There seems to be general consensus of approval in the international community regarding the initiative taken by the US to form a coalition (that includes also some notable Arab countries) to bomb the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq.
President Obama has described the Islamic State as “unique in its brutality”. It is a fanatical movement led by extremists of the worst kind. Muslim countries of the most traditional type have joined in condemning them. If unchecked the group with its ruthless doctrine of Jihad would heap unprecedented chaos on the world. The West is the most vulnerable because some of the worst diehards (estimated to comprise several hundreds) of the Islamic State army are actual citizens of these countries, including the US itself, the UK, France, Australia and others.
“They enslave, rape and force women into marriage. They threaten religious minorities with genocide. In acts of barbarism, they took the lives of two American journalists,” said Obama. On September 13 they also beheaded the British aid worker David Haines. In Algeria they beheaded an innocent French tourist to force France to rethink its commitment to join forces with the US-led coalition to bomb IS sites in Iraq.
The Islamic State group by its brutality has created strong opposition to its continued existence in the leadership of many traditional Muslim countries who see it as a serious threat to the stability of the governments in their own countries. However, it has also gained the sympathy and support of thousands upon thousands of adherents at ground level in these very same countries who would be ready to rally behind the group’s revolutionary banner.
The question is: Will bombing alone from the air achieve the destruction of IS? In Pakistan and Yemen drone strikes have destroyed much of al-Qaeda’s leadership, but the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan was successfully accomplished after long-term planning and by using US ground elite forces in the conventional manner. The IS group already controls large swathes of land in Syria and Iraq with an army of fanatics of thousands in possession of highly sophisticated weapons. In these circumstances a ground attack could develop into the least desired scenario reminiscent of Vietnam at its worst.
It is probable that many of these weapons are of Western origin generously given by these same governments to the opposition in the Syrian uprising against Bashar al-Assad. There was already much apprehension in the West about the composition of the opposition in Syria. It was known that many were ideologically in sympathy with extreme positions of Islam.
The situation is much the same as what has happened in Libya where the opposition to Gaddafi was armed to its teeth by Western governments. These weapons are now being used to destabilise the legitimate post-Gaddafi governments.
There is no doubt also that Russia with Putin at his most belligerent mood is secretly arming the Jihadists in the Middle east for no other reason but to destabilise the West which would allow him a freer hand in his backyard (especially Ukraine). The role of China is not yet clear, but what is certain is that it will not move a finger to help find a solution unless its economic might is also threatened.
The so-called war on terror has done nothing but produce more wars and more terror
In this complicated scenario the West comes out confused and with no clear strategy. It reacts to events as they come with no long-term planning. President Obama is the fourth successive US leader to order air strikes on Iraq. This must have been a traumatic experience to him as a Nobel Prize winner for peace remembering his rallying cry as the raw presidential candidate in 2008 who promised to end the presence of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama (before him George Bush) with David Cameron (before him Tony Blair/Gordon Brown) and Francois Hollande (before him Nicholas Sarkosy) have entered into a spiral of involvement in the extremely complicated affairs of Islamic states which the West has rarely understood properly. How do you guarantee Sunni participation in the new Iraq? How do you get Sunni Arabia and Shia Iran to a negotiating table? How do you get the many tribes in Libya to agree to a government of national unity?
In Egypt the West has forgotten its commitment to democracy so loudly expounded during the ‘Arab Spring’ and allowed President Sisi to run roughshod over human rights in his fight against former President Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood. The Syrian air defence system strangely remained silent during the recent long-distance US raids on IS targets in Syria. Could this be the first signs of a rapprochement by the US towards president Bashar al-Assad as the lesser of two evils?
Perhaps the lesson that should have been learnt from all these negative experiences was for the West not to get too involved in such complicated issues. Let them stew in their own juices. The so-called war on terror – now 13 years old and stretching from Iran to Iraq and Syria, from Afghanistan to Pakistan, from Iraq to Yemen, from Libya to Somalia – has done nothing but produce more wars and more terror.