Monday, September 1, 2014

Why we need the Middle East to help fight Islamic State


We've found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It's taken a decade and they're not the ones we were told to expect. But these ones are real.

The evidence of the WMDs advertised by the Bush, Blair and Howard regimes in 2003 was so elusive as to be invisible. The evidence this time is so overwhelming as to be irrepressible.

As Tony Abbott told the Parliament on Monday: "Many Australians, understandably, will shrink from reaching out to this conflict on the other side of the world, but this conflict is reaching out to us."

According to Australia's spy agencies, some 60 Australians have taken up arms to join ISIS. They are supported by about 100 more who still live in Australia. But the bigger, grander struggle is a contest between barbarism and civilisation.

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It's essential that the struggle is joined, and Australia is right to join it. Australia is right to join the humanitarian relief effort to help those under siege. Under US leadership, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy are also active.

And Australia is right to join the military effort to stop the barbarians who claim to represent an Islamic State. So far it is helping arm the Kurds and other "non-ISIS" forces.

But this is going to be much bigger, more complex and more dangerous than any Australian official has even begun to articulate.

The genocide and war in Bosnia in 1992-95 was "a problem from purgatory," says the US special envoy to that crisis, Chris Hill, whereas the fight in Iraq and Syria today is "the problem from hell". The Iraq crisis is another with which Hill is intimate; he was the US ambassador to Iraq in 2009-10.

Why is it so diabolical?

The first problem: Australia and allies have just stepped into a raging, ancient sectarian war. It's a civil war between the two main churches of Islam, the Shiite and the Sunni. And we have taken sides.

The ISIS fighters are partly a product of Sunni rage and frustration. And it was a rage and frustration set off by the US-British-Australian invasion in 2003:  "We didn't understand in 2003 the extreme antipathy of the Sunni Arabs to a Shiite government in Iraq.

"When you flip a country from being Sunni-led for several centuries to being [Shiite-led],  don't be surprised when the Sunnis don't accept it."

It didn't have to be that way after the invasion. But the US-endorsed prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, ran a vengeful sectarian government that persecuted the Sunni population.

It was part of Hill's job to try to persuade him otherwise: "The number of times I had to go to Maliki to ask him to pay off the Sunni militias – he always told me 'the cheque's in the mail.'" Hill didn't warm to him: "To know Maliki is to dislike him."

"So when the US left, the Sunnis decided it was time to put Iraq in its rightful order."

Sunni rage and frustration didn't merely flow spontaneously from Sunni streets and villages. It was fed and fuelled by wealthy groups in the region's Sunni powerhouse, Saudi Arabia. As Hill puts it: "The [Islamic State] movement got started with financial flows from NGOs in Saudi Arabia."

This is central to understanding why it's wrong to think that the US-led coalition can simply drop bombs on Islamic State (formerly known as ISIL or ISIS) and consider the problem solved.

For the West to attack Islamic State, a Sunni-based movement, in defence of a Shiite-led government, in Baghdad, is fraught with unintended consequences.

It could inflame the very schism that is at the centre of this problem. And that could further agitate the Muslim communities in Australia, Indonesia and elsewhere.

Hill's suggestion?  "I would start with the Saudis and the Sunni Arab world." It's vital to bring the key Middle East nations to the effort to get at the nub of the problem without merely inflaming it. It helps that Maliki is now gone. His successor, al-Abadi, has yet to prove himself capable of uniting Iraqis.

If mere bombs were enough to pacify and stabilise a country, there would not be a problem in Iraq today. The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, says he will travel to the Middle East next week in search of support from regional governments for the broader effort.

In short, lethal force is necessary but insufficient.

The second problem: To whom does the Western coalition lend force? The Kurdish Peshmerga, certainly. Western governments speak of moderate forces. But who else? "Who are these elusive moderates we're giving arms to, and how do we know they'll still be moderate next week?" Hill poses, a question without a convincing answer.

This leads to the third problem, or what Chris Hill calls "the real issue", ultimately, "we will have bombed ISIS out of Iraq and it will cross the border back into Syria. Then what?"

Barack Obama long ago declared that the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria had to surrender power; Assad has fought like a tiger ever since to hold it. Some 200,000 people have died.

How does the West deal with Assad? His great-power sponsor, Russia, is busy invading Ukraine. The West is trying to restrain him. It is in no position to ask for his help in Syria.

As Obama himself admitted last week, the US has no strategy for this inevitability. It needs to develop one with the major powers of the region. That will be much harder than dropping bombs.

"You have the same problem" that the US and the West has suffered before, warns Hill: "Arrogance. You can't take a 1000-year-old problem and try and solve it in a few months."

Peter Hartcher is the international editor.

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