The war Barack Obama didn’t want to fight

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/23/war-barack-obama-isis

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A month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Colin Powell, the then US secretary of state, tarnished a distinguished legacy with a riveting but now memorably tainted PowerPoint presentation at the UN security council on Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s collusion with al-Qaida terrorists. The security council refused to authorise a war, but Powell’s accusations had made it clear the conflict was imminent anyway. And so began that benighted war and its multiple offshoots, which were supposed to root out terrorism and insecurity but which in fact brought untold human suffering, carnage and instability on an unimaginable scale. Powell was a reluctant warrior but had no choice but to press for the conflict his president wanted to fight.

Barack Obama is a reluctant warrior as well, having come to power on a ticket of fierce criticism of the Bush-led Iraq invasion. But tomorrow, 11 years on, he will take to the same security council stage as Powell to urge the world to support a new US-led war targeting the surging Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq and Syria.

While Isis’s brutality and beheadings have unified the world in appalled condemnation, there is no consensus on how to defeat the insurgency, either among Washington’s allies, or more remarkably, within the administration itself. The geopolitics is further complicated by the US launchthis morning of air strikes on Isis sites inside Syria. Five Sunni Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, joined in the strikes, which makes questions about their legality moot.

Obama’s resistance to launching a war has for months made him the target of a sustained barrage of criticism, of a vehemence suffered by no other US president in the last 40 years. Media coverage of the Middle East crises routinely highlight his refusal to arm the “moderate” jihadists in Syria as the cause of the rise of the dreaded Isis. That connection was assumed to be an indisputable fact, as was the claim that a viable “moderate” armed jihadist group capable of overthrowing the Assad regime existed.

To get a sense of the pro-war shift in the US political landscape, recall how Bush’s infinitely more contentious 2003 war was preceded by a national debate. Merely a media-amplified campaign for stepped-up military intervention has preceded Obama’s war. Even within his party, there has been little support, with senior figures like Hillary Clinton pouring scorn on his reticence.

Given this shift in mood, the president has failed himself by not giving Americans a vision of how turbulence in the Middle East and north Africa could be subdued without engaging the US in endless military interventions. But his actions over the last year have been consistent with the goal of avoiding force where possible: he resisted the pressure to bomb Syriaand instead secured an agreement which destroyed its chemical weapons; he engaged Iran in serious nuclear negotiations; he criticised Israel and the Palestinians when the peace process collapsed; and he did not reflexively rattle the sword over Ukraine.

So even as he prepared to go on air two weeks ago to announce the planned war against Isis, the New York Times reported that Obama had told his staff not to evaluate his policy options in the context of the feverish external pressure. He was willing to “pay that political price”, he said, rather than be rushed into war. “I do not make apologies for being careful in these areas”, he added. He was aware that this war “would be a problem for the next President, and probably the one after that.”

But the “political price”, it seems, has become too great for a president facing midterm elections in November and two more years in the White House. He is now prosecuting a new war as a gift to the Democratic party, one could say. But whatever else it achieves, attacking Syria without UN authorisation – explicitly illegal under the UN charter and international law – will dog his legacy.

No one questions the need to defeat extremist groups, but that will not be achieved by pursuing the very post-9/11 strategies that have brought global instability to its worst level in 50 years. The rise of Isis is the definitive sign, if another were needed, of the unravelling of virtually every US goal for which its disastrous, decade-long interventions in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq were conducted.

There are now tens of thousands of transnational terrorists where once there were relatively few. Now these growing terrorist bands have under their sway vast amounts of territory in two countries.

There is a profound disjuncture between the paramount US goal of protecting its citizens from terrorist attacks and, at the same time, working to undermine secular states such as Syria and Libya, which posed no threat to the west and were themselves fighting extremism.

America’s Arab and Muslim allies, among them Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have a dubious record on this score and have had to be repeatedly pressed by the west to take action against terrorism – with mixed results at best. In Syria the essential goal of defeating Isis and other terror groups threatening the west will not be met if regime change is, as I believe, the simultaneous objective.

Libya offers the clearest rebuke to those convinced that “moderate” jihadists willing to take up arms flourish in the Arab world. Three years ago this month, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy travelled to Benghazi to rapturously hail the “democracy and courage” shown by groups they had helped bring to power. Libya is now a country in ruins, with no government and dozens of militias fighting for power.

Tony Blair has added his own twist to the Libyan fiasco, saying the chaos there could have been avoided by the use of ground troops. Never mind that tens of thousands of troops were deployed in Iraq and chaos persists 11 years on. Blair said this week that Britain should not rule out sending troops to fight Isis.

Yet the current discussions about combating Isis remind me of the astonishment I felt during meetings with the planned US authority in Iraq under Jay Garner when it became clear that his staff had a hopelessly inadequate grasp of what lay ahead.

Similarly, when the US pro-consul Paul Bremer set up an Iraqi Governing Council along sectarian lines it should have been clear that Iraq was not going to emerge from the trauma of invasion and war painlessly. The UN’s Iraq representative Sérgio Vieira de Mello used to say repeatedly that an early end to the occupation and establishment of inclusive, non-sectarian institutions was the only way Iraq could recover. He was of course killed with 21 colleagues by a terrorist bomb in August 2003, which I miraculously survived.

The use of force is sometimes necessary. But without simultaneous political steps to address deep-seated grievances against both the west and Arab governments, it will feed sectarian division and the extremists’ ranks. Yet there is not even a hint that tackling these grievances is part of the current thinking. The war that Obama has embarked on with the backing, and probably eventual participation, of Britain is therefore a recipe for endless conflict and endlessly widening circles of radicalisation.