to the South, Sunnis in the middle (who are the largest group,) and a small minority of Kurds and Christians in the Northern provinces. The United States created an artificial government modeled after our American multi-racial lets all get together and sing Kumbaya style government. Just because we are able to integrate whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians successfully (for now) in America doesn’t mean that they can integrate in Iraq. Although blacks were slaves in American until around 1865, they were never subjected to any large scale massacres, nor did they ever have any large scale persecution of whites or anyone else. Additionally, the United states has had 149 years of attempted integration since slavery. We have been working at this for a long time. Iraqis have been murdering each other on the basis of religion, religious sect, or ethnicity for god knows how long, and perhaps they will need 149 years before they can have a multi-ethnic & multi-sectarian alliance. For now, it seems quite obvious that Iraq needs to be separated into three parts!
The British and the French drew the lines of national borders
Historically, the Arab countries didn’t know the borders they know now. Under the Ottomans, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan were all referred to as Syria and were one province. Before that, there were other empires that divided the land in various ways as well. The current boundaries of Arab countries are very artificial in nature. The colonizers knew that they would need to keep the natives divided, and the easiest way to divide them was based on religion. Lebanon and Syria were conveniently created dividing each into a country with Christians, Druze, Shiites, and Sunnis, not to mention a minority of Jews. These five sects would never be able to get along, hence an uprising would be very difficult. This is how the Europeans were able to control the Arabs for so long! British Palestine was also divided with a high density of Christians and Jews in the greater Jerusalem area (30 mile radius) and mostly Muslims in most of the other areas. In my opinion, the Arabs would function better if their national lines were drawn based on the religion of the people who lived in the area.
The US left military equipment up for grabs
I’m not sure who had the idiotic idea to have a unified puppet state of Iraq and leave them with lots of expensive US military equipment. The problem with this is that if the country falls apart — and it just did, that the equipment “might” fall into the wrong hands which is exactly what happened. If we had divided the country in to three parts, armed the Kurds heavily, armed the Shiites moderately, and left the Sunnis alone, each entity would have a relatively equal chance of surviving. The problem is that there is no commitment on the part of the Iraqis who work for our artificial government that we set up there.
A lack of commitment to do their job
I blame the officials in Iraq for having a lack of commitment to fighting terror. The reality is that the majority in control are Sunni, and Sunnis don’t want to fight other Sunni’s. It just doesn’t work that way. Entities change names over time, and different terror groups come and go. Nations change their boundaries and extremists cross borders on a whim. The only thing that defines Arabs is their sect, and that is the one thing that doesn’t change. In the workforce if you have ever worked with Millennials, you will notice that there is very little commitment as well. Perhaps it is a sign of the times. If their work has meaning and excitement they will work, but the minute the venture loses its luster, then you can expect them to slack off or quit which is sort of what happened with the new Iraqi army. Incidentally, when the US attacked Iraq during the second invasion, many of the members of the Iraqi army just took off their uniform, and walked away in civilian clothing.
I would say that based on what I am seeing in the news, this lack of commitment is not unique to Iraq. It seems that Egypt is the only government that has any commitment to crushing extremism. I also feel that Israel lacks commitment to eliminating terrorists. They feel that extremists will always be there, and that there is nothing they can do about it. But, this is not true. If they would rely less on high technology and risk their young boys to find the bad guys one by one and eliminate them, they could eliminate the bad guys. Israel finds it “easier” to just destroy buildings using their fighter jets rather than find particular bad guys. Sure, it is hard when bad guys hide behind civilians, but it is possible to get them if you are committed and willing to pay the price.
America also is not committed. Our style of warfare is to spend billions of taxpayer money to set up camp, and do lots of bombing campaigns. Like Israel, we destroy a lot of civilian infrastructure, but leave the individuals that we should be targeting alive.
Fight fire with fire
Although the extremists are very few in number, they seem to have the upper hand in many ways for various reasons. They easily cross national borders, while other governments can’t send their troops to particular nations so easily. They can hide unnoticed among civilians while American troops cannot. They also are not afraid to die. But, the biggest advantage they have on us is that they are committed. I have never heard of Al Qaeda deciding to “slow down” for a few years due to budget cuts, have you?
American policy needs to ignore borders as well
If the extremists can cross borders on a whim at a moment’s notice, then why can’t America? American policy is always restricted to attacking particular regions. But, if our target audience moves out of that particular region into a region that we can’t or won’t attack, or need to spend six months having a policy discussion as to whether we should attack. Then the extremists have won the battle. If we attack in Afghanistan and the bad guys stroll over to Pakistan, then they are safe and out of reach. American policy needs to be adapted to target groups, and/or types of groups no matter where they are. Since these groups easily function under the unwatchful eyes of local governments, the U.S. needs to ignore what those host governments say and just do what needs to be done militarily, otherwise we cannot win the war against extremism which could pose deadly dangers to us in the future.
American troops need to be able to hide behind civilians
Extremists are famous for hiding behind civilians. They always seem to have tremendous grass-root support for their operations and always have many places to hide and have unlimited access to human shields. While America had it’s Green Zone in Iraq, the minute our guys ventured out of the secured perimeter, we were victim to roadside bombs, ambushes and other attacks. In other words, we were sort of spinning our wheels having a long camping trip with no ability to eliminate threats within the country. Going back into Iraq and re-setting up our Green Zone won’t accomplish anything. What America needs to do is to learn to fight fire with fire. We need covert operatives who look like the locals, talk like the locals (or at least from someone from a nearby province) and can blend in. We need our guys to be able to hide behind civilians, and take the enemy by surprise. We need spies who can find each of the 10,000 or so enemy fighters and get them one by one. This doesn’t take a lot of money — it takes skill, and a type of skill that we don’t seem to train our soldiers to have.
25 years later
After two and a half decades of war in Iraq, you would think that America would have figured out how to win a war against a hidden enemy. Sure, our enemies are smart, but so aren’t we. We don’t need 200,000 troops to set up a summer camp in Iraq. We only need about 20,000 front-line soldiers who are as fearless of death as our enemies. Most soldiers don’t want to die, but if we could find a few thousand who were as committed and fearless as the extremists, we would have a fighting chance. Those soldiers don’t even need to be American citizens. They could be outsourced Kurdish or Israeli fighters.
If we don’t win this war
America is tired of war, and so am I. I especially don’t like us sticking our noses into other people’s countries. But, with Saddam gone, and people who are ten times as ruthless as he is in charge, we have a monster on our hands which does nothing but attract new fighters from all over the world. This new conflict in Iraq seems to me to be a definitive beginning of World War 3 since it already has fighters from all around the world on the side of ISIS, and could easily attract people from around the world on the side of civilization. ISIS doesn’t just want to control Iraq and Syria. They want to control everywhere from Morocco to Indonesia and reestablish the boundaries of the earlier Caliphates. They want to come to the United States and fly their flag over the White House, and they are smart and determined enough to be able to have a chance of being able to temporarily do that which is why I am increasingly concerned. Winning this war doesn’t mean winning some battle in some GPS coordinate in Iraq. It means finding each and every ISIS fighter or other extremist and removing them. That means either killing them or putting them on an island somewhere with lots of coconuts. America needs to wake up and realize that a serious unprecedented crisis is on our hands, and this problem won’t go away unless we learn how to fight in creative new ways that will eliminate this new threat.
I personally feel that the U.S. lacks the commitment to successfully overthrow extremists. I feel that the power of extremists will continue to grow in unpredictable ways. The danger can very easily grow out of control and I shudder to think of what could happen. I am deeply concerned, but there is not a whole lot that I can do. Maybe the Republicans will find an ugly and expensive way to solve this problem. We’ll wait and see.
Tweets:
(1) Al Qaeda has decided to “slow down” for several years due to budget cuts
(2) 3 reasons extremists have the upper hand over the U.S.
Ability to cross borders, hiding behind civilians, willingness to die & commitment.