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~ “Today, it is violence within Muslim communities that has become the source of so much human misery. It is time to acknowledge the destruction wrought by proxy wars and terror campaigns between Sunni and Shia across the Middle East. And it is time that political, civic and religious leaders reject sectarian strife. No external power can bring about a transformation of hearts and minds. But America will be a respectful and constructive partner. We will neither tolerate terrorist safe-havens, nor act as an occupying power. Instead, we will take action against threats to our security – and our allies – while building an architecture of counter-terrorism cooperation.~ Pres. Barack Obama, Sept. 2014.
~ “In Islam, it is God and not the people who gives government legitimacy. This elevation of humanity could seem like idolatry, since it was a usurpation of God’s sovereignty. But it was not impossible for the Muslim countries to introduce representative forms of government without complying with the Western slogan. But the democratic ideal had often been tainted in practice. American support for the unpopular Shah, who closed down the Majlis to effect his modernization program, and systematically denied Iranians fundamental human rights, made it seem there was a double standard. The West proudly proclaimed democracy for its own people, but Muslims were expected to submit to cruel dictatorships.” ~ Karen Armstrong, 2000.
~ “The first U.S.-Saudi coalition had the single, clear objective of ousting Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait. This time, the two partners have different focuses and immediate concerns. For the Saudis, the overriding goal remains the removal of Assad.For the Obama administration, it is to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State now stretched across more than one quarter of Iraq and most of eastern Syria.” ~ David Ottaway, 2014.
~ “Across Egypt, even as dozens more political prisoners joinin staging hunger strikes, the government continues to deny their plight and ignore requests by autonomous civil society groups to visit prisons and examine the conditions there. Street demonstrations are virtually banned, further minimizing the ability to air grievances and leading to the arrest of prominent non-Islamist activists. Meanwhile, security agents have escaped punishment for several mass killings of demonstrators in the last three years.” ~ Mayy El Sheikh, Sept 2014.
~ “When arms entered the Syrian revolution, and it was a result of the tyranny of the regime and its brutal way of dealing with it, in that moment the leadership of the revolution started leaving the hands of its makers and moving to external powers who supply and bring in arms.” ~ Mufid from Daraya, 2012.
~ “Sectarian massacres by the Assad regime targeting Sunni civilians enhanced the process of radicalization. Sectarian polarization and a widespread sense of abandonment by an impotent West combined to create a fertile ground for radical Islamist ideas. The escalation of the conflict and the corollary atrocities against civilians convinced large numbers of hitherto not-so-radical foreign volunteers to take up arms in support of their Syrian brethren.” ~ Thomas Pierret, 2013.
~ “The massacre in Syria rages on and yet we stand idle. We must realize that, to millions of Syrians trapped in the country, the virtual absence of humanitarian relief is nearly as arbitrary and cruel as the war itself. We are all shamed by Syria’s suffering.” ~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 2013.
~ “It is in Syria that the future of the region hangs in the balance. Washington has wasted precious time in using diplomatic, economic and military levers to influence the course of events in Syria. That neglect has allowed the conflagration to rage at great human cost, radicalizing the opposition and putting at risk U.S. allies across the region.” ~ Vali Nasr, 2013.
In recent weeks, the rallying cry put out by the U.S.A. and its allies to attack and eliminate ISIS – the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria – has come to totally dominate the news in foreign policy in the Middle East. It has quite displaced attention on other major ongoing crises and conflict in that sorely afflicted region. Coverage is sparse now concerning the ongoing Syrian civil war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as other conflicts and crack-downs in Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain or Tunisia.
Earlier this week Pres. Obama in his address to the United Nations (see quote above) called for an all-out military effort to degrade ISIS which he sees as an immediate threat to the United States and its allies. He called upon Muslims in the Middle East to openly renounce “extremism” and “fundamentalism” – such as propounded by ISIS and Al Qaeda – to support democratic freedoms, and transition from autocratic regimes.
To be sure, ISIS has rapidly gained – and deservedly – a blood-curdling reputation for taking a large swath of land in the remote border areas of Iraq and Syria, using heavy weapons captured from the Iraqi and Syrian armies, capturing oil wells and refineries to supply its burgeoning illicit trade in gasoline, and wantonly murdering thousands of civilians. The sheer speed of its advance since 2013 and its ferocious brutality have aroused the conscience finally of the Western world to combat it, as has its claim last June to establish a new state – a Muslim “caliphate” – from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean.
Key Questions : How does the emergence of ISIS fit into the broader situation of crisis and conflict in the Middle East? Is defeating ISIS really central to an effective long-term strategy for the Western powers to assist development there? Or is it merely the latest symptom of deeper challenges that have long existed? Before engaging in a long and potentially costly conflict – in terms of military means and political capital – America needs to ponder carefully the goals and consequences for U.S. policy.
The Rise of ISIS and Its Meaning : ISIS grew out of an earlier extremist Islamist organization affiliated with Al Qaeda called ISI – Islamic State in Iraq. After the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, in 2006-10, ISI carried out many violent terrorist attacks in Baghdad and attempted to take over areas of northern Iraq. But its extreme violence alienated Iraqi followers and its foreign leadership was largely captured or killed. But in 2010, it was taken over by a new Iraqi leadership led by the mysterious Ali Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, its current leader, who recruited many previously jailed former Saddam Hussein officers to its officer corps. Returning to its former strongholds in northern Iraq, it initiated a spate of major violent terrorist attacks in Iraq, before sending guerrillas into Syria to fight against the regime of Bashar al-Assad starting in 2011. Ostensibly fighting with the increasingly armed Sunni opposition to Assad’s brutal massacres of his own people, ISIS’s bases were never attacked by Assad, suggesting collusion with him including in sales of gasoline.
Since 2012, ISIS took advantage of the vacuum created by the appalling human disaster of Syria’s deepening civil war to build a growing criminal business in smuggling illicit gasoline stolen from captured oil wells and refineries inside Syria, in human trafficking, kidnapping and protection racketeering. On this basis, since 2013, ISIS has launched a rapid march south into Iraq and west into Syria – taking major towns including Mosul and Fallujah. With the United States’ military drawdown in Iraq, and only limited Western support for the Syrian rebel struggle against Assad, ISIS went largely unopposed until its sudden major gains and brutal beheadings of three Western journalists in August shocked and aroused Western nations, led by the U.S.A., to launch the current offensive against it.
Finally, belatedly, the U.S.A. and Western powers will provide military support to the “moderate” Syrian rebels fighting Assad, as well as to Kurdish “peshmurga” fighters battling with ISIS in northern Iraq. But this support will be for combating ISIS and not Assad. Yet the latter’s regime has brutally massacred hundreds of thousands of Syrians, precipitated a sectarian civil war between Shia and Sunni, and caused displacement of a quarter of its population as refugees. Indeed, unspoken acquiescence of Assad’s government has been sought for Western and Arab air bombardments against ISIS.
Meanwhile, ISIS represents a virulently extreme form of Islam only practiced by a few Muslims in the world today. Its brutal doctrine – as is Al Qaeda’s – is based upon the Wahhabi Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. It prescribes amputations for theft, beheadings for corporal crimes, and gender segregation and severe curtailment of the role of women in society.
As a large and now potent guerrilla force of over 50,000 armed and paid fighters, ISIS has shrewdly pursued the strategy of rapidly occupying mainly sparsely populated areas in Iraq and Syria. It now controls about fifteen per cent of each country, though a far smaller portion – under 10% – of the population.
Lessons of ISIS’ Rise : In a very real sense, ISIS is not the main problem facing the Middle East today or Western policy in the region. ISIS is a symptom not a cause :
~ ISIS took advantage of the vacuum created by the collapse of governance in both Syria and Iraq to build its power base. Had the Assad regime not launched its brutal civil war in 2011, and had the Iraqi government led by prime minister al-Maliki not favored the Shia and marginalized the Sunni there, in more united better governed nations, a virulent but very small splinter extremist group like ISIS would never have been able to succeed.
~ The lack of any strong purposeful Western support to arm and feed the Syrian rebels opposing Assad for a long period or to find a political solution to the conflict, as analysts Vali Nasr and Thomas Pierret note (see above quotes), caused the collapse of Syrian society and the radicalization of its Muslim population – including more bitter divisions between Sunni and Shia. As did the international “shame” of the unfolding humanitarian disaster that went un-responded to for so long, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted (see above quote).
~ In proclaiming establishment of a new Muslim “caliphate” ISIS is deliberately appealing to marginalized and radicalized populations in both Syria and Iraq as well as elsewhere in the Middle East. With anti-American and anti-Western feelings at new highs – in good part because of inaction in Syria – ISIS can tap into a well of resentment among Arabs and Muslims over past Western efforts apparently to encourage democracy while in practice supporting dictators, as Karen Armstrong (see above quote) notes.
~ Since the 1980s, many Arab and Muslim countries in the Middle East – notably including Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen among others – have experienced declining economic growth, increasing poverty, land and food security. These factors have impacted the desperately poor – and still large, uneducated, and devoutly Muslim – rural populations far more than the still small urban, more Westernized, educated elites.
~ The collapse of the promise of the Arab Spring in many Sunni Muslim nations – most notably Egypt and Syria, but also in Bahrain and Yemen – has aroused increasing dismay and resentment from human rights activists there such as Mayy el Sheikh and Mufid from Daraya (see above quotes), that external powers’ influences are supporting violent crackdown by their own governments.
~ Meanwhile, as David Ottaway notes (see above quote), the United States is in fact calling upon the conservative, autocratic regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain – all of whom have launched crackdowns on political opposition in their own societies – to join the anti-ISIS coalition.
~ Despite Pres. Obama’s appeal at the U.N. this week, and his broad but unspecific offers of support for education, democracy and entrepreneurship in the region, in the past twenty years U.S. and European assistance to the Middle East has overwhelmingly taken the forms of arms supplied to these same autocratic regimes and to Israel.
Conclusions : In the short-term, the major threat posed by ISIS clearly needs to be countered purposefully through military action. But Pres. Obama’s call for action at the United Nations this week – especially his appeal to the Muslims in the Middle East – could well appear quite disingenuous, not to say hypocritical in their eyes. In reality, U.S. and Western involvement in the region has focused almost entirely on military actions – such as the war in Iraq – aimed narrowly at countering short-term threats to the status quo and the security of its massive oil reserves. Meanwhile, U.S. and Western unwillingness to open a dialog with Iran, the leading Shia power, has largely stymied their ability to assist in creation of a regional balance of power, and thus head off deepening sectarian violence and an arms race. Finally, the Western strong pro-Israel bias in providing one-sided support in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a further major source of mistrust for a majority of Middle Easterners and Muslims.
The United States and other Western powers urgently need to make major shifts in their Middle East policy – for the long-term benefit of the region and their own important interests there. Combatting ISIS is only a minor short-term part of what is a much larger and more complex set of issues long neglected or left unaddressed due to vested interests. I, for one, hope that Western leaders will take this opportunity to start honestly and directly tackling them.