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What Is Europe Doing to Stop the Islamic State?
08/20/14http://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-europe-doing-stop-the-islamic-state-11105
Daniel R. DePetris
Humanitarian Intervention, Foreign Aid, EU, Iraq, Europe
Great Britain, France and Germany are picking up the slack and leading Europe’s response to the crisis in Iraq. Could they do even more?
On August 13, 2014, Benjamin Rhodes—President
Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser—made news when he told a
collection of reporters traveling with the president on Martha’s
Vineyard that the Obama administration was prepared to increase military
support to the Iraqi Government once Prime Minister-designate Haider
al-Abadi was able to form a new cabinet. In fact, not only would
Washington be willing to continue its aerial campaign against militants
from the Islamic State (IS), but it would also be open to the idea of
using helicopters and U.S. ground forces to facilitate the evacuation of
thousands of Yazidi civilians trapped on top of the Sinjar Mountain.
Fortunately
for the administration, this option is no longer required. After an
assessment conducted by U.S. personnel who were flown onto the top of
the Sinjar mountain, the Defense Department concluded that a
humanitarian evacuation was “far less likely,”
due to the effective combination of U.S. airpower and a Kurdish
peshmerga counterattack. Yet the fact that the White House was willing
to place “boots on the ground” in harms way in order to save thousands
of men, women and children is a vivid example of just how important the
United States remains to the safety of people half a world away.
If America is willing to step up its activity—an additional 130 U.S. advisers were dispatched to Irbil on August 12—it’s
also appropriate to ask what America’s allies and partners in Europe
are willing to do in order to help alleviate a dire situation that would
have turned calamitous without targeted U.S. intervention.
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