By Basil Wilson
09/08/14
President Obama came to the Presidency as the peace time President and two years before he leaves office, he has been forced into being a war time President. Presidents try to shape events but often Presidents are shaped by events. America has begun its third war in Iraq that covers a span of three plus decades.
The circumstance under each war is different. Saddam Hussein’s expansion into Kuwait forced President George H.W. Bush to send in American ground troops to liberate Kuwait and to smash Saddam’s army. George H.W. Bush refrained from marching into Baghdad but placed immense pressure on Saddam that crippled his economy. A no-fly zone was imposed on Saddam’s Iraq. Wounded and reeling from United States pressure, Saddam struggled to survive. The United Nations inspectors effectively dismantled his capacity to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.
The 9/11/2001 attack on American soil during President George W. Bush first term in office illustrates the complexity of Middle East politics. The United States had played a vital role in the defeat of the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. The C.I.A. had armed the mujahedeen but as the Soviet troops made their exit, the mujahedeen entered Kabul and established a sharia oriented Islamic regime sympathetic to Al Qaeda and hostile to the United States and the West.
Al Qaeda plotted the 9/11 bombings from their safe haven in Afghanistan. President George W. Bush waged war against the Taliban and drove Al Qaeda and Bin Laden into Pakistan. His neophyte entourage of neo-conservatives presumed that since America was the only standing super-power, they should seize the time and overthrow Saddam even though he was not implicated in the 9/11 attack. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfgang, et al, convinced Congress and the American people that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and an invasion of Iraq would not confront formidable military resistance and the war would not be costly.
Saddam’s official military fell apart without much resistance but the Sunni Tribes and Shia militias engaged America in a protracted war.
The neo-conservatives failed to grasp the complexity of Iraqi society or the Middle East. America won the war but lost the peace. The Maliki government that replaced Saddam established Shia hegemony and alienated the Sunnis and the Kurds.
The Islamic extremists known as The Islamic State have taken advantage of Maliki’s ostracizing of Sunni in Iraq. ISIS has emerged as a genocidal-prone religious force that has rapidly expanded their control of territory in Syria and Iraq. The wanton atrocities of the Islamic state and the beheading of two American journalists have forced the United States to return as a combat force but thus far confined to the use of air power to roll back the advance of the Islamic state.
Not only has Bush 43 mis-calculated about events in the Middle East but Barack Obama has also mis-calculated. The overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya was engineered by NATO with America taking a back seat has left a power vacuum in Libya. Former Gaddafi forces and Islamic extremists are wrapped up in a death struggle for political control of Libya. The Egyptian military and the United Arab Emirates are in support of the ex-Gaddafi forces. Qatar, a tiny country oozing with oil wealth, is supporting the Islamic forces in Libya.
Qatar is playing a mercurial role in the Middle East. It is in Qatar that the United States has its largest military base. Qatar is playing on both sides. It is a supporter of Hamas in Gaza and it has allowed Al Qaeda and other Islamists to raise funds from wealthy Sheiks in that country.
President Obama came out in support of the overthrow of Bashar Assad in Syria. The civil war in Syria has an array of forces fighting Assad which includes Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, a break-away from Al Qaeda and The Free Syrian Army that is supported by the United States.
Much of what is taking place in the Middle East is driven by the religio-political conflict dividing Sunni from Shia. Under Saddam, the Sunnis used state power to oppress the Shia. Assad in Syria who is an Alawite is allied with Shia and the Sunni who constitute the majority in Syria have been excluded from state power.
In Lebanon, there is a delicate religio-political balance of power that includes rivals such as Maronite Christians, Sunni elements and Hezbollah, which is Shia and a burgeoning political and military influence in Lebanon and has joined Assad in the fight against the various factions trying to expel Assad from Damascus.
The critical element in President Obama’s strategy is to get Arab nations to join in the war against the Islamic State. A vital component of that strategy is an ethnic-religious inclusive cabinet and government in Iraq that will convince the Sunni Tribes in northern and western Iraq that it is in their interest to support Baghdad and the United States in the fight against the Sunni-led Islamic state. If it is perceived that it is the West and Shia ganging up against the Sunni-led Islamic State that would weaken, perhaps even make ineffective the alliance against the Islamic State.
President Obama will explain his position vis-à-vis the Islamic State in a nationally televised address to the American people. The projection by United States military experts is that the war against the Islamic State could take three years before they are crushed as a military force.
President Obama came to the Oval Office as a dove. Circumstances in the world and in the Middle East have changed and he will leave the Oval Office as a hawk.
