By
Danny Sjursen: The United States has already lost -- its
war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat
soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn’t be clearer to me.
Unfortunately, it’s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush’s
neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama’s quiet shift
to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn’t turn the
tide either. For all President Trump’s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest
assured that, at best, he’ll barely move the needle and, at worst… but why even
go there?
At this point, it’s at least reasonable to
look back and ask yet again: Why the failure? Explanations abound, of course.
Perhaps Americans were simply never tough enough and still need to take off the
kid gloves. Maybe there just weren’t ever enough troops. (Bring back the
draft!) Maybe all those hundreds of
thousands of bombs and missiles just came up short. (So how about
lots more of them, maybe even a nuke?)
Lead from the front. Lead from
behind. Surge
yet again… The list goes on -- and on and on.
And by now all of it, including Donald
Trump’s recent tough talk, represents such a familiar set of tunes. But what if
the problem is far deeper and more fundamental than any of that?
Here our nation stands, 15-plus years after
9/11, engaged militarily in half a dozen
countries across the Greater Middle East, with no end in sight. Perhaps a more
critical, factual reading of our recent past would illuminate the futility of
America’s tragic, ongoing project to somehow “destroy” terrorism in the Muslim
world.
The standard triumphalist version of the
last 100 or so years of our history might go something like this: in the
twentieth century, the United States repeatedly intervened, just in the nick of
time, to save the feeble Old World from militarism, fascism, and then, in the
Cold War, communism. It did indeed save the day in three global wars and
might have lived happily ever after as the world’s “sole
superpower” if not for the sudden emergence of a new menace.
Seemingly out of nowhere, “Islamo-fascists”
shattered American complacence with a sneak attack reminiscent of Pearl
Harbor. Collectively the people asked: Why do they hate us? Of
course, there was no time to really reflect, so the government simply got to
work, taking the fight to our new “medieval”
enemies on their own turf. It’s admittedly been a long, hard slog, but
what choice did our leaders have? Better, after all, to fight them in
Baghdad than Brooklyn.
What if, however, this foundational
narrative is not just flawed but little short of delusional? Alternative
accounts lead to wholly divergent conclusions and are more likely to inform
prudent policy in the Middle East.
Let’s reconsider just two key years for the
United States in that region: 1979 and 2003. America’s leadership learned
all the wrong “lessons” from those pivotal moments and has intervened there
ever since on the basis of some perverse version of them with results that have
been little short of disastrous. A more honest narrative of those moments
would lead to a far more modest, minimalist approach to a messy and tragic
region. The problem is that there seems to be something inherently
un-American about entertaining such thoughts.
1979 Revisited
Through the first half of the Cold War, the
Middle East remained a sideshow. In 1979, however, all that changed
radically. First, rising protests against the brutal police state of the
American-backed Shah of Iran led to regime collapse, the return of dissident
ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the declaration of an Islamic Republic. Then
Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for
more than 400 days. Of course, by then few Americans remembered the
CIA-instigated coup
of 1953 that had toppled a democratically elected Iranian prime minister,
preserved Western oil interests
in that country, and started both lands on this path (though Iranians clearly hadn’t
forgotten). The shock and duration of the hostage crisis undoubtedly
ensured that Jimmy Carter would be a one-term
president and -- to make matters worse -- Soviet troops intervened
in Afghanistan to shore up a communist government there. It was quite a year.
The alarmist conventional narrative of
these events went like this: the radical mullahs running Iran were irrational
zealots with an inexplicable loathing for the American way of life. As if
in a preview of 9/11, hearing those chants against “the Great Satan,” Americans
promptly began asking with true puzzlement: Why do they hate us? The
hostage crisis challenged world peace. Carter had to do something. Worse
yet, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan represented blatant conquest and
spotlighted the possibility of Red Army hordes pushing through to Iran en route
to the Persian Gulf’s vast oil reserves. It might prove the opening act
of the long awaited Soviet scheme for world domination or a possible path to
World War III.
Misinformed by such a tale that they
repeatedly told themselves, Washington officials then made terrible choices in
the Middle East. Let’s start with Iran. They mistook a nationalist
revolution and subsequent civil war within Islam for a singular attack on the
U.S.A. With little consideration of genuine Iranian gripes about the brutal
U.S.-backed dynasty of the Shah or the slightest appreciation for the
complexity of that country’s internal dynamics, they created a simple-minded
but convenient narrative in which the Iranians posed an existential threat to
this country. Little has changed in almost four decades.
Then, though few Americans could locate
Afghanistan on a map, most accepted that it was indeed a country of vital
strategic interest. Of course, with the opening of their archives, it’s
clear enough now that the Soviets never sought
the worldwide empire we imagined for them, especially not by 1979. The Soviet
leadership was, in fact, divided over the Afghan affair and intervened in Kabul
in a spirit more defensive than aggressive. Their desire or even ability to
drive towards the Persian Gulf was, at best, a fanciful American notion.
Nonetheless, the Iranian revolution and the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were combined into a tale of horror that would
lead to the permanent militarization of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Remembered today as a dove-in-chief, in his 1980 State of the Union address President Carter
announced a decidedly hawkish new doctrine that would come to bear his
name. From then on, he said, the U.S. would consider any threat to
Persian Gulf oil supplies a direct threat to this country and American troops
would, if necessary, unilaterally intervene to secure the region.
The results will seem painfully familiar
today: almost immediately, Washington policymakers began to seek military
solutions to virtually every problem in the Middle East. Within a year,
the administration of President Ronald Reagan would, for instance, support
Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s ruthless invasion of Iran, ignoring his more
vicious antics and his proclivity for gassing his own people.
Soon after, in 1983, the military created
the United States Central Command (headquarters: Tampa, Florida) with specific
responsibility for the Greater Middle East. Its early war plans
demonstrated just how wildly out of touch with reality American planners
already were by then. Operational blueprints,
for instance, focused on defeating Soviet armies in Iran before they could
reach the Persian Gulf. Planners imagined U.S. Army divisions crossing
Iran, itself in the midst of a major war with Iraq, to face off against a
Soviet armored juggernaut (just like the one that was always expected to burst
through Europe’s Fulda Gap). That such an assault was never coming, or
that the fiercely proud Iranians might object to the militaries of either superpower
crossing their territories, figured little in such early plans that were
monuments to American arrogance and naïveté.
From there, it was but a few short steps to
the permanent “defensive” basing of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain or later
the stationing of U.S. troops near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina to
protect Saudi Arabia from Iraqi attack. Few asked how such forces in the
heart of the Middle East would play on the Arab street or corroborate Islamist narratives
of “crusader” imperialism.
Worse yet, in those same years the CIA
armed and financed a grab bag of Afghan insurgent groups, most of them extreme
Islamists. Eager to turn Afghanistan into a Soviet “Vietnam,” no one in
Washington bothered to ask whether such guerrilla outfits conformed to our
purported principles or what the rebels would do if they won. Of course, the
victorious guerrillas contained foreign fighters and various Arab supporters,
including one Osama bin Laden. Eventually, the excesses of the well-armed
but morally bankrupt insurgents and warlords in Afghanistan triggered the
formation and ascension of the Taliban there, and from one of those guerrilla
outfits came a new organization that called itself al-Qaeda. The rest, as they
say, is history, and thanks to Chalmers Johnson’s appropriation of a classic CIA
term of spy craft, we now know it as blowback.
That was a major turning point for the U.S.
military. Before 1979, few of its troops had served in the region.
In the ensuing decades, America bombed, invaded, raided, sent its drones to
kill in, or attacked Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq again (and again), Somalia (again and again),
Libya again, Iraq once more, and now Syria as well. Before 1979, few --
if any -- American military personnel died in the Greater Middle East.
Few have died anywhere
else since.
2003 and After: Fantasies and Reality
Who wouldn’t agree that the 2003 invasion
of Iraq signified a major turning point both in the history of the Greater
Middle East and in our own? Nonetheless, its legacy remains highly
contested. The standard narrative goes like this: as the sole remaining
superpower on the planet after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, our
invincible military organized a swift and convincing defeat of Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq in the first Gulf War. After 9/11, that same military launched an
inventive, swift, and triumphant campaign in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden
escaped, of course, but his al-Qaeda network was shattered and the Taliban all but destroyed.
Naturally, the threat of Islamic terror was
never limited to the Hindu Kush, so Washington "had" to take its
fight against terror global. Admittedly, the subsequent conquest of Iraq
didn’t exactly turn out as planned and perhaps the Arabs weren’t quite ready
for American-style democracy anyway. Still, the U.S. was committed, had
shed blood, and had to stay the course, rather than cede momentum to the
terrorists. Anything less would have dishonored the venerated dead.
Luckily, President George W. Bush found an enlightened new commander, General
David Petraeus, who, with his famed “surge,” snatched
victory, or at least stability, from the jaws of defeat in
Iraq. He had the insurgency all but whipped. Then, just a few years
later, “spineless”
Barack Obama prematurely
pulled American forces out of that country, an act of weakness that led
directly to the rise of ISIS and the current nightmare in the region.
Only a strong, assertive successor to Obama could right such gross errors.
It’s a riveting tale, of course, even if it
is misguided in nearly every way imaginable. At each turn, Washington
learned the wrong lessons and drew perilous conclusions. At least the
first Gulf War -- to George H.W. Bush’s credit -- involved a large multinational
coalition and checked actual Iraqi aggression. Instead of
cheering Bush the Elder’s limited, prudent strategy, however, surging
neoconservatives demanded
to know why he had stopped short of taking the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. In
these years (and for this we can certainly thank Bush, among others), Americans
-- Republicans and Democrats alike -- became enamored
with military force and came to believe that it could solve just about any
problem in that region, if not the world.
This would prove a grotesque
misunderstanding of what had happened. The Gulf War had been an
anomaly. Triumphalist conclusions about it rested on the shakiest of
foundations. Only if an enemy fought exactly as the U.S. military
preferred it to do, as indeed Saddam’s forces did in 1991 -- conventionally, in
open desert, with outdated Soviet equipment -- could the U.S. expect such
success. Americans drew another conclusion entirely: that their military
was unstoppable.
The same faulty assumptions flowed from
Afghanistan in 2001. Information technology, Special Forces, CIA dollars
(to Afghan warlords), and smart bombs triggered victory with few conventional
foot soldiers needed. It seemed a forever formula and influenced both the
hasty decision to invade Iraq, and the irresponsibly undersized
force structure deployed (not to speak of the complete lack of serious
preparation for actually occupying that country). So powerful was the
optimism and jingoism of invasion proponents that skeptics were painted as unpatriotic
turncoats.
Then things turned ugly fast. This
time around, Saddam’s army simply melted away, state institutions broke down,
looting was rampant, and the three major communities of Iraq -- Sunni, Shia,
and Kurd -- began to battle for power. The invaders never received the
jubilant welcome predicted
for them by Bush administration officials and supportive neocons. What
began as a Sunni-based insurgency to regain power morphed into a nationalist
rebellion and then into an Islamist struggle against Westerners.
Nearly a century earlier, Britain had
formed Iraq from three separate Ottoman imperial provinces -- Baghdad, Basra,
and Mosul. The 2003 invasion blew up that synthetic state, held together
first by British overlords and then by Saddam’s brutal dictatorship.
American policymakers seemed genuinely surprised
by all this.
Those in Washington never adequately
understood the essential conundrum of forced regime change in Iraq.
“Democracy” there would inevitably result in Shia majority dominance of an
artificial state. Empowering the Shia drove the Sunni minority -- long
accustomed to power -- into the embrace of armed, motivated Islamists.
When societies fracture as Iraq’s did, often enough the worst among us rise to the
occasion. As the poet William Butler Yeats so famously put it, “Things
fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the
blood-dimmed tide is loosed… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are
full of passionate intensity.”
Furthermore, the invasion played
directly into Osama bin Laden’s hands, fueling his narrative of an American
“war on Islam.” In the process, the U.S. also destabilized Iraq’s
neighbors and the region, spreading extremists to Syria and elsewhere.
That David Petraeus’s surge “worked” is perhaps the greatest myth
of all. It was true that the steps he took resulted in a decrease in
violence after 2007, largely because he paid off the Sunni tribes, not because
of the modest U.S. troop increase ordered from Washington. By then, the
Shia had already won the sectarian civil war for Baghdad, intensifying
Sunni-Shia residential segregation there and so temporarily lessening the
capacity for carnage.
That post-surge “calm” was, however, no
more than a tactical pause in an ongoing regional sectarian war. No
fundamental problems had been resolved in post-Saddam Iraq, including the
nearly impossible task of integrating Sunni and Kurdish minorities into a
coherent national whole. Instead, Washington had left a highly sectarian
Shia strongman, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in control of the government
and internal security forces, while al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI (nonexistent prior
to the invasion), never would be eradicated. Its leadership, further
radicalized in U.S. Army prisons, bided its time, waiting for an
opportunity to win back Sunni fealty.
Luckily for AQI, as soon as the U.S.
military was pulled out of the country, Maliki promptly cracked down hard on
peaceful Sunni protests. He even had his Sunni vice president sentenced to
death in absentia under the most questionable of circumstances.
Maliki’s ineptitude would prove an AQI godsend.
Islamists, including AQI, also took
advantage of events in Syria. Autocrat Bashar al-Assad’s
brutal repression of his own protesting Sunni majority gave them just the
opening they needed. Of course, the revolt there might never have
occurred had not the invasion of Iraq destabilized
the entire region. In 2014, the former AQI leaders, having absorbed some
of Saddam’s cashiered officers into their new forces, triumphantly took
a series of Iraqi cities, including Mosul, sending the Iraqi army fleeing. They
then declared a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Many Iraqi Sunnis naturally turned
to the newly established “Islamic State” (ISIS) for protection.
Mission (Un)Accomplished!
It’s hardly controversial these days to
point out that the 2003 invasion (aka Operation Iraqi Freedom), far from
bringing freedom to that country, sowed chaos. Toppling Saddam’s brutal
regime tore down the edifice of a regional system that had stood for nearly a
century. However inadvertently, the U.S. military lit the fire that
burned down the old order.
As it turned out, no matter the efforts of
the globe’s greatest military, no easy foreign solution existed when it came to
Iraq. It rarely does. Unfortunately, few in Washington were willing
to accept such realities. Think of that as the twenty-first-century
American Achilles' heel: unwarranted optimism about the efficacy of U.S.
power. Policy in these years might best be summarized as: “we” have to do
something, and military force is the best -- perhaps the only -- feasible
option.
Has it worked? Is anybody, including
Americans, safer? Few in power even bother to ask such questions.
But the data is there. The Department of State counted just 348 terrorist
attacks worldwide in 2001 compared with 11,774
attacks in 2015. That’s right: at best, America’s 15-year “war on
terror” failed to significantly reduce international terrorism; at worst, its
actions helped make matters 30 times worse.
Recall the Hippocratic oath: “First do no
harm.” And remember Osama bin Laden’s stated goal
on 9/11: to draw conventional American forces into attritional campaigns in the
heart of the Middle East. Mission
accomplished!
In today’s world of “alternative
facts,” it’s proven remarkably easy to ignore such empirical data
and so avoid thorny questions. Recent events and contemporary political
discourse even suggest that the country’s political elites now inhabit a post-factual environment;
in terms of the Greater Middle East, this has been true for years.
It couldn’t be more obvious that
Washington’s officialdom regularly and repeatedly drew erroneous lessons from
the recent past and ignored a hard truth staring them in the face: U.S.
military action in the Middle East has solved nothing. At all. Only
the government cannot seem to accept this. Meanwhile, an American
fixation on one unsuitable term -- “isolationism”
-- masks a more apt description of American dogma in this period:
hyper-interventionism.
As for military leaders, they struggle to
admit failure when they -- and their troops -- have sacrificed so much sweat
and blood in the region. Senior officers display the soldier’s tendency
to confuse
performance with effectiveness, staying busy with being successful.
Prudent strategy requires differentiating between doing a lot and doing the
right things. As Einstein reputedly opined, “Insanity is doing the same thing
over and over again and expecting a different result.”
A realistic look at America’s recent past
in the Greater Middle East and a humbler perspective on its global role suggest
two unsatisfying but vital conclusions. First, false lessons and misbegotten
collective assumptions contributed to and created much of today’s regional
mess. As a result, it’s long past time to reassess recent history and
challenge long-held suppositions. Second, policymakers badly
overestimated the efficacy of American power, especially via the military, to
shape foreign peoples and cultures to their desires. In all of this, the
agency of locals and the inherent contingency of events were conveniently swept
aside.
So what now? It should be obvious (but
probably isn’t in Washington) that it’s well past time for the U.S. to bring
its incessant urge to respond militarily to the crisis of the moment under some
kind of control. Policymakers should accept realistic limitations on
their ability to shape the world to America’s desired image of it.
Consider the last few decades in Iraq and
Syria. In the 1990s, Washington employed economic sanctions against
Saddam Hussein and his regime. The result: tragedy to the tune of half a
million dead children. Then it tried invasion and democracy
promotion. The result: tragedy -- including 4,500-plus dead American soldiers, a few trillion
dollars down the drain, more than
200,000 dead Iraqis, and millions more displaced in
their own country or in flight as refugees.
In response, in Syria the U.S. tried only
limited intervention. Result: tragedy -- upwards of
300,000 dead and close to seven million
more turned into refugees.
So will tough talk
and escalated military action finally work this time around as the Trump
administration faces off against ISIS? Consider what happens even if the
U.S achieves a significant rollback of ISIS. Even if, in conjunction with
allied Kurdish or Syrian rebel forces, ISIS's “capital,” Raqqa, is taken and
the so-called caliphate destroyed, the ideology isn’t going away. Many of
its fighters are likely to transition back to an insurgency and there will be
no end to international terror in ISIS’s name. In the meantime, none of
this will have solved the underlying problems of artificial states now at the
edge of collapse or beyond, divided ethno-religious groups, and anti-Western
nationalist and religious sentiments. All of it begs the question: What
if Americans are incapable of helping (at least in a military sense)?
A real course correction is undoubtedly
impossible without at least a willingness to reconsider and reframe our recent
historical experiences. If the 2016 election is any indication, however,
a Trump administration with the present line-up of national security chiefs
(who fought
in these very wars) won’t meaningfully alter either the outlook or the policies
that led us to this moment. Candidate Trump offered a hollow promise --
to “Make America Great Again” -- conjuring up a mythical era that never
was. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton offered only remarkably dated and stale
rhetoric about America as the “indispensable
nation.”
In the new Trump era, neither major party
seems capable of escaping a shared commitment to the legends rather than the
facts of America’s recent past in the Greater Middle East. Both sides
remain eerily confident that the answers to contemporary foreign policy woes
lie in a mythical version of that past, whether Trump’s imaginary 1950s
paradise or Clinton’s fleeting mid-1990s “unipolar moment.”
Both ages are long gone, if they ever
really existed at all. Needed is some fresh thinking about our
militarized version of foreign policy and just maybe an urge, after all these
years, to do so much less. Patriotic fables certainly feel good, but they
achieve little. My advice: dare to be discomfited.
Major Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army
strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with
reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and
critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders
of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He
lives with his wife and four sons near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
[Note: The views expressed in this article
are those of the author in an unofficial capacity and do not reflect the
official policy or position of the Command and General Staff College,
Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]
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