Bomb Islamic State: is that our only strategy?

Death cult. There's a certain catharsis in saying it, isn't there? Somehow, when you're confronted with the jawdropping atrocities Islamic State churns out with gruesome frequency, "terrorist" seems puny, unsatisfactory. We're looking for something that distils our rage and drips with disdain. So, death cult: it implies a kind of unhinged violence directed to no rational purpose; a group beyond comprehension that appeals only to those on the limits of sanity. So, for instance, when three young Englishwomen skip the country to join, we have no explanation other than that they were brainwashed, or that their decision, in Julie Bishop's phrase, "defies logic". That, after all, is the nature of cults.

If only it were true. If only IS were a small, tightly controlled group under the command of a single charismatic leader on whom everything depends. If only it were destined to go the way of so many cults, burning destructively but briefly before disappearing with little trace in some tragic implosion. But it isn't. It's an expanding group forged in the collapsing politics of the Middle East. IS's plain barbarism shouldn't obscure this fact. Its existence is not harebrained. It is deeply political, and those who support, or even merely tolerate it, have political reasons for their decisions.

Iraqi soldiers in Mosul simply abandoned their posts when IS rolled into town last year 

Which brings me to Tony Abbott's announcement this week that we'd be sending another tranche of troops to Iraq in our ever-expanding military campaign. They'll be the latest soldiers trying valiantly to train the Iraqi Army. In some ways, there's less to this than meets the eye. We already have troops in Iraq doing this job, and it reflects precisely the strategy we're pursuing against IS: bombard them from the air and get local groups – including the Iraqi Army – to fight them on the ground. Once you've committed to that, there's nothing particularly controversial about increasing troop numbers doing the job. 

The trouble, though, is that it seems to be the only card we have to play. Outraged by IS, we'll send soldiers. Concerned they aren't retreating in the way we'd like, we'll send more. That, it seems, is the strategy.

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But we've been failing at this strategy for nearly a dozen years. America spent something like $US40 billion on the task. Soon, it became a NATO project. Naturally, Australia helped out. So did Jordan, South Korea and Romania. Iran, too, struck similar deals with the Iraqi government. And more than a decade of multi-national training later, Iraqi soldiers in Mosul simply abandoned their posts when IS rolled into town last year. Precisely why we think a few hundred extra Australian soldiers will succeed where years of grander, more expensive efforts so miserably failed, remains unexplained.

But the bigger problem is that the approach remains a narrow military one. It has no obvious political dimension to it: no clearly explained account of why IS has grown so rapidly, how it took major Iraqi cities with so little resistance, and why it might prove so difficult to dislodge. But it is precisely these things that have the most to teach us. 

It's easy to forget that IS is scarcely the unstoppable force of our nightmares. It spread through the Sunni areas of Syria and northern Iraq mainly because no one in those regions particularly wanted to stand in their way. That included the Iraqi military, whose Sunni representatives clearly had little fidelity to the Iraqi cause. In brief, IS succeeded because it carried more good will in the regions it conquered than the Iraqi state. Not because Iraqi Sunnis are blood-loving nihilists – indeed, it was the Iraqi Sunnis who  had expelled IS's predecessor organisation, al-Qaeda in Iraq. It is rather a story of just how rent Iraq truly is; just how colossal a failure its reconstruction after we invaded it has been. And it is a story of monstrous Sunni resentment at the pro-Shiite excesses of the Iraqi state. 

Perhaps our greatest mistake in this regard was to disband Saddam Hussein's military machine entirely, letting it become instead the largely incompetent, Shiite-dominated muscle for an increasingly Shiite-supremacist nation under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. With the Americans gone, Sunni protests were violently quashed, Sunni politicians hounded from office and Shiite death squads marauded far too freely. This, we watched from afar, apparently unmoved by the fact that Iraqi Sunnis were now looking for someone – anyone – prepared to stand up for them. While we were watching, IS made that offer.

What's our counter offer?  Because if we're serious about defeating IS, we'll have to do more than train an Iraqi military widely regarded by Iraqi Sunnis as a tool of Shiite oppression. We'll have to find a way to win over the Sunni tribes of northern Iraq with a political future they can believe in; a future that just might inspire them to turn on IS the way they turned on al-Qaeda in Iraq. 

That means a more inclusive Iraqi state, and on this score Iraq's new Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is making some positive noises. We're also helped considerably by the astonishing scale of IS's barbarism, which is causing many Sunnis living under its regime de la terreur a severe case of buyer's remorse. But if our only plan is to bomb IS into history, we might just lose these advantages.  We also might leave something worse in its place, just as IS took the place of al-Qaeda after we'd tried bombing them. The question we face now is not as simple as: more or less war? It is: what else? What's our political strategy?  And I'm not sure the death cult paradigm delivers us an answer.

Waleed Aly is a Fairfax Media columnist and winner of the 2014 Walkley award for best columnist. He lectures in politics at Monash University.