The ISIS Challenge: A Tough Problem, Even Tougher Solutions

The ISIS Challenge: A Tough Problem, Even Tougher Solutions

08/15/14

David C. Hendrickson

Counterinsurgency, ISIS, Security, Iraq, United States

The Islamic State presents the Middle East and America with an immense challenge. The possible solutions won't be easy to implement.

The use of U.S. military force against ISIS is a significant escalation whose long-term significance is elusive. The announced justification for the military strikes combined a humanitarian rationale (the exigent need of the Yazidis stranded on their bleak mountain) with the threat that ISIS posed to American citizens in the Kurdish capital of Erbil. These objectives cannot quite be taken at face value. Humanitarian interventions have a strong tendency to morph into something much larger; there is, moreover, a deep obscurity in what the Obama administration intends to do. President Obama has identified a vital interest, but has also put some limits on the enterprise. He emphasized that “there is no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq. The only lasting solution is for Iraqis to come together and form an inclusive government—one that represents the legitimate interests of all Iraqis, and one that can unify the country’s fight against ISIL.”

The American airstrikes occur against the background of a prolonged stalemate over the formation of a new Iraqi government. Nouri al-Maliki, who has recently announced that he will step aside, whose parliamentary list received the most seats in the elections, has incurred the bitter enmity of the Kurds and the Sunnis; even a majority of the Shia legislators has abandoned him. Iran opposes him; the United States opposes him; Sistani opposes him. Faced with these obstacles, it seems incredible that Maliki should have stationed personally-loyal military forces at critical points around the capital in a display of force, as his answer to the call of the Iraqi president—a Kurd—to nominate Haider al-Abadi for prime minister in preference to Maliki. (Maliki is also objecting to the very presidential discretion that enabled him to remain prime minister in 2010, when Allawi earned, but was denied, the right to form a government.) It is a very ill omen that the Shia should display such division even when their community lies under mortal peril.

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