by Paul Rogers
Night
launch of F-18s from USS George H.W. Bush in the Arabian
Sea to conduct strike missions against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL) targets.
U.S.
Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Robert Burck – Wikimedia Commons
A major new war has begun in the Middle East. But the Islamic State movement is prepared, and the precedents are bleak.
George
W Bush, the United States president, was unequivocal in his response to the
9/11 attacks. Al-Qaida was a threat to the world and must be destroyed; the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan would be terminated; western states should give
strong support to the US in its immediate military assaults.
At the
time, a handful of analysts in think-tanks such as Oxford Research Group and Focus
on the Global South warned against such instant responses. They argued that al-Qaida sought
confrontation and that 9/11 had been a provocation with this aim in mind. After
all, one superpower had already been humbled in Afghanistan during the 1980s; here was a
chance to repeat the action against another, however long it might take.
The
regime in Kabul was indeed terminated in a matter of weeks, and in January 2002
- two months after the Taliban had gone - Bush delivered his first
state-of-the-union address as president. He extended the war against al-Qaida to a much broader
conflict against an “axis of evil”, the immediate enemy being the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. This received rapturous applause.
As war
loomed a year later, the rhetoric escalated. The Baghdad regime was declared a
threat to the world, in part on account of its alleged possession of missiles loaded with weapons
of mass destruction that could be launched in forty-five minutes. Saddam was
overthrown within three weeks in March-April 2003; the following month, Bush
made his “mission accomplished” speech to great acclaim.
In the
event, the war in Afghanistan was to last thirteen years before the US withdrew
most of its troops. There may be much more insecurity yet to come (see "Afghanistan: state of insecurity", 31 July 2014). Iraq developed into a
bitter eight-year war that cost well over 100,000 lives and is now leading on
to a third major confrontation. Al-Qaida may be a shadow of its former self but
as an idea it is gaining more potency and fresh recruits. There are evolving
movements fired by the idea in Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Libya and many
other countries; a determined and brutal offshoot, Islamic State (IS), controls substantial territory in
Syria and Iraq.
George
W Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, insists that Islamic State must be degraded
and ultimately destroyed. The war started in earnest with major bombardments on 22-23 September 2014. The one big
difference between now and 2001 or 2003 may be that senior military in
Washington are saying from the start that this will be a long war stretching
over years (see "The thirty-year war, continued", 11 September 2014).
Even
so, in spite of presumed war weariness, majority opinion in the US is moving in
favour of war. In Britain, prime minister David Cameron is seeking and will likely get cross-party support for
UK strike aircraft to join in. Most of the public in the UK was recently
assessed as being opposed to direct involvement, but that may change in the
face of repeated claims of immediate threat.
The Islamic State view
The
air-raids earlier this week were much more substantial than reported in
established media outlets. Most were undertaken by the United States, using cruise-missiles,
drones, the F-22 stealth-aircraft and other systems from the airforce, navy and
marines, with five Arab states playing more of a symbolic support role.
The
operations, far more intense than the seven weeks of bombing IS targets in Iraq, hit twenty-two sites in
three broad areas across northern Syria. One of the best-informed US journals, Military
Times, reports:
“Monday
night’s attacks involved about 200 munitions, a defense official said, making
it far more intense than the air campaign over Iraq that began Aug. 8, which
have rarely targeted more than one or two sites at a time.”
The
intensity of the assaults may suggest that IS will be rapidly crippled, but
this is very far from the truth. The previous column in this series pointed to the limited impact of the US
attacks in Iraq so far (see "Into the third Iraq war", 18 September 2014). There are also
numerous reports that, days before being attacked, IS paramilitaries in Raqqa
and elsewhere had already dispersed from their bases into the city. Thus, the
buildings targeted were largely empty.
“So
far, the strikes have not targeted large urban areas such as Mosul, Fallujah
and Tikrit, where breaking the extremists’ grip is harder and the risk of
civilian casualties is higher. In a sign of their confidence, Islamic State group
fighters paraded 30 captured Iraqi soldiers in pickup trucks through the
streets of Fallujah on Tuesday, only hours after the coalition strikes across
the border in Syria.”
This
should not come as a surprise. The core of the Islamic State
is formed of determined paramilitaries, many of them combat-trained young men
who survived the ugly war fought by US and UK special forces
against Iraqi Sunni insurgents during the Iraq war after 2003.
As
this new war accelerates, it is wise to assume that Islamic State is
not only ready for this but welcomes it. The movement will be particularly
pleased that the Pentagon is preparing to deploy an army division headquarters
to Iraq, a strong indication that many more troops will be moved there in the coming weeks. The possibility
of capturing US military personnel is particularly attractive (see "America and Islamic State: mission
creeping?", 21 August 2014).
The longer term
The
fact that Washington is in coalition with five Sunni Arab states is not so
much irrelevant as to be expected by IS.
After all, radical jihadist movements in the Middle East for at least
two decades have been opposed to the “near enemy” of autocratic regimes just as
much as to the “far enemy” of the United States, these regimes' consistent
backer.
For
now, Obama will have much domestic support, as will Cameron in the UK, Francois
Hollande in France and not forgetting Tony Abbott in Australia. Furthermore, the intensive air
assault that will develop in the coming weeks will most certainly give an
impression of progress, with the Islamic State reported as being much diminished.
In the
short term, though, even the positive spin might not ring true. It is uncertain
how IS will react in the next few days, what will happen to the multiple
hostages, or whether it will launch diversionary attacks (for example, on the
US base that is rapidly building up at Baghdad international airport) or
engineer some completely unexpected event.
In any
case, it is the longer term that counts. It is all too likely that this war, a
couple of years hence, will look every bit as misjudged and futile as the previous
two.
Paul Rogers is professor in the department
of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is
openDemocracy's international-security editor, and has been writing a weekly
column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly
briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity,
2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century(Pluto Press, 3rd
edition, 2010). He is on twitter at: @ProfPRogers
This article first appeared on openDemocracy 25 September 2014.