Barack Obama has
tried to avoid risk to America by avoiding military commitments. "I am the
president who ends wars," he once proclaimed. But has he been too
cautious?
"From the
moment Syria's government declared war on its own people, we should have
acted," says Stephen Hadley, a former US national security adviser. It was
in 2011 that Syria's Bashar al-Assad responded to peaceful mass demonstrations
with furious mass murder.
Regional powers
including Turkey and the Arab states were ready to intervene but looked to US
leadership, he says. They didn't get any.
"We sat on our
hands for three years" as Syria's civil war raged, "and the result is
what you see today," a typhoon of barbaric violence and medieval chaos
spreading danger from Syria and Iraq to Canada's capital and Sydney's suburbs
and many points in between.
The post of US
national security adviser is the highest office in the world that any
professional strategist can attain. Yet Hadley does not have an unblemished
record on Middle East matters.
He was the deputy to
Condoleeza Rice, the national security adviser to George W. Bush when the
president decided to launch the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Hadley fully
supported that ill-begotten decision.
Today he concedes
that the invasion was based on a fallacy: "If we knew in advance there
were no WMD stockpiles, it would have been very difficult for the President to
go to war," Hadley tells me. But he defends the former president
nonetheless: "On what he believed at the time, he was justified."
Yet Hadley has proved
to be prescient on the Syrian civil war and its spillovers. He, among others,
has been warning for three years of the danger of Western inaction:
He had been saying
that "the longer the Syrian civil war goes, the more people die, the more
sectarian it becomes, the more it destabilises Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and the
whole region, and the more it opens the door to Al Qaeda. All that has come to
pass."
Obama waited three
years too long, so that the barbarians masquerading as Islamic State enjoyed
"the perception of unbridled, uninterrupted success and a reputation of
being ten feet tall."
That's why the first
task of the allied operation to defeat IS is "to break the attack, stop
their momentum and make them six feet tall," he says during a stint in
Sydney as the Telstra Distinguished International Fellow at the Lowy Institute.
Hadley thinks the
Obama strategy is the right one and should be supported. He applauds the Abbott
government for taking "the very courageous decision early – and he was
early – to make a major commitment of aircraft and people."
But he says that it's
too early to know whether the strategy is actually working: "In some
places it seems to be working, in other places it's not. What's clear is that
you can't defeat ISIL" another name for IS "with air power
alone".
For this reason he
makes two further predictions. The US ultimately will have to take two extra
steps that Obama has so far resisted. First, America will end up committing
more ground forces to the battlefield.
Not because the US
will end up doing all the fighting on the ground, but because it must convince
Iraq's Sunni tribes to do some of the fighting on the ground. The Sunni tribes,
in fear of IS, are hesitating to the join the battle. The Kurds and the Iraqi
army are not enough, he says, to win. The Sunni tribes are an essential part of
the combat force needed to succeed:
"If they rise up
against ISIL, the price of failure is a brutal death. They will only rise up if
they're convinced they will win, and they will only be convinced they will win
if they are convinced the US will do what they need to help them win."
Second, Hadley
predicts that the US eventually will wage war directly against Syria's Assad.
Because as the US tries to train some of the Syrian opposition forces, the
Syrian military is killing them.
But it's not enough for
the US to defeat IS. The superpower has to deal with multiple threats,
including an aggressive Russia and an ever-spreading Ebola plague.
Hadley sees a similar
tendency to inaction in confronting these dangers, too. With Ebola, "the
issue is, did we respond fulsomely enough and fast enough? You'd always like to
do better, and that's certainly the case with Ebola."
And on Russia, the
West's sanctions are not enough to stop Vladimir Putin's aggression, he
says. Because Russia is winning:
"He has achieved
his objective in Ukraine, just as he did in Georgia and Moldova. He grabs some
territory so there's a conflict, so the EU will not touch them." They will
remain outside the Western sphere and the reach of the US.
Next, says Hadley,
Putin will destabilise the Baltic states and, if unopposed, end up dominating
the former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe that Russia controlled
during the Cold War. "This is big stuff," he emphasises.
"All that is
possible unless Putin decides he has failed in Ukraine and the strategic costs
of proceeding are too high." And that will only happen if the West raises
the costs to Putin.
The US needs to
station forces in the Baltic states, and Poland too. Trade and energy policy
must be enlisted too, says Hadley.
Abbott's promise of a
shirtfronting should be just the beginning. Hadley concludes: "In addition
to shirtfronting Putin, there have to be concrete steps to deter him."
Peter Hartcher is the international
editor.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/pressure-on-us-to-put-foot-down-in-more-than-just-middle-east-20141027-11ckej.html#ixzz3HNoqjEyC
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