October 20, 2014
Analysts in the United States this week are debating the
precise meaning of the statements Wednesday by John Allen, the
ex-Marine general who now coordinates the U.S.-led coalition’s response to the
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). He said that the United States is not
coordinating with the Free Syrian Army, and instead plans to develop from scratch
new local ground units in Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS on two fronts.
I have always felt that neither Allen’s recent
track records in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and CENTCOM nor the legacy of
U.S. training of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan provide any comfort about the
current American strategy to defeat ISIS. His announcement that the United
States plans to create what American press reports call “a home-grown, moderate
counterweight to the Islamic State” should cause new concerns for Iraq, Syria,
the United States any many others around the world who one day may be targets
of ISIS reprisal attacks, or victims of the chaos it spreads in the region.
Sadly, and based on actual recent history, I
suspect that the United States in fact cannot train Iraqi and Syrian forces to
achieve this specific goal, because it continues inadequately to assess and
respond to the frightening underlying trends across much of the Middle East
that have seen the birth and expansion of groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the
first place.
I wish that were not the case, because ISIS-like
fighters are knocking on the door of Lebanon where I live; and the chaos that
has emerged from Syria and Iraq in recent years to threaten the integrity of
many Levant states is to a great extent the consequence of…well, of the
policies that well meaning folks like Gen. Allen and his colleagues and
superiors have practiced since 2003, along with their Arab “allies” in the
“coalition” that is now fighting ISIS after midwifing the conditions for its birth.
So when Gen. Allen says that the United States
and its coalition partners will aim to strengthen the political opposition and
make sure it is associated with “a credible field force” that would be
intensely vetted, my eyes roll and my heart aches for the millions of people in
the Arab region who will become refugees in the years ahead. The United States
has tried to do precisely this kind of thing in recent years in Iraq, Syria and
Afghanistan, spending billions of dollars over ten years — but it has failed
miserably on most fronts.
This is not because the United States lacks
technical capabilities or good intentions — it is amply endowed with both. It
is rather because the United States allows broadly ignorant and politically
constrained political figures in Washington, D.C. to come up with strategies
that are simultaneously hare-brained, unrealistic, inappropriate, detached from
reality, and, therefore, unachievable — even predictably unachievable, and
repeatedly predictably unachievable, at that.
Gen. Allen warned that, “It’s not going to
happen immediately. We’re working to establish the training sites now, and
we’ll ultimately go through a vetting process and beginning to bring the
trainers and the fighters in to begin to build that force out.”
Of course it’s not going to happen immediately;
that is because foreign policy catastrophes never happen quickly, but rather
they build up over time as ignorance, arrogance, ordinance, confusion and
romanticism all blend together to generate foreign policy failures so dramatic
that politicians in Washington inexplicably seem to need to repeat them again
quickly, perhaps to make sure that their initial failures were not a fluke.
The prevalent skepticism about this latest
American plan is not about the United States or Iraq-Syria. It is about human
nature and history, and the proven inability of a superpower’s army to travel
halfway around the world and reconfigure local conditions to its liking. This
lesson has been repeatedly reconfirmed since approximately the 4th Century BC,
largely because local folks do not take kindly to foreign armies that come in
and try to reshape their society according to alien values and goals. Why does
the United States repeatedly ignore the fact that the single biggest driver of the
birth and growth of criminal groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS in the past quarter
century has been the direct involvement of foreign armies — mainly the USSR and
the USA — in Arab-Asian-Islamic lands, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya,
Lebanon and others?
Why does the United States repeatedly discard
the relevance of human nature and history when it unleashes its guns and goes
into action around the world? There are no indications that the United States
today has any clearer appreciation than it did a decade ago of the critical
political, strategic, cultural, historical and psychological contexts of Arab
lands where it seeks to undertake larger-than-life military and political
missions that have serially failed in recent years.
They have failed and will continue to fail, I
fear, because American policy-makers fail to understand what their armed forces
were doing so far away from home, in those always confounding realms of real
life and society beyond McDonalds and Disneyland.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in
the Daily Star. He was
founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for
Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On
Twitter @ramikhouri.
Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by
Agence Global