BLOODY IRAQ: Where's A Saladin When You Need One?

“You break it, you own it,” it has been said. Besides The Pottery Barn, a retired four-star general had expressed that warning. The remark purportedly came from Colin Powell just prior to the invasion of Iraq. At the time of his declaration he was the Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. Who he made that comment to, and exactly when he said it is unclear. Irrespective of that bit of lore, eleven years later, post U.S. invasion and U.S. withdrawal, not to forget 4486 U.S. military killed in action, perhaps 100,000 casualties, Iraq is most certainly broken, however, Secretary Powell’s comment was hardly prophetic.  

In an Op-Ed on June 17, 2014 titled," Ghosts of Religious Wars Past Are Rattling In Iraq for "Foreign Policy" magazine and its’ online publication, retired four-star U.S. Navy Admiral James Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, and current President of Fletcher School of Law at Tufts, states, "As Sunnis and Shi’ites tear their societies societies apart throughout parts of the Arab world, old ghosts are indeed rattling from the eastern Mediterranean and Levant to the northern Arabian Gulf. We watch with horror and near disbelief as radicalized elements on both sides of the Islamic faith take up arms in Iraq and Syria in increasingly vicious ways. But in the West, we have seen this play out before: in the Christian faith, during the wars of the Reformation.” Crafted with wit as the Admiral usually does, the piece is short, and therefore somewhat of an oversimplification of a much muddled reality, however he does go on to postulate that the spreading conflict is not just about religion. Roger that!

The events that have been unfolding in Iraq over the last six months, and rapidly escalating in recent weeks, are incredibly complicated, and cannot be reduced to comparisons of religious fervor gone widespread murderous, which would be akin to attributing the decimation of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, and four murdered Americans, to an overzealous spontaneous protest against an obscure anti-Mohammed YouTube video. The movement of ISIS through Iraq with blitzkrieg speed has been calculated, and alarmingly successful, no doubt especially to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the terrorist group’s leader. It is so complex that if the diagram were to be looked at in the manner the FBI used to put the top mafia families up on an office wall, the convoluted mess of arrows going this way and that would probably take up half of the wall space at the Pentagon. And believe it or not, some of the arrows would originate at the CIA annex and U.S. consulate in Benghazi, before going across the Mediterranean to Turkey and then Syria, and then finally down to Iraq. The money trail is even more complicated, but here's a hint: Wahhabi Sunni - the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Remember, Nouri al-Malaki and his government are Shi'ites, and so is Iran. So there are many conflicts of interest for the United States, but if you're a CIA guy looking for the assignment of a career, this is gourmet Italian bistro to a lover of pasta.

Once a ragtag, and relatively small band of radical Sunni fundamentalists aligned with Osama bi Laden and al Qaeda, ISIS is rapidly growing in numbers, newly equipped with billions of dollars of U.S. military hardware and weapons, perhaps even stinger missiles, freshly financed from plundered banks throughout Northern Iraq as well as from other sources in the Middle East, and emboldened as never before. For these particular radical Islamists, a group only ten years in the making, as all insurrectionists who have gone down in history before them, bin Laden’s al Qaeda included, success tends to breed success, and at the risk of being cliché, to ISIS, the ends justify the means.

As Iraq implodes into chaos, as never before seen in modern times, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s tactics have been seen as ruthless and barbaric, the atrocities being well covered by the media. And ISIS is not hiding anything, quite the contrary. The insurgents themselves are supplying video of the butchery, footage that includes summary executions of thousands of captured Iraqi army regulars, beheadings, crucifixions, and other various atrocities, which are mostly being committed against Shi’ites, the highest percentage of the Iraqi army’s compliment, or against those in opposition to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. There have also been reported cases of the random, intentional murder of untold numbers of unarmed civilians, which would be par for the course for any insurgent operation in that area of the world.

History over the last 1400 years has proven that such brutal tactics being employed by these new radical Islamists are nothing new to the region, or to Islam in general. What is new, and very effective is the use of YouTube, Facebook, and other forms of social media to publish the brutality in near real-time across the expanse of planet earth. The result, and a very calculated one, has been mass desertions of Iraqi army who don’t want to go the way of their previously captured fellow soldiers, comrades that they have watched being massacred on the screens of their mobile phones. The deserters are simply putting their weapons down on the ground, abandoning tanks, trucks, and HUMVs, and fleeing for their lives in fear, even before the greatly outnumbered ISIS has even engaged them, or attacked the objective. Now the ISIS victories across northern Iraq are a rallying cry for jihadists or wannabe jihadists everywhere. Their numbers will surely rapidly increase. Think Spartacus on steroids, building an army to fight Rome, and al-Baghdadi has more going for him than Spartacus did.  

ISIS may want to continue to strike while they have the momentum, however their numbers are still relatively small compared to the forces of any counter attack planned by Nouri al-Maliki in the defense of Baghdad. Seasoned ISIS commanders will want to wait. Ramadan which occurs in one week aside, the summers in Iraq are brutally hot and now al-Baghdadi can well afford to wait out 40 degree plus Celsius heat as his insurgent forces regroup, recruit, and train for a fall offensive of Baghdad and the oil refineries in the south. His new recruits will be made up of fanatics, disenchanted youth, unemployed and socially rejected, Americans included, who will all have a beacon, something to be a member of, a cause. The ISIS numbers will begin to swell suddenly, and as predictably as the illegal children immigrants flood into the United States across the southern borders was, a flood that continues unabated by the way, and that's here on our own soil. What will President Obama do about something half a world away? He doesn't think globally, at least not since he's been the president of the United States. In addition, calls for immediate drone attacks by politicians, political pundits, and media commentators are ridiculous. Use of UAVs, such as the Predator, or other airstrikes launched from the USS George Bush, would not only be ineffective ground-based spotters, but counterproductive due to civilian collateral casualties. The human shield defensive strategy is very popular and easily done by a fighting force willing to die for their cause and not having one relational connection to the indigent population. Even more of a bad idea than airstrikes is the notion of coordinating with Iran to squelch the hostilities, which would only result in the United States aiding Khamenei in seizing control of the entire Middle East. Has anyone at the State Department or in the Obama Administration thought to ask what Israel thinks about that?

With the absence of a modern day version of Saladin, the Kurdish Sunni from Syria, barbaric and ruthless in war, but merciful in surrender and peace, ISIS will not stop after Iraq. Their mission is the establishment of a new Islamic Caliphate with a greater reach than that of Saladin in the 12th century, or the Ottoman Empire at its zenith.  Since the United States cannot undo the past, the arguments for what should or should not have been done, and who’s fault is, etc., being irrelevant and inconsequential, we must focus on viable solutions, unfortunate as they may be, and all with consequences.

1.     Nouri al-Maliki is essentially ineffective and impotent at this point. There should be concentrated, covert efforts made to have him and his government ousted and replaced before some very radical element even more closely associated with Iran, or even worse, ISIS, does it for us. Jawad al-Bulani, an engineer in Saddam Hussein’s Air Force and former head of the Unity Alliance of Iraq is a logical choice to replace al-Maliki, as he is more sympathetic of the Sunni minority, as well as less myopically power hungry than the corrupt al-Maliki has proven to be.

2.      ISIS must be defeated in a conventional sense of the word, with whatever fire power and U.S. presence that it takes to do that.  By no means should such action be unilateral. There must be leadership on the part of the United States, as clear and unequivocal as the coalition that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. The cancer must be stopped before Baghdad, and other Arabic states of Sunni majorities, particularly those that are Wahhabi, must not only be supportive, but must also aid in the defeat of the ISIS insurgency. For balance in the region it must not be an Iranian led effort. In fact, Iran should be left completely out of the equation.

3.     Once ISIS is destroyed, and those ISIS leaders and commanders, and insurgents responsible for the war crimes, which also include the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Mosul, Tikrit, and other Iraqi villages and cities, are tried and executed under Iraq law, then and only then, the United States must have the “Status of Forces” Agreement that currently is not in place. At the end of the day however, the United States must keep a substantial presence, we must remain there, in order to protect our interests and preserve our way of life, freedom, and the safety of our nation and our people.

Although extremely doubtful that the Obama administration would actually do something before Baghdad becomes the next Saigon or falls into the hands of Iran for protection and control, the plan laid out is the wisest course of action for the United States to take, the best idea in a list of alternative choices that are all exceedingly bad.  The consequences of the above are numerous however, and include a divided Iraq, with the Kurds finally having a place to call home, as well as a Kurdish stake in Iraqi oil production. Relations with Russia might be further impacted negatively, but one must ask, “How much worse can it get from where we are now after the Clinton Reset?” Perhaps our relations with Putin might actually improve due to a demonstrated resolve on the part of the United States to finally lead. There are other consequences too numerous to discuss here, however the consequences of not doing what has been set forth above, or dithering further, as the president so often does, are perhaps, much worse, and include putting Israel into such a corner that they have no choice but to use the Samson option for the entire region. Samson of course killed all of the Philistines when pulled down the pillars, but unfortunately caused his very own death in the process; the "Samson Option" - Israel's hypothetical option of massive nuclear retaliation leaving the all of the Middle East a nuclear wasteland. That is not the place that we want to go. 

Finally, reiterating the point that Mr. Stavridis had made, the final chapter written about the events occurring in Iraq will be about power and not religion. Who ends up in power will be decided by the actions of the United States. It has always been predicted that World War III will be sparked by a series of events that have their genesis in the Middle East. Let’s see what happens.