RETHINKING SECURITY

The US has opted to pursue a strategy of control, with short-term objectives of containment and (some) rollback and a long term objective (it seems) of rolling back the Islamic State completely. But in doing so Washington is setting the state for the expansion of Iranian influence – and a backlash is beginning to emerge in Western policy circles. How to interpret this? 

In my piece with Nick Prime on control and US strategy in Iraq and Syria, many likely did not pay attention to our aside: 

If the Obama administration truly thought ISIL was the worst of the worst, they would be open to options that might more directly benefit the likes of Bashar al Assad or an expansionist Iran. Yet they would prefer that striking ISIL and other terror groups not benefit Assad.

More bluntly, how much does Washington want ISIL/ISIS/Daesh (I have opted to refer to it as the Islamic State here) stopped? How much would it be willing to trade off other priorities? 

This poses hard questions for Washington, questions that unfortunately are not getting responsible answers. Like it or not, the regional situation that US action in Iraq has in large part built makes US action against the Islamic State one step forward and one step back in terms of curtailing Iran. However, Washington does not get to rewind the clock – Iranian expansion post-2003 is a hard reality, as is the fact that American policymakers seem to be willing to put consideration of it on the back burner due to the political momentum behind striking the Islamic State. 

A (confusing) history of violence

The intra-regional, inter-state, and intra-state issues surrounding the war against the Islamic State are quite tangled. 

First, there is obviously the small matter of Iraqi local politics. The Islamic State was once a part of the motley group of murderous malcontents that followed one Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as he cut a bloody swath through Iraq’s sectarian Sunni-Shiite civil war. It is conventional wisdom now that the sectarian bias and oppression of Iraq’s post-Surge government helped lay the seeds for IS’ meteoric rise, but that’s not quite all of the problems involved in the matter. 

There is, as evidenced by the heavy participation of the Kurdish peshmerga and even the PKK, a significant Kurdish dimension to the current war against the Islamic State. Which has traditionally been something of a worry for Turkey and Iraq’s central government even if the latter successfully clinched an oil deal with the Kurds due to the need for a united front against the Islamic State. 

Meanwhile, in Syria the civil war helped generate much of the Islamic State’s current territorial gains and created a space for them to operate. So the civil war is now multi-sided: between Bashar Assad’s brutal regime, the Islamic State, various rebel groups and sub-groupings of rebel groups. 

Looming over all of this is Iran. Iran and Iranian proxies back Assad, Iran backs and directs groups currently shadowing Israel’s frontiers, and Iran backs key Iraqi militia and is going all-in to prevent Iraq from being taken over by the Islamic State or Sunni groups hostile to it. Iran and its proxies have invested significant blood and treasure in Iraq and Syria – its clients, if Assad’s casualty list is evidenced, have bled far more. 

However, Sunni Gulf States and others that view Iran as a threat are also both heavily engaged against the Islamic State and partially responsible for creating it – they, after all, funneled an enormous amount of both nonlethal and lethal support to their own proxies, helping create the chaos necessary for the Islamic State to rise.  They and Iran may be nominally “on the same side” when it comes to fighting the Islamic State, but this seems like more of a strange coincidence than cause for geopolitical cooperation and concert. 

American policy, strategy, and the problem of limited aims

Washington faces a hard problem. Having deposed Tehran’s opponent Saddam Hussein, they directly enabled the spread of Iranian power. Of course, at the time no one cared. The idea that Tehran could spread its tentacles farther out once it no longer faced the serious threat of Iran-Iraq War 2.0 never occurred to those hellbent on forcing Saddam out. As a result, Iranian covert ops units and special operations forces were emboldened and empowered and Iranian diplomats suddenly found themselves welcome in Baghdad’s halls of power. 

The Sunni Gulf states and Israel became very upset about this, and loudly and often counterproductively attempted to galvanize Washington into action to prevent a potential Iranian regional hegemon from arising. One potential theory of why certain powers may have been motivated to deploy Stuxnet despite the fact that it caused little to no significant long-term damage to the Iranian nuclear program is that doing something could have been a way of re-assuring anxious regional players and their publics that the situation was under control. Perhaps this might have created some political maneuver space where it was otherwise lacking. 

America also recoils at the savagery and impunity of the (Iran-backed) Assad regime, and few shed tears over the deaths of Iranian spies and soldiers and their minions in the Syrian war (a good deal of whom are implicated in actions against America and its regional allies). So on one hand, Washington would obviously prefer to retract Tehran’s power, kill its external operatives, and wreck its militias and other proxies. For a while, direct military action in Syria (or indirect support to anti-regime militias) was floated, with the idea that Assad must be forced one way or another to leave. This was justified along both humanitarian and realpolitik lines – we have a “responsibility to protect” Syrian civilians and we can kneecap Iran on the way there. Win-win situation, right? Wrong. 

Washington would also like to prevent al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other non-state Sunni bad guys from taking root in Iraq and Syria. The crux of the problem is that it is hard to see how the US can simultaneously accomplish one objective without putting the other on the back burner. The Islamic State is a revolutionary force and both Washington and Tehran must step into the role of reactionary gendarme stamping out the fire. Though not as directly and obviously as the decision to overthrow Hussein, fighting the Islamic State also indirectly helps Iran, its proxies, and its clients. 

And, to boot, as we have noted the US is both stingy about what means it will allocate to the Islamic State fight and picky about the optics of how it actions look to domestic, regional, and perhaps international audiences. The Sunni states and Israel will not look kindly on cooperation with Iran and overt support for Assad is politically toxic and morally upside-down. But at the same time the US also is not willing to devote the time, energy, and resources to completely isolating itself from any hint of even indirect Iranian benefit or American-Iranian comity. 

Dancing with ourselves? 

As usual, the road taken was the middle one – no matter how half-baked the idea may sound. The US would not exert itself to overthrow Assad, it would supply some rebel groups in Syria with enough arms to look passable to domestic audiences – but with so much caveats and constraints that the support was worse than useless. Here, the US took the balance of its desire to overthrow Assad with the domestic political consequences of a future terrorist incident being traced back to US support for rebels and was not willing to incur risk. Washington struck the Islamic State and other groups in Syria and consciously downplayed the inevitable benefit to the Assad regime. 

In Iraq appearing to dance with ourselves is proving to be far more difficult. Both the US and Iran deal with the Iraqi security services and sub-state fighters.  Both the US and Iran operate militarily in Iraq against the same target. Perhaps some coordination – or at the very minimum, deconfliction – is going on. But for reasons otherwise stated the US is not going to partner with Iran or cooperate; besides the bad optics the US (for good reason) does not trust Tehran enough to establish the links necessary for effective teamwork. Aside from Kerry’s throwaway remark that Iranian strikes against the Islamic State are “positive” (which is not, in and of itself, too objectionable – dead Islamic State fighters are dead Islamic State fighters), there is not much to indicate US-Iranian cooperation or rapprochement.  

It may very well be that some kind of amorphous “detente” is underway, but as Vali Nasr notes in the linked piece it is hard to see shifts in US-Iranian relations as anything but a temporary geostrategic alignment rather than an conscious policy. Again, it amounts at most simply to a informal (and likely to be broken) non-aggression agreement as both focus on killing Islamic State militants. Moreover, aside from fringe voices like the Leveretts and others, there is no groundswell whatsoever for a thaw in US-Iranian relations. Perhaps the Obama administration’s recent nuclear negotiations with Tehran are naive and ill-informed, but the same could be said of US talks with the Soviets during the 1970s. There’s a big difference between that and the “Nixon goes to China” frame that the Leveretts and others hope to further in DC policy debates. 

Any kind of US-Iranian cooperation or the prospect of thaw is downplayed; the only politically important item on the agenda right now that enjoys broad support is the war against the Islamic State. Various American officials have made the Islamic State into Public Enemy #1 and vowed in bellicose language to destroy it. That we do not believe it will be “destroyed” – at least right now – is beside the point for this discussion. What matters is that resources, political capital, and targeting decisions are being made based on that understanding. 

Putting Assad and Iran on the backburner 

Hence the US, as noted earlier, abandoned the goal of overthrowing Assad. How could it not do so, when its jets share the skies with Syrian government airplanes during operations against the Islamic State? The US also has put on the backburner the idea that it is going to prioritize rolling back Iranian influence over fighting the Islamic State. 

Quite naturally, this state of affairs has caused significant consternation among those that would like the US to exert an equal amount (and likely more) of energy against Iran and its proxies than the Islamic State. Israeli President Netanyahu’s last-ditch effort to galvanize American elite and public opinion against Iran is being panned even by longtime political supporters, supporters of the “responsibility to protect” in Syria are raging against the switch from overthrowing Assad to containing the jihad, and some weave fantastical tales of an imminent US-Iranian concert over Iraq. Again, while ad-hoc de-confliction and temporary alignments are undeniable, it is hard to believe that Iran really is viewed as a responsible and useful partner in the Middle East’s wars. 

Certainly, as Philip Smyth rightly argues, the growth of Iranian influence should be viewed with concern and Americans should not delude themselves into believing that the war will do anything but produce a bumper crop of anti-American killers obedient to Tehran from Syria to Iraq. But the outrage comes without real, actionable policy recommendations as to what the US can do differently in Iraq and Syria. 

Washington simply cannot snap its fingers and magically wish away the reality of Iranian influence and power projection. Unfortunately the very Iraq War that many of those currently upset about Iranian power supported has created “facts on the ground” that will take an enormous amount of resources to reverse. Iran has a foothold and its deadliest rival is gone. Is the US going to publicly reprimand the Iraqi government when it states Iran is “helping” it beat back the Islamic State? 

If the US were willing to drop everything else it is doing and focus single-mindedly on rolling back both the Islamic State and Iran and its proxies and clients, perhaps this equation would be different. Of course, the US is not dropping everything else – we also see calls for the US to counter Russian aggression in Europe, pivot to the Pacific, hold the line in the Hindu Kush, and punish North Korea for allegedly hacking Sony Pictures Entertainment. And this is going on in the middle of a painful sequestration process that is exerting great strain on American military power. 

Hence the US does what it is willing to do in Iraq and Syria – not very much – and looks the other way if an air raid supports an Iranian-backed militia, client, or proxy. Denying R2P’s lost credibility in a last-ditch effort to prevent a policy reversal regarding Assad’s overthrow, fuming that Washington is not trying to simultaneously roll back Iran and the Islamic State, and other analytical responses do not help the situation. 

Unfortunately in political affairs there is a little something called “path dependence.” If Iranian power was politically and morally unacceptable, the time to have prevented it from re-emerging was prior to when the United States enabled its re-emergence by invading Iraq, deposing Hussein, and failing to prevent widespread insurgency, civil war, terrorism, and disorder. The consequence of this is that an “Islamic State Delenda Est” mentality can both make America and its allies safer – by wiping out bloodthirsty, al-Qaeda challenging killers and their Pol Pot-esque regime – and also simultaneously put us and our friends in greater danger by further enabling Tehran’s expansion of influence. 

But without a substantially enlarged mission concept, Washington cannot have it both ways.

Be careful what you wish for – or not 

There is no real lesson to be learned from this state of affairs beyond a generic “for the love of [insert your deity here] think it through before you attempt a major geopolitical re-alignment in a conflict-prone part of the world!” Which, of course, denies the reality that people can think it through and prize some things above others. To the Bush administration in 2002-2003, knocking over Hussein was more important than containing Iran. To the Obama administration in 2015, knocking over the Islamic State is more important than containing Iran. 

What do both situations have in common? There was an actual policy constituency in the US for overthrowing Hussein, contrary to the comforting myth that it was all just the Bush administration using black magic to cast a spell over the nation. Similarly, there is a strong consensus in favor of the current Obama administration move against the Islamic State. There is no giant groundswell for “fight the Islamic State but don’t forget to take the fight to Iran and the Assad regime too!” – putting the lie to the persistent myth of an all-powerful Israel Lobby. Similarly, R2P seems less like the fundamental re-definition of sovereignty Dan Trombly and I argued against years ago and more like a temporary bubble fueled by temporary circumstances and quickly undercut by its own manifest downsides in Libya and other locales. 

Whatever happens in Syria and Iraq – good or bad – is the result of strategy following policy (however amorphous and contradictory), not the absence of strategy. Strategy does not exist separate from policy, and policy is the result of politics. The politics of Iraq and Syria in 2015 point a certain direction, and analysis ought to acknowledge this first and foremost.