NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2013

No Exit: Why the US Can’t Leave the Middle EastMichael J. Totten

America is in a bad mood.

Share

Tweet

inShare

Email

Print

In the midst of the worst economy since the 1970s, we’re on the verge of losing the war in Afghanistan, the longest we’ve ever fought, against stupefyingly primitive foes.

We sort of won the war in Iraq, but it cost billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and Baghdad is still a violent, dysfunctional mess.

Read On

Dispatches

Follow weekly commentary in Michael J. Totten's World Affairs blog.

The overhyped Arab Spring has been cancelled in Egypt. Liberating Libya led to the assassination of our ambassador. Syria is disintegrating into total war with bad guys on both sides and the US dithering on the sidelines, worried more about saving face at this point than having any significant effect on the facts on the ground.

A majority of American voters in both parties have had it. They’re just flat-out not interested in spending any more money or lives to help out. Even many foreign policy professionals are fed up. We get blamed for every one of the Middle East’s problems, including those it inflicts on itself. How gratifying it would be just to walk away, dust off our hands, and say you’re on your own.

But we can’t.

 

Actually, in Egypt maybe we can. And maybe we should.

Hosni Mubarak was a terrible leader and a lukewarm ally at best, but until the Egyptian army arrested him in 2011, Cairo had been part of the American-backed security architecture in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean ever since his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, junked Egypt’s alliance with the Soviet Union.

The election of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in the wake of the Arab Spring, though, moved Egypt into the “frenemy” column. It’s still there under the military rule of General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the new head of state in all but name since the army removed Mohamed Morsi.

Sisi is no less hostile to Washington than Morsi was. As Lee Smith put it shortly after the second coup in three years, Egypt’s new jefe “sees the United States as little more than a prop, a rag with which he burnishes his reputation as a strongman, a village mayor puffing his chest and boasting that he is unafraid to stand up to the Americans.” 

Sisi knows his country and what it takes to appeal to the masses. The whole population—left, right, and center—is as hostile toward the United States as it ever was. Never mind that Americans backed the anti-Mubarak uprising. Never mind that Washington sought good relations with Egypt’s first freely elected government in thousands of years. Never mind that the Obama administration refuses to call the army’s coup what it plainly

was in order to keep Egypt’s aid money flowing. None of that matters. The United States and its Zionist sidekick remain at the molten center of Egypt’s phantasmagorical demonology.

Bribing Egypt with billions of annual aid dollars to maintain its peace treaty with Israel and to keep a lid on radical Islam makes even less sense today than it did when Morsi and the Brotherhood were in charge. Morsi needed that money to prevent Egyptians from starving to death. He had a major incentive to cooperate—or else.

But now that the Brothers are out of the picture, partly at the behest of the Saudis, Riyadh says it will happily make up the difference if Washington turns off the aid spigot.

Turn it off then, already. Our money buys nothing from Sisi if he can replace it that easily. If he gets the same cash infusion whether or not he listens to the White House, why should he listen to the White House? He isn’t our friend. He’s only one step away from burning an American flag at a rally. He’s plenty motivated for his own reasons to keep radical Islamists in check since they’re out to destroy him. And his army is the one Egyptian institution that’s not at all interested in armed conflict with Israel because it would suffer more egregiously than anything or anyone else.

We’re either paying him out of sheer habit or because Washington thinks it might still get something back from its investment. Maybe it will, but it probably won’t.

Either way, Sisi instantly proved himself more violent and ruthless than Mubarak when he gave the order to gun down hundreds of unarmed civilians. The fact that the Muslim Brotherhood “retaliated” by burning dozens of churches, murdering Christians at random, and shooting policemen does not make what he did okay. He was, for a few days at least, no better than Bashar al-Assad. Giving him money and guns will make us no friends but plenty of enemies, especially when his regime proves itself no more capable of halting Egypt’s freefall than the last one.

Max Boot at the Council on Foreign Relations put it this way in the Los Angeles Times: “It is no coincidence that both Osama bin Laden and [al-Qaeda deputy Ayman al-] Zawahiri hailed from US-allied nations that repressed their own citizens. Both men were drawn to the conclusion that the way to free their homelands was to attack their rulers’ patron. It is reasonable to expect that a new generation of Islamists in Egypt, now being taught that the peaceful path to power is no longer open, will turn to violence and that, as long as Washington is seen on the side of the generals, some of their violence will be directed our way.”

Even if the Egyptian army faces the kind of full-blown Islamist insurgency that ripped through Algeria in the 1990s—which is unlikely, but possible—Cairo will still get all the help it needs from the Gulf, not because the Saudis oppose radical Islam, but because they view the Muslim Brotherhood as the biggest long-term threat to their rule.

The case for walking away from Egypt and dusting our hands off is sound.

 

Libya, however, is another matter entirely.

Having learned in Iraq that occupying Arab lands is bad for everyone’s health, the US helped free Libya of Muammar el-Qaddafi without suffering even one single casualty. We did it all from the skies. The ground was thick with indigenous rebels, so no American ground troops were required. Qaddafi had no friends to come to his rescue and he stood no chance with his feeble and outdated hardware.

But then we lost Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others during the long Libyan aftermath, when a terrorist group tied to al-Qaeda attacked the US consulate in Benghazi. It happened on the same day—not coincidentally, on September 11th—that mobs of fanatical Salafists waving al-Qaeda flags rioted and set fires all over the region, using a ludicrous anti-Muhammad video uploaded to YouTube by a crackpot Egyptian “filmmaker” no one had ever heard of before as a pretext.

For reasons that still don’t make any sense, American officials falsely claimed the Benghazi incident was the result of yet another protest riot gone out of control. But there was no protest or riot in Benghazi related to that video, contrary to Washington’s initial clumsy and mendacious public statements.

Unlike in Egypt and even Tunisia, nobody in Libya protested against the United States for “allowing” a so-called blasphemous video to be uploaded to YouTube. The only demonstrations in Libya that week were against radical Islamists, against the terrorists that murdered Ambassador Stevens. The citizen groundswell against Benghazi’s Islamist militia was so intense that its members had to flee into the desert.

Libya is a traditional and conservative place, but that does not mean it’s Islamist. Two out of three Egyptians voted for Islamist parties in the post-Mubarak parliamentary elections, but in Libya, the National Forces Alliance, a moderate centrist party, won the most seats in 2012. The Justice and Construction Party—the political vehicle for Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood—only won ten percent of the vote. The Brotherhood isn’t quite as irrelevant in Libya as, say, the Green Party is in the United States, but it’s close.

Libya’s people are not just by and large against the Islamists. They are perhaps friendlier to the West in general and the United States in particular than anyone else in the Arab world.

It makes sense if you think about it. Under no theory can the United States be held responsible for Qaddafi’s crimes and repression. He was a self-declared enemy of America on the day he took power, and he’d still be tormenting his hapless citizens like a sadistic mad scientist if Americans hadn’t provided air support for the rebels. He received no money, no weapons, no training, no diplomatic cover—nothing—from the United States.

Every bad thing Libyans ever heard about Americans came from the internal propaganda organs of the man who kicked them in the face every day for forty-two years. At least some of their geopolitical views resemble

those of Eastern Europeans under the communists—if the Americans are the enemies of our tyrannical government, how bad can they be? They are as pro-American as we could ever expect Arab Muslims to be.

Libya under Qaddafi had far too much government. Now it does not have enough. The previous regime was one of the most repressive on earth, and when it went down, most institutions—including the army—went with it. The state and its security forces are therefore too weak. They’re being rebuilt from scratch and won’t be finished for years.

There is no reason in the world for the US not to associate with or help Prime Minister Ali Zeidan and his colleagues. On the contrary, if the government can’t establish a monopoly on the use of force in the lawless parts of the country, Libya could end up an incubator of terrorism like Somalia, Yemen, or Mali, despite the fact that most of its people want nothing to do with it.

 

Syria is the last country we can afford to ignore right now, even though large numbers in both parties—for perfectly logical reasons—are averse to doing anything more than shuddering at a distance.

But what happens there is our business because it affects us. Syria isn’t Belize. It matters who runs that country, and it matters a lot.

Bashar al-Assad’s regime is the biggest state sponsor of international terrorism in the Arab world, and it’s aligned with the Islamic Republic regime in Iran, the biggest state sponsor of international terrorism in the entire world. Obviously, then, it’s in our interest to see him defeated.

One of his principal enemies on the home front, though, is the al-Qaeda–linked Nusra Front. Obviously it’s not in our interest to see these bin Ladenists replace Assad.

The Free Syrian Army is disgruntled at the lackluster assistance the United States has provided, but that’s partly because it has been fighting against Assad alongside the Nusra Front, and also because many of its own commanders are also Islamists, even if they’re moderate compared with al-Qaeda. The tactical alliance between the two groups is fracturing, and it won’t outlast Assad by even a week, but it’s enough to make Washington reluctant and skeptical.

Americans have always been willing to sacrifice money and lives for allies and friends, but allies and friends who are powerful enough inside Syria to affect outcomes are thin on the ground. Early in the game, the administration could have tried to arm, fund, and train a politically moderate fighting force inside Syria, but that will be a lot more difficult now that the Turks and the Gulf Arabs are backing their own proxies who don’t share our interests or values.

So there are those who say let them kill each other because, as Daniel Pipes argues, it “keeps them focused locally” and “prevents either one from emerging victorious.” It brings to mind Henry Kissinger’s famous quip about the Iran-Iraq war. “It’s too bad they can’t both lose.”

The operative word in Kissinger’s sentence is “can’t.” Opposing sides don’t zero each other out. That’s not how wars work, or end. Wars end when somebody wins. 

The worst-case scenario from an American point of view is that they both win. That’s an actual possibility. Syria could fracture into pieces. In a way, it already has. An Alawite rump state backed by Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia existing alongside a Sunnistan ruled by Islamists could very well emerge as a semi-permanent reality of Middle Eastern geography. At the very least, the United States needs a policy that reduces the likelihood of that most horrible outcome.

A few months ago, I asked the Lebanese MP Samy Gemayel what he thought about Washington’s confusion in Syria. “Before you can know what to do,” he said, “you have to know what you want.” One way or another, we should want both Assad and al-Qaeda to lose. But they aren’t going to lose simultaneously. They’ll need to lose consecutively. One of them first has to win.

So fight and defeat Bashar al-Assad, or support someone who will do it instead. Then fight and defeat the Nusra Front, or support someone who will do it instead.

Or face the fact that one or both are going to win. If the Nusra Front wins, we’ll have an Afghanistan on the Mediterranean. And if Assad wins, he could end up under an Iranian nuclear weapons umbrella.

 

Some parts of the world are like Las Vegas. What happens there, stays there. Sub-Saharan Africa is the primary example. Hardly anyone outside that region has even noticed that the various wars in Congo have killed millions of people since the late 1990s, and even fewer have cared.

The Middle East isn’t like that. Until cars and trucks can be powered by solar, wind, or nuclear energy, the entire world depends on the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf region. That requires American security guarantees, which require our presence. And until radical Islamist organizations utterly lose their local appeal, we’ll have little choice but to intervene periodically for reasons that have nothing to do with economics or resources. For the time being, aggravating though it may be, Americans and Arabs are stuck with each other. We can take a bit of a breather, but retirement is decades away.

Michael J. Totten is a contributing editor at World Affairs and the author of four books, including Where the West Ends and The Road to Fatima Gate.

OG Image: 

The Case for US Intervention in the Middle East

By   Gary Grappo •   October 23, 2014

Gary Grappo

Gary Grappo is a former US ambassador and a distinguished fellow at the Center for Middle East Studies at the Korbel School for International Studies,

.... Read more WE BRING YOU PERSPECTIVES FROM AROUND THE WORLD. HELP US TO INFORM AND

EDUCATE. YOUR DONATION IS TAX-DEDUCTIBLE.

Washington’s decision to enter war in Iraq for the third time in a quarter century is consistent with long-held US policy.

The debate over isolationism vs engagement is a relatively new one in American political history. No less than George Washington and John Quincy Adams warned Americans of entangling ourselves in permanent alliances and enlisting under foreign banners regardless of how seemingly righteous.

That seemed like good advice for the young nation for well over 100 years. Then there were the two World Wars. America hesitantly entered the first, exiting with a different attitude about the world and its potential new role in it. Still, as dark clouds gathered over Europe in the 1930s and a new, more assertive power rose in Asia, few Americans were inclined to insert themselves in what was clearly a prelude to war. So resistant was the country, that for most of the period leading up to World War II, the troop levels of US armed forces were kept at dangerously low levels. Not until 1940, after the defeat of France and when all-out war appeared inevitable, did the US ramp up its army. And then there was Pearl Harbor.

_s-xclick

9ETG36S2U66CA

Among the many lessons America learned from its Pearl Harbor and World War II experiences were three that have become cornerstones of US foreign and national security policy. First, the US, as the only major combatant nation with its infrastructure and manufacturing base largely intact at war’s end, would have to step up and play a leadership role in the world. Second, its leadership efforts must strive to attain global stability through regional and international alliances. Third, the US must be prepared to confront its enemies abroad, as opposed to at home, so as to prevent another Pearl Harbor from ever happening again.

Isolationist voices persisted, nevertheless, but the threat of communism and a nuclear-armed Soviet Union convinced the majority of Americans that their country’s new role and its pro-active engagement abroad were the right course. Historically speaking, however, Americans have practiced isolationism much longer than engagement. And variations of the isolationist voice persist today, for example, urging American withdrawal from the Middle East and its current turmoil, as a recent article on Fair Observer argued.

Can Washington Afford to Withdraw?Isolationism is indeed an easier argument to make. America is flanked by two great oceans and by two stable and peace-loving democracies, Canada and Mexico — a luxury no other great power in history has had. And, of course, the US has a long list of domestic problems still unresolved. Leave the world to its problems and concentrate on fixing our own at home.

But can a nation as large as the US afford to withdraw? Or is it even possible for America to simply make itself an equal among all nations? The answer to both is simply no, not even if the US wanted to do so.

Since World War II, the US has gone to war on 14 occasions — from Korea through the latest wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That does not

include dispatching US troops to far-flung locales to protect or rescue Americans, defend embassies or address humanitarian crises. 

The lessons of World War II have become far more difficult in their application than in their adoption. They remain as relevant today as they were in 1945. As the lone superpower in the world, the US is the only nation that can initiate action, preferably with the support and help of other major powers, to address and help solve crises and, yes, even enforce order from time to time.

But must the US exercise a leadership role in every conflict or crisis? And what if the conflict presents little threat to US security interests but endangers the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents? How does the US determine which crises or conflicts present a genuine threat? Does every conflict require US military force?

There is no overarching answer to such questions. International crises, conflict and discord rarely admit to simple, overarching solutions.

Since World War II, the US has gone to war on 14 occasions — from Korea through the latest wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That does not include dispatching US troops to far-flung locales to protect or rescue Americans, defend embassies or address humanitarian crises. The American record in these is not flawless. Vietnam and Iraq stand out as two engagements in which American judgment was severely clouded, its estimate of the threat grossly exaggerated and understanding of the local political, cultural and historical context

woefully inadequate. Americans paid the price for these errors — 58,000 lives lost in Vietnam and 4,500 in Iraq, tens of thousands more adversely impacted by physical and psychological wounds and trillions of Americans’ tax dollars spent. The toll on the countries themselves remains inestimable.

Bosnia, But Not RwandaOther engagements would appear to justify the post-World War II policy. Korea, the 1991 Gulf War, Bosnia in 1994-95 and Kosovo in 1999 all succeeded — with important help from NATO and other allies — in halting invading forces or stopping ethnic cleansing. The 1983 Grenada invasion ended the threat to Americans living and studying there.

There have been times when the US chose not to intervene, too. It turned back Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991, but merely condemned Vladimir Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea earlier this year. US and NATO forces prevented ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, but stood by during the Khmer Rouge’s 1978 genocide of nearly 2 million innocent Cambodians and the 1994 Rwandan genocide of 800,000 Tutsis. Why Bosnia but not Rwanda or Cambodia? American hands may have been clean but perhaps not their consciences.

And in the Middle East, where American policy has been challenged and criticized extensively, it has abjured military involvement in the various conflicts pitting Egypt, Jordan, Syria and the Palestinians against Israel, choosing instead to employ its no less formidable diplomatic and economic assets to address those crises. Again, the results have been mixed — Camp David in 1979 on the plus side, but the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the minus.

Successes do not offset failures. Rather, they call for a continuing debate and thorough reassessment of the policy and its implementation. While largely valid on the whole, the policy — exercising our unique global leadership role, pursuing global stability through alliances and confronting enemies abroad as opposed to at home — needs to be constantly evaluated. Also, the tools with which the US exercises the policy must be carefully considered.

What neither the US, nor any other nation involved in ousting IS has been able to articulate is: What comes next?

The primary reason the US can maintain this policy is because it is the only nation that is able to bring massive — even overwhelming — resources to a conflict or crisis. These may be diplomatic, economic, logistical or technological. They must also include our military assets.

The latter tend to be more controversial, especially as applied in some regions like the Middle East. But for the policy to be truly effective, and for the US to acquire the support and especially the respect and trust it needs to play its outsized role, it must be able to deploy its formidable military assets.

Another Round in IraqFor the third time in a quarter century, America finds itself militarily involved in Iraq. Americans are understandably frustrated and exhausted. “Why us again?” they fairly ask?

If the US reengagement in Iraq is measured against the policy sketched above, then it appears justified. First, as a global leader with the resources, we can involve ourselves and bring about a positive outcome. That is not to be discounted since there are conflicts or crises whose outcomes we cannot necessarily affect — such as Putin’s annexation of Crimea.

Second, the US has been able to cobble together a coalition of more than 40 Western and Arab nations. That kind of unified force is almost indispensable in today’s world to any US engagement abroad, even though Americans bear the preponderance of the burden. The symbolic and political value of such a coalition, as long as it holds, is vital.

Third, the declared enemy, the Islamic State (IS), like its ideological forbear — al-Qaeda — presents a danger both to us and our allies in the region. That argues for confronting and defeating the terrorist group in Iraq and Syria before it may strike further afield in countries such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Lebanon, or further destabilize Iraq.

There are other motivating factors as well. The US bears some responsibility for Iraq’s current state. While the US did help establish a framework for democracy in Iraq — however fledgling it may be at present — it also inflamed deep-seated sectarian animosities. The US cannot hope to resolve those — it failed to do so after nearly nine years in Iraq — but it can help ensure that the worst elements of sectarianism, like IS, do not threaten the established order within the country or surrounding nations. Indeed, the US managed that, albeit too briefly, with the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2009 as a result of the so-called surge.

A second motivating factor is humanitarian. When the US decided to deploy its air forces to the region in September, IS was poised to assault Kurdistan, whose inhabitants we had helped escape the depredations of Saddam following the first Gulf War. The US could not idly stand by and watch the tremendous advances of Kurdistan and the Kurdish people threatened. Also, IS had begun a campaign to kill or enslave the minority Yazidis of northwestern Iraq. It looked like genocide, and it was one that the US had the ability to prevent. So, Bosnia or Rwanda?

What the US cannot say at present is what happens when — though the matter of the “if” may not be entirely settled for a while — the Islamic State is defeated? Instability in Syria will remain, not to mention continuing sectarianism and division in Iraq. The US record in implanting democracies abroad is sketchy — Korea’s took decades, Iraq’s hangs by a thread and Vietnam’s failed disastrously.

So, it would seem on the face of it, there is a good case for American intervention — even military — to eliminate a terrorist organization whose negotiating terms are “capitulation or death.” What neither the US, nor any other nation involved in ousting IS has been able to articulate is: What comes next?

One should not necessarily forgo the first action — elimination of a ruthless and heedlessly violent organization threatening the lives of thousands and even millions — because of the inability to address the second. Rather, it argues for pursuit of the first and vigorous, simultaneous action to get those nations most directly involved in the conflict to answer the second question and supporting them in that effort.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Kasha Malasha / Shutterstock.com

Opinions

Why U.S. troops should stay in IraqThe inside track on Washington politics.

Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published.

You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published.

You’re all set!

Sign up

*Invalid email address

Got it

Got it

By Meghan O'Sullivan

Opinions

September 9, 2011

As America looks back on this 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the war in Iraq looms large — and usually not in a good way. At best, it’s regarded as a distraction, a needless conflict that took America’s focus away from Afghanistan and al-Qaeda. At worst, the Iraq war is decried as a fiasco, the United States’ “greatest strategic disaster,” as retired Gen. William Odom, the former National Security Agency director, once put it.

There is no question that Iraq, as it stands today, has fallen short of American — and Iraqi — hopes and expectations. And there is no question that the costs of the war, for both sides, have been greater than anticipated. Even so, Iraq’s achievements — including the establishment of representative institutions against all odds — are hardly minor. The country could still become mired in a civil conflict that destabilizes the region. But it is equally or even more conceivable that, with relatively small amounts of continued U.S. support, the greatest strategic benefits of the Iraq intervention will materialize in the next several years. And these benefits would more than justify an ongoing U.S. military presence there.

inRead

This belief about Iraq’s strategic potential is not based on the naivete that underpinned many optimistic assessments before the war, and it is rooted in firmer ground than the desperate hopes of someone, like me, who has devoted much of the past decade to U.S. efforts in Iraq. While by no means inevitable, there are at least three ways in which Iraq has only just begun to show its strategic value.

First, Iraq can offer a great deal toward ensuring that the nascent transitions from dictatorships to more accountable governance in the region succeed over the long term. Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans — and perhaps eventually Syrians and Yemenis — have an advantage over Iraqis in the sense that they carry none of the baggage that comes with having a regime removed by the armed forces of an external power. But they will face many of the same challenges tackled by the Iraqis over the past eight years: how to hold members of the former regime accountable without stripping society of the expertise needed to rebuild the country; how to manage a political transition amid competing pressures for both quick results and inclusive processes; and how to deal with elements of the former regime determined to unseat the new order.

For sure, Iraqis — and we Americans — did not meet these challenges without mistakes and missteps. But Iraq’s lessons can help other countries of the Arab world make smoother, more successful transitions. Even before the Arab Spring, Arab intellectuals had begun looking to Iraq’s experience to gain insights into their own challenges.

Second, Iraq, perhaps paradoxically, is now one of the Middle Eastern countries best positioned to maintain ties with the West and with the United States in particular — no small matter in a region where U.S. strategic allies have almost literally disappeared overnight. The eight years since the ouster of Saddam Hussein have been traumatic both to Iraqis and Americans. But at the same time, the shared experience has built relationships and sympathies between the two populations that run deep. Even Americans who lament the U.S. intervention in Iraq must realize that their country made a large investment there and that there are benefits to some sort of ongoing relationship.

The Iraqi view of the United States is more complex. Even while there is real resentment, in private many Iraqi officials recognize that a continued relationship is important to the future stability and prosperity of their country. This mutual understanding is enshrined in the Strategic Framework Agreement of 2008, which pledges robust, nonmilitary cooperation between the two nations for the long term. A close U.S.-Iraqi relationship may be an important asset as other countries in the region draw further away from the United States, rejecting the policies of their former authoritarian, but pro-American, regimes.

Finally, and most compelling, there is the role that Iraq may play in averting a major global energy crisis in the coming years. The world economic recession eased pressure on global oil supplies and provided relief from the climbing energy prices of 2007 and 2008. But a quiet trend of 2010 was that growth in global oil consumption grew at the second-fastest rate ever, 2.8 percent, while growth in global crude oil production lagged behind at 2.5 percent. If demand continues to outgrow supply, it will be only a few short years before global spare capacity of oil — one of the indicators most closely tied to prices — gets dangerously low, and jittery markets push prices up and up. Assuming the world escapes another dip in economic growth, this outcome would probably materialize even without any additional geopolitical hiccups, such as political unrest in Saudi Arabia or a military confrontation with Iran.

Iraq is one of a very small number of countries that could bring oil online fast enough to help the world meet this growing demand at a reasonable price. In fact, major energy institutions and international oil companies are already assuming that Iraq will significantly increase its oil production in the coming decade. The International Energy Agency expects Iraq to nearly double its production in the next decade, from roughly 2.5 million barrels per day to 4.8 million barrels per day; BP’s 2030 global assessments are based on similar assumptions.

Such assessments are not pie in the sky. Yes, the claims made in 2003 that Iraq would pay for its own reconstruction with oil turned out to be woefully inaccurate; the country struggled to maintain its production in the face of decrepit infrastructure and a determined insurgency for nearly six years after the invasion. But in the past two years, Iraq has made impressive, if incomplete, progress in developing its vast oil resources. It has signed 11contracts with international oil companies geared toward increasing production more than four-fold to over 12 million barrels a day — more than Saudi Arabia produces today. Few analysts expect Iraq to reach these levels, because of infrastructure bottlenecks and political obstacles. But most still expect a significant increase in production, and they acknowledge that without it, the global economy could be in trouble.

If lessons from Iraq’s difficult experience help stabilize the region, if Iraq remains one of a rapidly dwindling number of Arab countries willing to cooperate with the United States publicly and privately, and if the development of Iraq’s oil resources help the world avoid another energy crisis, some may recalculate the strategic ledger on the U.S. intervention in Iraq.

These potential strategic contributions make a compelling case for maintaining support for Iraq at a time when most Americans are more than ready to let the Iraqis sink or swim on their own. Iraq no longer needs the enormous volumes of U.S. financial, political and military assistance of the previous eight years. But, as a fragile state whose institutions are still vulnerable, Iraq could benefit greatly from a relatively small, continued investment of resources and time.

While the military component of this investment need not be large, it is critical to shoring up Iraq’s nascent armed forces against extremist threats. And in demonstrating America’s continued interest in Iraq’s trajectory, this assistance would buttress Iraq’s political and security institutions.

The Obama administration and Iraqi leaders are grappling with the question of whether all U.S. forces will leave Iraq by the end of 2011, as stipulated in the current bilateral security agreement. The alternative is a different legal arrangement for a small number of U.S. troops — perhaps 10,000 — to stay and help Iraq’s security forces train and deal with challenges that they still cannot adequately address on their own.

Recent news reports suggest that the Obama administration has already decided to limit the number of American troops it would keep in Iraq to as few as 3,000. This is disheartening on several levels. First, troop numbers should come out of negotiations with the Iraqis over the necessary missions — not as a fiat from Washington based on domestic politics. Second, it is not clear what such a small force could accomplish while still protecting itself. And finally, it calls into question whether the Obama administration really understands the opportunities and imperatives it is presented with in Iraq.

How U.S. Interventions Dismembered the Middle EastDespite everything, hawks are still pushing President Obama to send ground troops to Syria. He would be wise to reject their advice.By Adil E. Shamoo, December 11, 2015. Share

Print

 (Photo: U.S. Army / Flickr)

For the last few decades in the Middle East, the policy of western powers — led by the United States — has been to ensure the flow of oil; maintain stable and secure allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf States, Egypt, and Israel; and maintain military and economic influence when needed. Usually these ends were met through economic or military-to-military partnerships.

After September 11, however — with a big push from the neoconservatives — U.S. policy toward the Middle East lurched toward overt military intervention, such as the one in Iraq in 2003.

The goal was to spread U.S. influence and secure supposed U.S. interests by regime change. So U.S. policy planners looked for a weak and corrupt regime that enjoyed little support from its people (in this case, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq), and cooked up a justification for the military intervention (in Iraq’s case, the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction).

The invasion triggered tremendous sectarian violence and a violent insurgency against the U.S. occupation, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives in Iraq and the overall destruction of a society of some 30 million people. The occupation also led to a surge in suicide bombings and the emergence of the Islamic State, two horrific developments that continue to plague the country to this day. The sectarian tensions between Shia and Sunni, meanwhile, combined with greater Kurdish autonomy, have led to the effective break-up of Iraq.

The United States supported military intervention again in Libya, four years ago. Although Washington claimed that it was intervening only to prevent large-scale civilian casualties at the hands of the Libyan government, it ended up supporting a full-scale regime change that culminated in the death of Muammar Gaddafi. Today, Libya is in chaos, with several political and territorial factions fighting for power.

Syria has had a corrupt and dictatorial regime for decades, first under Hafez al-Assad and then, since 2000, his son Bashar al-Assad. In 2011, Bashar al-Assad faced a nonviolent uprising from a large segment of his people. In the first year of the Syrian uprising, the rebellion was secular and nationalistic. But his violent repression of the protests ignited the country’s sectarian fissures, alienating the country’s majority Sunnis while driving minority populations like Christians and members of Assad’s Shia Alawite sect into the arms of the regime, turning a previously nationalistic uprising into a violent sectarian bloodbath.

Now the Islamic State, or ISIS, controls the east and much of the north. Assad controls the west. Kurdish groups control fragmented regions in the north and northeast. Dozens of other factions — such as Turkmen, the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, and many other opposition groups — control smaller areas all across the country. Over 200,000 Syrians have been killed, and over half of the country’s 23 million people have been displaced.

The country, in other words, is ripe for dismemberment. Its military is weak, its central government is reduced to a rump state, and the regime enjoys ever-diminishing support from the (shrinking) populace.

Syria’s neighbors are all contributing to the centrifugal tensions within the country. Turkey, a Sunni country with a long border with Syria, has funneled money to anti-Assad rebels while also training its fire on the anti-ISIS Kurds. Saudi Arabia and other Sunni-dominated Gulf States, fearful of Shiite Iran’s influence in the region, have sent billions of dollars to anti-government rebels to establish a Wahhabi Sunni government. They’ve relied on Turkey to look the other way as money, arms, and trainers have poured over its borders to the rebels, including Islamic extremists, while Iran and Hezbollah have intervened on the side of the regime.

Enter Russia. Without a warm-water port of its own, Russia has maintained a naval base at Tartus, near Latakia, since 1971 — and intends to keep it that way. After arming and supporting the Assad regime since the beginning, Russia began targeting rebels with airstrikes earlier this fall as they closed in on regime strongholds along the coast. After ISIS downed a civilian Russian plane over the Sinai, leading to the death of over 200 passengers, Russia intensified its bombing of targets in Syria with heavy airstrikes, bombardments, and cruise missile attacks.

More recently, Turkey downed a Russian jet after it allegedly violated Turkey’s airspace for a total of 17 seconds. Local Turkmen militiamen shot one pilot and Assad’s forces rescued the second. Russia accused Turkey, and especially Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of planning the episode, and indeed many military experts were skeptical of a shoot down after only 17 seconds incursion. In response, Putin increased Russian hardware in Syria, including sophisticated missiles capable of shooting down any airplane over Syria, and also accused Turkey of buying ISIS oil. Recently, the Turkish government jailed two journalists who released a video of arm shipments from Turkey to Syria.

President Barack Obama won election in 2008 promising an end to “dumb wars,” and since then he’s vowed to avoid major troop commitments. Yet even after all the fallout from recent interventions — including, more recently, the spread of ISIS terrorism to Europe — foreign policy hawks keep pushing Obama to send ground troops to Syria.

He would be wise to reject their advice. Syria is in need of a ceasefire, not more bombing from the world powers. On the verge of dismemberment, the country needs a negotiator to bring all sides together without prior conditions. Are members of the UN Security Council ready to listen before it’s too late and Syria completely falls apart?

Adil E. Shamoo is an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, a senior analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, and the author of Equal Worth – When Humanity Will Have Peace. He can be reached at ashamoo@som.umaryland.edu and blogs at forwarorpeace.com .

W O R L D

U.S. Involvement in Middle East: 2 Reasons to Scale BackANALYSIS

B Y H A O L I O N 1 1 / 1 5 / 1 1 A T 4 : 5 4 P M Low

 

The U.S. involvement in the Middle East has spiked since the 9/11 attacks.

U.S. efforts in the region has so far “claimed more than 6,000 American lives, cost more than $1 trillion,

and consumed countless hours for two presidents and their senior staff,” said Richard N. Haass,

President of The Council on Foreign Relations, in a Project Syndicate commentary.

Haass said the U.S. had (and still has) legitimate reasons for being involved in the Middle East.

U.S. Army soldiers return fire during a gun battle with suspected Taliban militants near the village of Jilga in Arghandab District north of Kandahar July 8, 2010. Photo: Reuters

The U.S. was attacked on 9/11 by terrorists based in that region. The region still has vast reserves of oil

and gas. Iran “is moving ever closer to developing nuclear weapons,” which could destabilize the region

and prompt others to follow suit. Moreover, the “unique American tie to Israel” will likely always

warrant some level of U.S involvement in the region.

Still, these reasons do not justify the current (high) level of U.S. involvement.

Al-Qaeda has been significantly weakened, culminating in the recent killing of its former leader Osama

bin Laden. Haass believes the prospects for “peacemaking efforts” are poor. He also believes the

expensive U.S. strategy of “massive nation-building” in Iraq and Afghanistan is clearly not working.

Instead, he advises the U.S. to focus more on the Far East.

It is hard to exaggerate the rising importance of Asia’s economy. Many predictions, including this one

from the IMF, predict that the size of China’s economy (in PPP terms) alone could exceed that of the U.S.

in just a few short years.

“Much of the twenty-first century’s history will be written” in Asia, said Haass.

He pointed out that U.S. companies already export more than $300 billion in goods and services to the

Far East annually. Moreover, the U.S. is a big recipient of capital from Asia; the U.S. government alone

has received over $2 trillion of loans over the years from China and Japan.

What is the U.S. foreign policy objective in the Far East?

According to Haass, it is maintaining overall regional stability, honoring alliance obligations with allies,

deterring North Korean aggression and incentivizing China to not use its power coercively.

Dominique Moisi, a French political scientist, thinks the U.S. should involve itself less in foreign affairs in

general (and especially in the Middle East).

The U.S. has faced several serious foreign threats its modern history, including those from Germany

during WWII and those from the Soviet Union after WWII.

In the early 21st century, however, the U.S. does not face such threats.

Russia is much weaker than the Soviet Union. China’s clear priority is domestic stability and economic

growth, not global domination, said Moisi in a Project Syndicate commentary. As for the threat of

terrorism from the Middle East, staving it off does not require a “massive military budget or huge

deployments of U.S. troops all over the world,” he said.

Instead, the bigger threat to the U.S. may be the relative decline of its economic standing in the world.

Moisi said the U.S.’s deteriorating infrastructure has become “a drag on its competitiveness,” “an insult

to its international image” and “a risk to the safety of its citizens.”

The U.S. should do more to revive economic growth in general, create jobs and reduce the budget

deficit, he said.

Modern history has repeatedly illustrated the importance of economic power.

The fall of the Soviet Union was largely caused by economic weakness. The rise of China, conversely, is

almost solely fueled by economic strength.

If the U.S. wants to retain its superpower status as much as it possibly can, it should put its economy on

the forefront and spend less effort fighting foreign entities that pose less threat than U.S. economic

weakness.

Stuck in the Middle EastOffshore balancing is the right strategy, if Obama has the courage for it.By Christopher Layne • January 4, 2016

Tweet

illustration by Michael Hogue

When it comes to the Middle East, President Obama must feel a lot like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather: Part III”: “Just when I thought I was

out, they pull me back in.” Before the apparently out of the blue emergence of ISIS in summer 2014, Obama was committed to ending America’s involvement in the futile Iraq and Afghanistan wars and shifting—“rebalancing” or “pivoting”—Washington’s strategic focus from the Middle East to East Asia. The Islamic State’s breakout, and the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan, forced the administration to scale back its plans to disengage militarily from the region and put the Asian pivot on hold.

Responding to the Islamic State’s emergence and the civil war in Syria, the Obama administration has modestly increased its involvement in the region: air strikes, military trainers, employment of special forces. But at least until now, in both Syria and Iraq—which are straddled by the Islamic State’s self-styled caliphate—Obama has held the line against a major reinsertion of U.S. military power in the region. Since the November attacks staged by ISIS in Paris, however, he is being pressured to respond by dramatically ramping up the U.S. military role in Syria and Iraq.

His refusal to be stampeded into significantly expanding the American military presence in the Middle East is strategically sound. America’s security and interests will best be served by reducing the U.S. military footprint in the region and adopting an offshore balancing strategy. Saber-rattling may score cheap political points, but recent events show that American military intervention is not a panacea for solving the Middle East’s deep political pathologies. Indeed, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2011 Libya intervention increased regional instability and, by creating breeding grounds for Islamic extremists, amplified the threat from groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.

What explains the failure of America’s policy in the region, and where should the U.S. go from here? Obama’s policy has been contradictory and ambivalent. Although his instincts have been to wind down the American military role in the region, when pressed by hardliners in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment he has often lacked the courage of his convictions. When it comes to strategy, there is a good deal of evidence that Obama favors offshore balancing. His inability to hold firm to his preferences, however, carries the risk that he will cave into the post-Paris political pressure and that the United States will be dragged into another long, costly, and futile war in the Middle East.

♦♦♦

The fundamental cause of today’s Middle East turmoil is the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which unhinged an already volatile region. It was regime change, the export of democracy, and Washington’s own hubris-drenched imperial ambitions that plunged the United States into the regional geopolitical cul-de-sac in which it now finds itself. The George W. Bush administration’s Iraq goals were fantastical. Any policymaker with a sense of history—not least the Vietnam debacle—should have known that American attempts to impose democracy at the point of a bayonet would invariably end in failure.

We know—and it ought to have been known at the time—that the Bush administration’s articulated rationales for the war were false. Iraq was neither about 9/11 nor “weapons of mass destruction,” which were nonexistent. Moreover, because it had been weakened by years of sanctions and was effectively hemmed in by U.S. military power, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed no threat to U.S. allies and client states in the region.

The Downing Street memos generated by the British government make clear that the asserted rationales for war were merely pretexts and that at least a year before the invasion the Bush administration had decided to use military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein. And the administration brushed aside a number of warnings that an invasion of Iraq would have catastrophic consequences. For example, a February 2003 study written by two U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute analysts debunked the administration’s notion that American troops would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqis. Rather, the War College analysts stated:

Most Iraqis and most other Arabs will probably assume that the United States intervened in Iraq for its own reasons and not to liberate the population. Long-term gratitude is unlikely and suspicion of U.S. motives will increase as the occupation continues. A force initially viewed as

liberators can rapidly be relegated to the status of invaders should an unwelcome occupation continue for a prolonged time.

The authors highlighted the probability that U.S. occupation forces would find themselves facing guerrilla and terrorist attacks—or even a large-scale insurrection. The report also stressed that because of Iraq’s sectarian divisions “the establishment of democracy or even some sort of rough pluralism in Iraq, where it has never really existed previously, will be a staggering challenge for any occupation force seeking to govern in a post-Saddam era.” The authors’ prophetic bottom line was that “The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious.”

The U.S. intelligence community also counseled the administration: to refrain from going to war; that an Iraqi democracy was not in the cards; and that if we did invade, the United States would face a “messy aftermath” in Iraq. These prewar analyses were accurate. But an administration driven by belief in the efficacy of American power and blinkered by a messianic foreign-policy ideology ignored the warning signs.

The U.S. not only toppled Saddam Hussein, it also destroyed the institutions of the Iraqi state and upended the sectarian political balance, which from the end of World War I—the beginning of the modern Iraqi state—had been tilted in favor of the minority Sunnis. This created the opening for a bitter internecine conflict between Iraq’s Shi’ite and Sunni populations. By 2007 the conflict had become so severe that the Bush administration decided to “surge” additional troops to Iraq to end the strife.

To be sure, the surge did reduce sectarian strife in Iraq. By no means, however, did it end it. More important, notwithstanding the assertions of leading Bush administration officials that the surge was a “success,” it failed to achieve the administration’s overriding objective. This, as President George W. Bush stated, was to buy time to foster political reconciliation between Iraq’s Sunni and Shi’ite populations. This never happened. Iraq has remained polarized and unstable. Under the leadership of then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Shi’ites consolidated their power internally and aligned externally with their natural ally, predominantly Shi’ite Iran. Consequently, Iraq’s Sunni population remained alienated politically from the Shi’ite-dominated regime in Baghdad and resentful of their displacement from power. It was disaffected Sunnis—including many former officers in Saddam Hussein’s army—who formed the backbone of the Islamic State.

When the Islamic State burst on the scene, the architects and executors of the George W. Bush administration saw, and seized, an opportunity to revise history and absolve themselves of responsibility. There is a historical

parallel: after their defeat in 1918, Germany’s military leaders denied that the Allies had prevailed on the battlefield. Rather, they said, the German army had been “stabbed in the back” by disloyal elements on the home front. In a similar vein, Bush administration apologists claimed that by fumbling away the American “victory” purportedly won by the 2007 surge, the Obama administration bears sole responsibility for the emergence of the Islamic State because—so it was alleged—Obama had precipitously withdrawn U.S. combat forces from Iraq.

This argument is disingenuous. The narrative constructed by Bush administration apologists overlooked two crucial facts. First, U.S. forces were withdrawn from Iraq in 2011 pursuant to the terms of a 2008 status of forces agreement that the Bush administration itself had negotiated with the Iraq regime. Second, Obama was prepared to keep a residual force of American combat troops in Iraq for several years. Washington was, however, unable to reach agreement with Baghdad to this effect because the Maliki regime wanted the Americans out. Simply put, the claims of Bush administration apologists that fruits of its “victory” were thrown away by the Obama administration are nonsense—not least because the so-called victory attributed to the surge was an illusion.

The idea that the world is more dangerous today because Obama is a weak president, rather than chiefly because his predecessor attempted to do too much, has set the stage for further debate about Middle East intervention. Since the Paris attacks, Obama’s critics have renewed their calls for a robust American military response to the Islamic State. But rhetoric aside, few of the critics have offered a viable policy for dealing with the Islamic State and the Syrian civil war. The truth is that Obama’s caution about plunging the U.S. back into the swamp of the Middle East is the right policy.

This is not to say that Obama’s Middle East policy is beyond criticism: his record is mixed. On the plus side, at least until now, he has successfully resisted the calls for direct American military intervention in Syria’s civil war and for greatly increased involvement in Iraq. Obama has carefully kept U.S. troops out of harm’s way. American forces are confined to providing training, intelligence, and logistical support to the Iraqi military. Rightly eschewing calls for American boots on the ground, he decided that the United States will rely on air power and local proxy forces, like the Kurds, to strike the Islamic State.

On the negative side, in August 2014 Obama unwisely declared that Bashar al-Assad had to “go.” This was a mistake on several levels. First, it overlooked the fact that U.S. choices in the Middle East are not between good and bad—democracy versus tyrants—but rather between awful and worse. The Obama administration apparently learned nothing from its own reckless decisions, in the midst of the so-called Arab Spring, to intervene in

Libya and to pull the rug from underneath the former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, which allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to take power in Cairo. Authoritarian rulers may not be good but they and the strong states they rule are preferable to power vacuums that will be filled by jihadists.

Second, by raising the hopes of the anti-Assad forces that the U.S. would intervene on their behalf, the Obama administration caused an intensification of the Syrian civil war. As former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter said, given the Obama administration’s reluctance to use U.S. military power to remove Assad, Washington erred in issuing an ultimatum that he had to give up power. “If we’re going to get people’s hopes up when we’re not willing to do more,” she said, “we need to be honest about that and maybe it’s better to remain silent.”

Third, by demanding Assad’s ouster, the Obama administration limited its options to achieve a diplomatic settlement in Syria. As Brookings Institution scholar Bruce Jones put it, “If you call for Assad to go, you dramatically drive up the obstacles to a political settlement. If you’re not insisting on him leaving there are more options. If you say Assad must go as the outcome of a settlement he has the existential need to stop that settlement.” It was a mistake to lay down a marker, or a “red line,” that Washington was not prepared to enforce.

♦♦♦

Where should the U.S. go from here? The first thing is that a realistic appraisal of the situation is needed. ISIS has engaged in horrific acts—though our Saudi Arabian “ally” is by far the worldwide leader in beheadings—and for sure the Islamic State will continue to try to strike at the West. But this does not mean that it poses an existential threat to the United States. No terrorist group can destroy a great power. (Though it can cause policymakers to make knee-jerk decisions that result in the roll-back of the very civil liberties that are core of what our national security policy is supposed to defend.) The Islamic State may lash out again at Western Europe and the U.S., but this can never be the main focus of its strategy because it is surrounded by hostile forces that are bent on destroying it. If ISIS means to consolidate its grip on the territory constituting its self-declared “state,” its first strategic priority must be on the “near enemy.”

Washington needs to appraise the threat from ISIS soberly. While the United States is not invulnerable, it is far less vulnerable than Western Europe. Partly this is because of simple geography: the Middle East and the Maghreb are on Europe’s doorstep. Moreover, unlike the U.S., states like Britain and France were colonial powers in the region and that legacy is an important source of jihadist animus toward them—in Western Europe there is a large homegrown pool of potential terrorists from which ISIS can

recruit terrorists. Finally, the European Union is more exposed than the U.S. for two additional reasons. First, because its borders are porous. Second, the EU lacks centralized intelligence and internal security mechanisms. Instead, it relies on its member states to perform these functions, which are poorly coordinated.

This is not to say that the U.S. can be complacent. Robust intelligence capabilities, control over its borders, actions to cut off the Islamic State’s finances, and the limited use of drone strikes, special operations forces, and air power can reduce the threat of an Islamic State strike at the American homeland.

At the same time, we should expect America’s leaders to approach the question of how to respond to ISIS, and the broader issues of U.S. Middle East policy, calmly and without stoking public fears. In today’s world, given the realities of globalization and the pathologies of the Middle East, there is always the possibility that jihadists will pull off random attacks. But with the right policies, that will be seldom, and the damage will be small scale. As Ohio State University Professor John Mueller has demonstrated, U.S. policymakers and politicians are prone to greatly exaggerating the amount of damage that jihadist groups can inflict on the United States.

As long as the Middle East remains in a state of disorder, the terrorist threat will be chronic. Even if the Islamic State were overrun militarily and occupied tomorrow, jihadist terrorism would not disappear. Rather it would simply migrate elsewhere, and new groups would emerge to promote jihadist ideas. Policies of democratization, and of economic development, cannot extinguish this threat because there are just too many ungoverned spaces to which jihadists can disperse. And for the United States, sending large numbers of ground forces back into the Middle East would worsen the problem, not eradicate it. As Iraq demonstrated, American military occupations in the Middle East fuel the jihadist backlash.

We already are on the precipice of a war of civilizations, and we should not want to go over that cliff. That would embroil the United States in a new version of the Hundred Years’ War—or something like 17th-century Europe’s religious wars—and the long-term sapping of American power. Until the Middle East outgrows its political and religious pathologies, and its lingering colonial-era resentments of the West, there will always be the risk of horrors like Paris or even 9/11. The challenge is not to adopt policies that fuel a cycle of escalation and broaden the appeal of jihadism in the region.

Doubtless the reality that jihadism is a long-term, chronic issue will not satisfy those who believe there are simple solutions in the Middle East.

There are not. The region is too riven by its many deformities to be fixed by outsiders.

The U.S. has no good options in Iraq and Syria. Air power alone cannot defeat or destroy the Islamic State. Given Obama’s decision, a correct one, to eschew a ground war in Syria and Iraq, Washington has been forced to rely on regional proxies—“moderate” anti-Assad Syrian rebels, the Iraqi army, and the Kurds—to provide ground forces to fight the Islamic State. The efficacy of this strategy, however, is doubtful. Most fundamentally this is because, as Financial Times correspondent Roula Khalaf has observed, true moderates among the Syrian rebels are few and far between. Indeed, to the extent these “moderates” exist at all, it is primarily in the febrile imaginations of foreign-policy mavens in Washington. Splintered among various factions, the Syrian rebels have no unified command or strategy. It is the most extreme among them who have been the most successful militarily, and they are interested primarily in fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, not the Islamic State.

The notion that the U.S. can call into existence credible Iraqi military forces is equally far-fetched. The Iraqi army—rebuilt at a cost to the U.S. of $25 billion—collapsed in the face of an Islamic State onslaught in 2014. Key cities including Mosul, Ramadi, Tikrit, and Fallujah were overrun by ISIS forces. To date, such military successes as the Baghdad regime has had have been won by Iraqi Kurdish forces—and by Shi’ite militias, which are closely linked to Iran—and not by regular Iraqi army units. The Obama administration has pinned its hopes in Iraq on the notion that the supposedly “more inclusive” government of the new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, will be able to rebuild the country’s military capabilities. There is no reason to believe this will happen, however, because the Sunni-Shia divide is too deep and the foundations on which a unitary Iraqi state can be built have been shattered.

♦♦♦

In summer 2014 Obama said that he did not have a strategy to deal with the Islamic State. This gave his opponents an opening to stoke the interventionist fire. The irony is that Obama, in fact, did, and does, have a strategy for dealing with the Islamic State. That strategy is what security studies scholars call offshore balancing. In a nutshell, as an offshore balancer the United States would pretty much stay out of the Syria and Iraq—and Afghanistan—conflicts militarily. Any U.S. involvement would be confined to intelligence, logistical back-up, training, and the occasional use of air power and special operations forces. The goal of the strategy would be to shift the responsibility for containing or rolling back the Islamic State (and Taliban) to regional powers—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Russia, and the European Union. The risks of deeper U.S. involvement in these conflicts

are clear. America would become more entangled in the complex politics and multisided rivalries of a region that U.S. policymakers—even, or especially, the so-called experts—can neither understand nor control. The wisest American strategy is to pivot away from the Middle East and to insulate ourselves as much as possible from the region’s turmoil.

The Islamic State is an existential threat to itself. No great or regional power openly supports it. The regional actors have competing as well as parallel interests, however, and each wants to do as little as possible to stop the Islamic State. Each prefers to buck pass to the United States—and secondarily to the other regional powers—to do the heavy lifting. For these reasons, the U.S.-orchestrated coalition against the Islamic State is fragile.

For example, Turkey’s strategic priorities are to force Assad from power and strike at the Kurds, who are the main U.S. proxy in Syria. There are persistent rumors that, in pursuit of these aims, Ankara has tacitly colluded with the Islamic State. Saudi Arabia is an equally feckless ally. The Saudis have their own ties to the jihadists, whom it views as useful in waging a proxy war against Iran. Moreover, Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi brand of Islam is a powerful incubator for anti-Western jihadist fighters.

As long as they believe that the United States will take care of the Islamic State, the regional powers have every incentive to free ride and minimize their own commitments, costs, and risks, and to pursue their own agendas rather than focusing on ISIS. The Obama administration’s policy thus has created a strategic version of moral hazard. After all, the Islamic State is a much greater threat to its neighbors than it is to the United States: instead of shielding them from this threat, the U.S. should force them to confront it. Simply put, if we want the regional powers to do more in the fight against the Islamic State, Washington needs to convince them that the U.S. is going to do less. When they realize that America is not going to ride to their rescue, the regional powers will have to take the lead in tackling ISIS because their own survival and security will be on the line.

Members of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment who are aghast at Russia’s intervention in Syria are suffering from a bad case of strategic myopia. Instead of fearing Russian or Iranian involvement in this conflict, American policymakers should welcome it. Far better for them, rather than the United States, to pay the price in blood and treasure of battling the Islamic State. A similar dynamic is at play in Afghanistan, where Russia and China fear a northward Islamist extremist thrust that will menace their interests in Central Asia. But the American and NATO military presence there means that Moscow and Beijing are able to stand back while the U.S. shields them from the danger.

Barack Obama was on the way to being America’s first modern offshore-balancing president and was more or less successfully pursuing that strategy. He moved to extricate the U.S. from futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama placed America’s Middle East conflicts in a wider strategic perspective. Against the background of China’s rapid rise and America’s own fiscal and economic crisis, he rightly asked what sense there is in borrowing money from China to fight in the Middle East at a time when U.S. power is in relative decline. He understood that America’s wars in the Islamic world would have the same effect of weakening U.S. power that the Boer War had for Britain at the beginning of the 20th century—or that intervention in Afghanistan had for the Soviet Union. Far more than the American foreign-policy establishment, of which he has never truly been a member, Obama seemed to understand the tectonic geopolitical and economic shifts that have brought the unipolar era of American dominance to an end.

Regrettably, however, Obama has seemed to lack the fortitude to stick to his strategic guns. His successor, whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or one of the crop of Republicans seeking the GOP nomination, will almost certainly be more hawkish. By not liquidating these costly and unwinnable conflicts during his term, Obama has made it likely that the next president will plunge the U.S. back into the region’s geopolitical morass, repeating the Bush administration’s mistakes in the name of “doing something” about the Islamic State.

Christopher Layne is University Distinguished Professor of International Affairs and Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A&M University.

Top U.S. Commander: American Troops Need to Stay in Afghanistan

By Paul McLearyPaul McLeary is the Pentagon reporter for Foreign Policy. October 6, 2015 - 1:43 pm paul.mcleary @paulmcleary

The U.S. Army general leading the 14,000-strong NATO force in Afghanistan made a plea on Tuesday to leave American forces in Afghanistan longer to train the faltering Afghan security forces, a move that would require President Barack Obama to scrap his December 2016 timeline for withdrawing the last U.S. troops from the country.

Afghans still “cannot handle the fight alone” without American close air support and a special operations counterterrorism force to hit Taliban leadership, Gen. John Campbell told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It will take time for them to build their human capital” in logistics and managing their forces in the field, meaning Afghan forces will need international assistance “well beyond this year.”

Campbell said he has provided the White House a variety of options on troop strength, but he hedged when asked specifically how many of the 9,800 American troops should remain in Afghanistan and for how long.

The testimony comes just days after a U.S. airstrike in the city of Kunduz hit a charity hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, killing 22 and injuring another 37 civilians. The attack has sparked international outrage, particularly as the American explanation for the tragedy has continued to change. Initial reports said U.S. forces were under fire at the location, but that story changed on Monday, when Campbell said Afghan forces had requested the strike by an AC-130 gunship after reporting that they had come under Taliban fire.

Just before Campbell’s testimony, Dr. Joanne Liu, president of the aid group, released a statement charging the hospital was “deliberately bombed” and that the group is “working on the presumption of a war crime.” The group has maintained that it had provided the GPS coordinates of the hospital to coalition and Afghan officials, as recently as Sept. 29.

On Capitol Hill Tuesday, Campbell took more responsibility, telling the panel, “To be clear, the decision to provide [airstrikes] was a U.S. decision, made within the U.S. chain of command. The hospital was mistakenly struck. We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility.”

He and other senior U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Ash Carter, have promised a full investigation into the incident.

The three-hour hearing focused new attention on the Afghan war, the longest in American history and one that has long since faded from the public consciousness. Much of the general’s testimony had a familiar ring, as it reflected the script that U.S. generals have followed for much of the past decade-plus in Iraq and Afghanistan: a plea for more time, and more training, to solidify the small gains in security that local forces have made.

In recent recommendations sent to the White House in September, Campbell proposed keeping as many as 8,000 U.S. troops in the country through 2017 and beyond, Foreign Policy has reported, but Campbell told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “our support cannot and should not be indefinite.”

Pressed by lawmakers to criticize Obama’s plan to leave Afghanistan in little over a year, Campbell would only say his job is to provide options to the White House. “I do believe that we have to provide our senior leadership options different than the current plan,” he said, which calls for keeping a 1,000-troop embassy presence only.

The 2016 withdrawal plan is now outdated, however, Campbell said. “When the president made that decision [to withdraw], [he] did not take into account the changes over the past two years,” including the rise of the Islamic State, the 2014 election of a more pro-U.S. government under President Ashraf Ghani, and a series of renewed offensives under an emboldened Taliban leadership.

Since the end of U.S. and NATO combat operations at the end of 2014, Afghan forces have taken the lead in the fight and have suffered record casualties on the battlefield as a result. About 7,800 Afghans have been wounded and 4,700 killed in combat so far this year, an increase of 60 percent over 2014, according to figures released by the Pentagon in July.

The White House appears to favor a recommendation put forth by Gen. Martin Dempsey, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before he retired last month, which would maintain a U.S. presence of about 5,000 troops focused mainly on counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan, according to recent reports.

Campbell’s message about staying the course in Afghanistan found a willing audience in Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, who called the 2016 pullout plan a “politically motivated withdrawal.” McCain warned the United States is at risk of another disastrous security situation like the one in Iraq, where the Islamic State captured the cities of Ramadi, Mosul, and Fallujah, along with vast swaths of Anbar province, after American troops left at the end of 2011.

“Wars do not end just because politicians say so,” McCain said.

Less is More: The Future of the U.S. Military in the Persian GulfNovember 01, 2014

by Joshua Rovner and Caitlin Talmadge

Download the print version Five years ago, the total number of U.S. military personnel in the Persian Gulf was over 230,000. Today, that number

is well under 50,000. The rapid exit of so many U.S. fighting men and women has caused many observers to fear for

the future of the Gulf. As one analyst put it, the regional forecast is bleak with “violence, followed by intermittent

violence, and renewed violence.”1 Beyond the short-term problem of insecurity lies a raft of long-term nightmares,

including political instability, oil shocks, and nuclear proliferation. Policymakers and military officials in Washington

and the Persian Gulf share these concerns. The belief that a precipitous U.S. drawdown is creating a security

vacuum and political breakdown is close to the conventional wisdom.

Officials routinely cite the British withdrawal from the Gulf as a dangerous precedent. The British East India Company

established a residency in Persia in 1763, and the government spent the next century building its influence in the

region. British hegemony continued even after World War II while much of the rest of the empire was collapsing. In

1968, however, Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced that the United Kingdom would end its military

commitments “east of Suez,” and in 1971 the Royal Navy officially left the Persian Gulf. The British had served as the

de facto guardians of the Gulf for a quarter century; then they were gone. The decade that followed saw intense

regional hostility, the growth of military power in Iran and Iraq, and the first major use of the oil weapon against the

West. The absence of an external hegemon, according to this version of events, meant that nothing existed to stop

regional powers from jockeying for influence.

Joshua Rovner is the John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National Security at

Southern Methodist University, where he also serves Director of Studies at the Tower Center for Political Studies.

Caitlin Talmadge is assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University

and a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and has also served as a consultant to

the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

But the British analogy is oversimplified, and fears about U.S. withdrawal today are overwrought. The British example

actually shows that, in some cases, it is possible to provide stability with a minimal investment. Despite wide

recognition of British hegemony in the post-war period, London maintained a surprisingly small force in the Gulf. It did

not need much more than that—the Gulf was a very permissive environment for most of the 1950s and 1960s. No

regional state had the military capabilities to change the regional balance of power. In addition, oil was abundant and

global demand was low, meaning that regional rulers could not use oil as a tool of coercion. These favorable

circumstances began to change near the end of the 1960s, right at the time that British leaders were deciding that

they had no future in the Gulf. Thus, even if they had wanted to continue to provide hegemonic stability, the British

would have had to invest a great deal more force in the region to get it.

Happily, however, the situation for the United States today is more like the 1950s than the 1970s. The major regional

powers all suffer from serious shortcomings in conventional military power, meaning that none of them will be able to

seriously threaten the balance for the foreseeable future. Iran’s military has suffered greatly from decades of war and

sanctions. Iraq’s fledgling security services are almost exclusively focused on internal problems. And Saudi Arabia,

the richest country in the region, seems content to rely on a dense network of defenses and proxies rather than

pursue any real power projection capabilities. While there are reasons to worry about internal stability, especially

given the ongoing fight against ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), there is very little chance of a major

interstate war. Moreover, threats to oil shipping in the Gulf are real but not overwhelming. All of this points to a simple

and optimistic conclusion: the United States can protect its core interest in the free flow of oil without having to

commit to a large and enduring naval or ground presence to the Gulf.

 

Pax BritannicaTo understand why the United States is in such a favorable position today, it helps to look back at the experience of

the post-war United Kingdom. Britain’s traditional interest in the Persian Gulf was as a trade route to India; but after

World War II, its focus shifted to ensuring oil security and enhancing regional stability as a bulwark against the Soviet

Union. U.S. officials were happy to delegate the role of regional naval hegemon to London, as they were occupied

with the demands of stabilizing Western Europe and East Asia while orchestrating a huge military demobilization.

British forces were also stretched, of course, and dire economic circumstances at home constrained British strategy.

Nonetheless, Britain was able to provide stability in the Gulf for over two decades.

Regional leaders widely recognized British naval and military dominance, though the actual British presence was

quite small. Britain maintained a regional headquarters at Aden, as well as two Army battalions and Royal Air Force

Bases. The RAF bases sustained two fighter squadrons each, along with one-and-a-half transport squadrons, one

squadron of support helicopters, and one flight of long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft. About 6,000 British

troops made up the entire ground force. Britain’s base in Bahrain has been described as a “miniature bastion for the

Royal Navy,” and miniature is exactly the right word.2 No more than a handful of ships were in the Gulf at any given

time, and naval officials reasoned that they could send vessels from elsewhere in the event of a crisis. In the 1960s,

for instance, the typical deployment was four minesweepers, one frigate, two landing craft, about two dozen fighters,

and a handful of patrol aircraft.

Britain based its light presence on the belief that it could deter hostile action with a minimal investment as long as it

enjoyed good intelligence. Upon receiving warning of a looming crisis, it would quickly send a small military

contingent as a show of force, while mobilizing larger follow-on forces if needed. Such actions were designed to

reassure nervous regional allies while deterring anyone with dreams of upsetting the status quo. Britain’s commitment

to allied defense relied on moving warships and troops into the Gulf quickly, not stationing a large and expensive

presence there.

The British approach was put to the test more than once. In the 1950s, British officials feared that fledgling regimes in

the Middle East were vulnerable to growing Arab nationalism, which in turn might open the door to Soviet

encroachment. In July 1958, a coup in Iraq cost London its military bases there and took a major oil supplier out of

the western orbit. Later that month, reports came in that Jordan’s King Hussein was coming under attack from Arab

nationalists and pro-republican forces. In response, the British rapidly deployed 2,200 paratroopers to Amman in

order to bolster the government and deter challengers to the throne. The Hashemite regime survived.3

A potentially more serious crisis occurred in 1961, after Kuwait formally declared independence. Some British officials

feared that Baghdad would use this as a pretext to invade and make good on its historical claims that Kuwait and its

resources belonged to Iraq. In late June, the British ambassador reported that Iraq was already revising its budget in

anticipation of incorporating Kuwait, and that it had been making preparations for moving armored units to Basra.

While none of these reports were confirmed, London quickly began sending forces to Kuwait. Less than a week later,

Kuwait formally requested British assistance, and about 8,000 personnel arrived. No Iraqi attack materialized,

causing some to speculate that Iraq never seriously intended to invade Kuwait. Nonetheless, British officials viewed

the episode as a successful case of deterrence. The ambassador believed that no Iraqi tanks appeared because they

had turned around in the face of British power.4

As in all cases of deterrence, it is hard to draw a straight line between British actions and the preservation of the

status quo. Nonetheless, the Gulf region remained comparatively stable during this period, while aggression and war

convulsed other areas. Fledgling regimes consolidated power, international borders held, and oil continued to flow.

The Gulf states certainly believed Britain was playing the role of benevolent hegemon. When the British announced in

1968 that they would no longer honor defense commitments east of Suez, Gulf leaders reacted with sadness, not

relief. “Britain is weak now where she was once so strong,” lamented the Amir of Bahrain. “You know we and

everybody else would have welcomed her staying.”5 Leaders of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia even offered to

continue to pay for the British military presence, to no avail.

How was Britain able to play such an important role with such a minimal force? Mainly because the regional security

environment was stable and benign for most of that period. None of the regional powers had the military wherewithal

to do the kind of things that Western leaders feared. They could not destroy the oil infrastructure of regional rivals, nor

could they disrupt oil transportation or shipping. Most importantly, they could not go to war in order to seize a

significant portion of the region’s resources. As a result, Gulf states faced relatively few external threats, and the light

British presence was more than adequate to help protect them from internal threats.

Countries that would later grow into formidable military powers suffered from acute military weakness and domestic

upheaval that forced them to look inward. Despite ambitions to transform Iran into a formidable regional power, for

example, the Shah was unable to develop any serious power projection capabilities for most of the 1950s–1960s.

Post-war Iran struggled to maintain a small army, and the situation worsened as a result of a power struggle that led

the prime minister to slash the defense budget and purge the officer corps. The army recovered in fits and starts over

the next decade, but it could not think about seriously projecting power. Iran’s air force focused on air defense and

close air support rather than long-range strikes, and the navy remained a paltry coastal force.

Iraq similarly lacked meaningful power projection capabilities. The Hashemite regime had a tiny army and could send

only two infantry brigades and one armored brigade to the Arab–Israeli War in 1948. The army and air force grew

slowly and enjoyed limited access to British weapons over the next decade, but the coup in 1958 ended that

relationship. While the new Iraqi regime sought to make up the difference by opening the doors to Soviet arms, these

were of lower quality. At the same time, Iraq also was forced to maintain a large garrison at home to deal with the

intermittent threat of Kurdish rebellion, which sharply constrained its ability to act outside its borders.

In sum, the would-be military powers of the Gulf lacked the resources to seriously challenge the regional status quo,

meaning that Britain could safely maintain the peace through a combination of intelligence and a skeletal

infrastructure that could accommodate surge forces as needed. Iraq and Iran both aspired to more regional influence,

but during this period, demand for oil was low and supplies were abundant so they could not translate their oil

reserves into cash for military spending. And while Iraqi and Iranian leaders dreamed of expanding their power

beyond their borders, ongoing domestic turmoil forced them both to devote their attention to internal affairs.

All of these conditions changed in the 1970s. The dramatic rise in global oil demand led to skyrocketing prices. Gulf

exporters were suddenly flush with cash. This allowed them to transform their militaries and develop genuine power

projection capabilities. Iran, which had spent $1.5 billion on procurement from 1950–1972, more than doubled that

total in 1973 alone. Its defense budget went from $900 million in 1970 to $9.4 billion in 1977. It spent lavishly on

British tanks and U.S. fighters, and it acquired a fleet of tankers for in-fight refueling, which extended the range of its

fighters and fighter-bombers. It also purchased dozens of naval combatants and made a serious investment in naval

aviation in an attempt to dominate the Gulf littoral.

Iraq went on its own spending spree during this period. Rather than sitting idle as its neighbor built an offensive

military machine, the Ba’ath government pursued a vast military expansion. Total defense spending in current dollars

rose from $252 million to $1.66 billion from 1969–1979, and total military manpower tripled over the same period. A

four-fold rise in oil prices after 1973 led to a four-fold increase in arms imports, and it was able to develop a network

of suppliers from both the Soviet Union and Western Europe. The army doubled in size and added six divisions,

which it equipped with over a thousand of the Soviet Union’s most modern tanks and armored personnel carriers. The

air force purchased hundreds of new combat aircraft, including modern Soviet and French fighters.

As both countries bought military power, their leaders indulged their regional ambitions. The Shah showed flashes of

revisionism during the 1970s, though they were somewhat tempered by the constraints of the Cold War. He exploited

the British exit to occupy Gulf islands and to challenge Iraq over the boundary of the Shatt al-Arab river, but he

remained staunchly pro-U.S., willing to balance against a Soviet-sponsored Iraq, and basically satisfied with the

politics of the new Gulf states. Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, became increasingly aggressive as he

consolidated his rule, especially after successfully dealing with the Kurds in the middle of the decade. His grandiose

dreams of serving as the face of pan-Arabism made him willing to take risks outside Iraq’s borders, culminating in the

invasion of Iran in 1980.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Britain was able to exercise hegemony with a light military presence because the Persian

Gulf was a relatively safe place. The situation became radically different in the 1970s, as the oil market changed, the

Gulf powers developed real military power, and regional leaders began to look beyond their own borders. Even if

Great Britain had decided to stay, it would not have been able to exercise effective hegemony without a massive

increase in its military presence in the Gulf. Hegemony on the cheap was no longer possible.

 

Back to the FutureWhat does the Persian Gulf look like today? Does it resemble the benign 1950s or the dangerous 1970s? The

answer has large implications for the future of U.S. military presence in the region. If conditions resemble the earlier

period, then the United States can safely draw down its posture while providing a modicum of political stability and

ensuring the free flow of oil to market. If conditions resemble the latter, however, then Washington faces a much

more difficult choice, because playing the role of external hegemon would require an open- ended commitment of

substantial military force, unless the United States chose to scale back its regional objectives.

Although no analogy is perfect, the situation today is much closer to the calmer 1950s. No regional power possesses

the military capabilities needed to seize and hold territory, meaning that none can capture so much oil that it

threatens to manipulate international markets. Moreover, the diversification of supply, including the rapid expansion of

new drilling techniques outside the region, may ultimately reduce the political leverage and long-term revenue of Gulf

oil exporters in general.

Some threats to political stability and oil security remain, of course. Gulf leaders were startled by the Arab Spring

uprisings, and some reacted quickly to defuse any similar protests in the region. Indeed, the chief threat in the region

may be internal upheavals, though it is important not to exaggerate this danger. Civil conflict within the major oil-

producing states could threaten the flow of affordable oil. The world has had a taste of this problem with the wars in

Iraq and Libya, both of which disrupted oil production—but other suppliers, especially Saudi Arabia, were able to

compensate for those losses. Even recent gains by ISIS have not seriously threatened oil production or shipping.

ISIS attacks on the major refining plaint at Baiji in Iraq concerned some analysts, but that facility is exclusively for

domestic refining and is not part of the export infrastructure. Moreover, ISIS has made gains in relatively friendly

Sunni- dominated territory, but it has pulled back when confronted by organized resistance. This suggests that it

would have a very difficult time threatening the Kurdish and Shi’a heartlands, which sit atop the vast majority of Iraq’s

proven oil reserves.

The real nightmare would be civil war in Saudi Arabia, which plays a special role in the international market because

of its ability to increase production in response to crises. Of particular concern is that many of Saudi Arabia’s most

unhappy citizens, the Shia minority, live in the Eastern Province where so much of the oil production network is

located. Were sectarian conflict in Iraq and Syria to ignite a region-wide hot war between proxies of Iran and Saudi

Arabia, one could imagine Iran seeking to foment instability in Saudi Arabia by supporting Shia uprisings there. ISIS

also has made known its desire to conduct attacks in Saudi Arabia. It is possible that such developments could hinder

the flow of Saudi oil, though this danger is certainly not news to the Saudi regime, which already orients much of its

internal defense efforts toward oil security. Regardless, civil conflict in Saudi Arabia is not a problem that U.S. boots

on the ground can do much to solve; in fact, a heavy U.S. presence in the region likely would heighten rather than

reduce this sort of instability.

The good news is that a modest investment of U.S. force should be enough to stop the other important military

threats to oil security in the Gulf. For example, some observers fear that Iranian strikes on critical oil infrastructure in

the region, such as the Saudi stabilization plant at Abqaiq or ports at Ras Tanura and Ras al-Juaymah, could have

severe consequences for global oil production. Others worry about Iranian attempts to close the Strait of Hormuz,

through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil flows every day. Iran periodically threatens to take this step, has

directed naval procurement to acquire capabilities relevant to such operations, and regularly exercises these

capabilities. Nonetheless, a smart and economical force posture should allow the United States to deter and frustrate

Iranian efforts indefinitely.6

 

An Affordable ForceBecause the regional security environment is still relatively favorable for oil security, a small U.S. force can replicate

the spirit of the British approach that proved so effective during the 1950s and 1960s. A careful military drawdown

can leave in place a set of capabilities that would allow Washington to monitor events in the Gulf and spot signs of

mischief that might be a prelude to attacks against oil facilities or shipping. Intelligence warnings can trigger the

decision to surge forces into the Gulf quickly, again following the British model. A residual presence should include a

skeletal base infrastructure that can accommodate follow-on forces. This combination of intelligence capabilities and

a basing network can be relatively inconspicuous, which will reduce the political and diplomatic consequences of an

enduring U.S. presence. When it comes to U.S. military force in the Gulf, less is often more.

Today, the United States maintains substantial land-based airpower in the Gulf, for example, in part to support

ongoing operations in Afghanistan. But many of the strike aircraft used in that war likely will not be necessary for

future Gulf missions and can be sent elsewhere. Some assets will remain critical, however, both to provide

intelligence and to deter major challenges to the regional status quo. Interestingly, the most valuable aircraft to

forward deploy in peacetime are not bombers and fighters, because combat aircraft can always flow rapidly to the

theater in a crisis—as, in fact, they have done recently to strike ISIS. Rather, aircraft that provide persistent, high-

altitude surveillance are key, because they make it less likely that combat aircraft will ever be needed. Stationing

intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets in the region reminds potential aggressors that any

offensives will be detected quickly, reducing the temptation to try. Keeping a residual force of tankers as well as

airborne command and control assets in the region would also be important to hedge against the possibility of

deterrence failures. These land-based helpers would greatly extend the range, sortie rate, and survivability of U.S.

combat aircraft that could return to the region in the event of a crisis or war.

Concentrating on ISR and support craft would limit the Air Force’s regional profile, which is already surprisingly low.

Air bases are deliberately located well outside of populated areas. The one exception, Al Udeid, is located on the

outskirts of Doha, but it still is not easily visible from the main roads out of the city. Furthermore, the Qataris still own

the base, control all access to it, and use it extensively for their own training and operations, so little about it appears

American from the outside. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that Al Udeid houses mostly “enabling” aircraft (tankers,

reconnaissance, and airborne command- and-control) rather than the potentially more controversial combat platforms

(such as drones or fighter-bombers). Predators, Reapers, and the F-22s do not operate out of Al Udeid, only out of

the more remote Al Dhafra in the UAE.

Similarly, the U.S. naval presence, centered on the 5th Fleet based at Manama, Bahrain, is also already relatively

low-profile. Even amidst the domestic political upheaval in Bahrain during the past three years, the United States

seems likely to stay and has not paid a significant political price for its continuing presence. U.S. ships are not visible

to the region’s publics unless the United States wants them to be. The U.S. naval presence in Bahrain is so long-

standing and accepted that the base is located quite centrally in Manama. Unlike in Kuwait or Qatar, where the Army

and Air Force have taken pains to remain out of sight, any Bahraini cab driver can drop his passenger right at the

front gate of the Navy’s headquarters without needing directions. U.S. personnel live among Bahrainis, shop at their

markets, and eat at their homes. Bahrainis know that the real combat power is afloat, so they do not seem allergic to

U.S. presence ashore. Likewise, the ruling al-Khalifa family seems more concerned about U.S. attempts to

communicate with the opposition than with the presence of warships. Indeed, in the same week that the regime

expelled a U.S. diplomat for meeting with the Shi’a opposition, it welcomed two additional U.S. Navy patrol craft to

increase the overall size of the 5th Fleet.7

Keeping some naval assets in the region is critical to an effective residual U.S. posture. Continuing the forward

deployment of mine-countermeasure ships is especially important in the event that Iran attempts to close the Strait of

Hormuz, and given the ships’ slow speed, it makes little sense to station them outside the Gulf. The same is true for

other ships whose main mission is intelligence. Rotating in smaller surface vessels—coastal patrol craft, destroyers,

cruisers, and frigates—would also be helpful for deterrence. But there is little reason to regularly sail aircraft carriers

through Gulf waters when virtually all of their deterrent and combat power would remain intact were they to operate

from the Indian Ocean. Carriers are designed for blue waters, not shallow enclosed environments like the Gulf.

Despite their immense firepower, carriers have few organic defenses and must rely on the other components of their

strike group in order to travel safely through contested areas.

Finally, given the regional powers’ inability to project conventional power, the United States can continue to reduce its

forward-deployed land forces. The U.S. presence on the ground is least relevant for maintaining oil security, and U.S.

land forces in the Gulf are already smaller than they have been at any time in the last 20 years. The Army maintains

what is sometimes called a “brigade plus” in the region, which varies from 7,000–13,500 soldiers, stationed mostly in

Kuwait. These forces conduct a wide variety of missions for Central Command, which is responsible for territory from

Egypt to Pakistan, but many of these missions are irrelevant to Gulf oil security (though they might be relevant to

other U.S. objectives such as counterterrorism). The Third Army in Kuwait essentially serves as a “lily pad” for

operations throughout the Middle East by maintaining bases, training ranges, and large stocks of pre-positioned

supplies. U.S. leaders may want to continue to maintain a ground presence for that reason, but they should not be

bound to the idea it is necessary to ensure the flow of affordable oil.

That said, the Army’s enduring presence is largely uncontroversial in Kuwait, where the U.S. military still wears the

halo of 1991. Many Kuwaitis view the Third Army as a bulwark against the violence and chaos of southern Iraq and a

hedge against long-term Iranian coercion. The U.S. presence in Kuwait reassures the Saudis for the same reasons,

while conveniently keeping U.S. forces off their soil. In short, U.S. presence in Kuwait may have minimal benefits, but

it also has minimal costs, especially given that Kuwait covers basing expenses. For these reasons, it makes sense to

keep pre-positioned equipment and something like a “brigade minus” in Kuwait, amounting to a few thousand ground

troops, but no more. In total, U.S. forces in the Gulf could hover in the low tens of thousands, well below the 50,000

present there today.

 

Preparing to PivotThe United States had practically no military force in the Persian Gulf in the 1970s. It expanded its force in the 1980s

as U.S. leaders increasingly worried about the security of Gulf oil. It sent a very large army to fight Iraq in 1991, and it

kept a very large presence there after the war. Now, more than twenty years later, U.S. forces are withdrawing almost

as fast as they arrived. To many observers, the withdrawal foreshadows an ominous shift in the regional balance of

power and increased uncertainty about the future of the Gulf. Indeed, echoing regional pleas for a continued British

presence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the GCC countries today generally want the United States to remain in

the region, not only as a bulwark against Iran, but also to tamp down rivalries amongst themselves. They privately

acknowledge the security and economic benefits that U.S. hegemony provides.8

But a U.S. drawdown is unlikely to have dire consequences, if it is managed properly. The civil wars in Syria and Iraq

obscure the generally favorable conditions for core U.S. interests. While we do not mean to downplay the horror and

tragedy of the ongoing violence, it is primarily the result of local disputes having little to do with U.S. foreign policy

and is not especially amenable to the sort of solutions the U.S. military can deliver. Furthermore, political turmoil has

been commonplace in the region for decades; domestic instability, coups, and ethnic rebellions all happened even in

the benign period of the 1950s-1960s. As long as U.S. leaders keep key residual assets in place, much like the

British in the post-war era, they will be able to monitor events, foreseeing and forestalling contemporary threats to oil

security.

There are reasons to believe that intelligence on these issues is already quite good. Minesweepers stationed at

Bahrain regularly update their hydrographic maps of the seabed in the Gulf, which allows them to quickly spot and

identify new objects that might be mines. In addition, the United States has spent decades refining technologies that

could be used to locate and track mobile missiles in the event that Iran attempted to attack oil facilities and shipping

from onshore. These technologies can come in the form of unattended ground sensors or more exotic devices

attached to vehicles themselves. The fact that the intelligence community reportedly used human agents to deliver

the Stuxnet virus in Iran by infiltrating the Natanz uranium enrichment facility also suggests that boots on the ground

are not necessarily key to keeping an eye on regional developments, or to influencing them.9 Extraordinary gains in

signals intelligence collection and processing also now allow analysts to rapidly combine information from ground,

airborne, and space-based sensors.10

Finally, the United States can make good use of the growing number of drones, especially the RQ-170, that are

capable of loitering at high altitudes for long stretches. The RQ-170 has been operating undetected over Iran for

years, though one crashed there in 2011.11Stealthy drones are perfectly suited to watch for preparations of a

significant campaign against Gulf oil, and they require a comparatively small and inconspicuous support structure.

In sum, despite facing a region that often seems unstable and conflict-prone, the United States actually is in a

position to take advantage of favorable circumstances in the Gulf, at least when it comes to the question of oil

security. For many years, officials worried that if a single land power was able to dominate the oil-rich Gulf, it would

possess extraordinary leverage over the international economy, ultimately putting U.S. prosperity in doubt. That

nightmare scenario is no longer a concern. The major Gulf states have little to no ability to project power, and in any

case, they are necessarily focused on internal problems. Thus, the old problems of deterring large-scale conventional

aggression, and responding to it if it arose, are likely to prove irrelevant for many years to come. Internal conflict and

instability will likely persist, but a large U.S. military presence is not the right tool for preventing or solving these

dangers. After all, the worst period of sectarian bloodshed in the last decade occurred while the United States had

hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground. Traditional threats to Gulf oil production and shipping will not

disappear, but the United States can deal with these dangers via a much leaner presence. Following the British

example, it can provide the benefits of hegemony without paying an exorbitant cost.

A light military presence also will send the right signal to U.S. allies in the region. Some modest assistance may help

local actors fend off militant groups such as ISIS, but the outcome ultimately depends on these local actors’

willingness to fight, and the return of a large U.S. force may turn out to be counterproductive if it convinces them that

they can offload their security requirements to the United States—or if it appears to give unconditional U.S.

endorsement to repressive and exclusionary regimes. Indeed, there is little evidence that a large U.S. military

presence can ameliorate the underlying political conditions that give rise to groups such as ISIS or other forms of

regional instability, and it might exacerbate them. There are already troubling reports that some Iraqis are using U.S.

support to settle scores against their ethnic and sectarian rivals.12 This problem will intensify the more deeply the

United States involves itself in the current conflict. To avoid inspiring irresponsible and reckless behavior, U.S.

leaders must resist the temptation to return large forces to Iraq and throw the full weight of U.S. military power against

ISIS.

A light presence will also reinforce the purposes and limits of U.S. involvement to the major oil exporters. By retaining

intelligence capabilities and a skeletal base infrastructure, Washington can reassure the Gulf states that it is

committed to the free flow of oil and that it will counter any Iranian mischief in the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time,

a limited investment will serve as a reminder that the United States does not have grandiose ambitions, and that it

has largely abandoned its prior rhetoric about exporting U.S.-style democracy to the region. Finally, by keeping U.S.

assets largely invisible to most observers in the region, the light footprint will reduce the political problem for Gulf

leaders who may face domestic criticism for cooperating with the United States.

The coming end of the war in Afghanistan offers an ideal time for the United States to re-assess its commitments in

the region and further reduce the U.S. presence. Although both U.S. policymakers and their Gulf counterparts have

grown accustomed to the highly visible, heavy U.S. regional footprint of the last twenty-plus years, this force posture

is no longer necessary. In fact, it is anomalous when viewed in historical context. The ideal military posture will

benefit the Gulf exporters by safeguarding the flow of oil while remaining relatively inconspicuous. Such a force will

provide reassurance without encouraging moral hazard, and stability without entanglement or local irritation. Now is

the time to begin conveying these realities to regional allies and working to convince them that returning to a smaller

and smarter U.S. regional presence is the most politically and financially sustainable way of maintaining the U.S.

commitment to the region, even as U.S. grand strategy shifts resources and attention to the Pacific.

The U.S. Has an Empire of Bases in the Middle East — and It’s Not Making Anyone SaferThirty-six years into the U.S. base build-up in the Greater Middle East, military force has failed as a strategy for controlling the region, no less defeating terrorist organizations.By David Vine, January 20, 2016. Originally published in TomDispatch.Share

Amid the distractions of the holiday season, the New York Times revealed that the Obama administration is considering a Pentagon proposal to create a “new” and “enduring” system of military bases around the Middle East.

Though this is being presented as a response to the rise of the Islamic State and other militant groups, there’s remarkably little that’s new about the Pentagon plan. For more than 36 years, the U.S. military has been building an unprecedented constellation of bases that stretches from Southern Europe and the Middle East to Africa and Southwest Asia.

The record of these bases is disastrous. They have cost tens of billions of dollars and provided support for a long list of undemocratic host regimes, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and Djibouti. They have enabled a series of U.S. wars and military interventions, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which have helped make the Greater Middle East a cauldron of sectarian-tinged power struggles, failed states, and humanitarian catastrophe. And the bases have fueled radicalism, anti-Americanism, and the growth of the very terrorist organizations now targeted by the supposedly new strategy.

If there is much of anything new about the plan, it’s the public acknowledgement of what some (including TomDispatch) have long suspected: Despite years of denials about the existence of any “permanent bases” in the Greater Middle East or desire for the same, the military intends to maintain a collection of bases in the region for decades, if not generations, to come.

Thirty-Six Years of Base Building

According to the Times,  the Pentagon wants to build up a string of bases, the largest of which would permanently host 500 to 5,000 U.S. personnel.

The system would include four “hubs” — existing bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Djibouti, and Spain — and smaller “spokes” in locations like Niger and Cameroon. These bases would, in turn, feature Special Operations forces ready to move into action quickly for what Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has called “unilateral crisis response” anywhere in the Greater Middle East or Africa. According to unnamed Pentagon officials quoted by the Times, this proposed expansion would cost a mere pittance, just “several million dollars a year.”

Far from new, however, this strategy predates both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. In fact, it goes back to 1980 and the Carter Doctrine.

That was the moment when President Jimmy Carter first asserted that the United States would secure Middle Eastern oil and natural gas by “any means necessary, including military force.” Designed to prevent Soviet intervention in the Persian Gulf, the Pentagon build-up under Presidents Carter and Ronald Reagan included the creation of installations in Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

During the first Gulf War of 1991, the Pentagon deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries. After that war, despite the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military didn’t go home. Thousands of U.S. troops and a significantly expanded base infrastructure remained in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Bahrain became home to the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The Pentagon built large air installations in Qatar and expanded operations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman.

Following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon spent tens of billions of dollars building and expanding yet more bases. At the height of those U.S.-led wars, there were more than 1,000 installations, large and small, in Afghanistan and Iraq alone.

Despite the closing of most U.S. bases in the two countries, the Pentagon still has access to at least nine major bases in Afghanistan through 2024. After leaving Iraq in 2011, the military returned in 2014 to reoccupy at least six installations. Across the Persian Gulf today, there are still U.S. bases in every country save Iran and Yemen. Even in Saudi Arabia, where widespread anger at the U.S. presence led to an official withdrawal in 2003, there are still small U.S. military contingents and a secret drone base. There are secret bases in Israel, four installations in Egypt, and at least one in Jordan near the Iraqi border. Turkey hosts 17 bases, according to the Pentagon. In the wider region, the military has operated drones from at least five bases in Pakistan in recent years, and there are nine new installations in Bulgaria and Romania, along with a Clinton administration-era base still operating in Kosovo.

In Africa, Djibouti’s Camp Lemonnier, just miles across the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula, has expanded dramatically since U.S. forces moved in after 2001. There are now upwards of 4,000 troops on the 600-acre base. Elsewhere, the military has quietly built a collection of small bases and sites for drones, surveillance flights, and Special Operations forces

from Ethiopia and Kenya to Burkina Faso and Senegal. Large bases in Spain and Italysupport what are now thousands of U.S. troops regularly deploying to Africa.

A Disastrous Record

After 36 years, the results of this vast base build-up have been, to put it mildly, counterproductive. As Saudi Arabia illustrates, U.S. bases have often helped generate the radical militancy that they are now being designed to defeat. The presence of U.S. bases and troops in Muslim holy lands was, in fact, a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden’s professed motivation for the 9/11 attacks.

Across the Middle East, there’s a correlation between a U.S. basing presence and al-Qaeda’s recruitment success. According to former West Point professor Bradley Bowman, U.S. bases and troops in the Middle East have been a “major catalyst for anti-Americanism and radicalization” since a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines in Lebanon in 1983. In Africa, a growing U.S. base and troop presence has “backfired,” serving as a boon for insurgents, according to research published by the Army’s Military Review and the Oxford Research Group. A recent U.N. report suggests that the U.S. air campaign against IS has led foreign militants to join the movement on “an unprecedented scale.” 

Part of the anti-American anger that such bases stoke comes from the support they offer to repressive, undemocratic hosts.

For example, the Obama administration offered only tepid criticism of the Bahraini government, crucial for U.S. naval basing, in 2011 when its leaders violently cracked down on pro-democracy protesters with the help of troops from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Elsewhere, U.S. bases offer legitimacy to hosts the Economist Democracy Index considers “authoritarian regimes,” effectively helping to block the spread of democracy in countries including Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Low-Balling

The Pentagon’s basing strategy has not only been counterproductive in encouraging people to take up arms against the United States and its allies. It has also been extraordinarily expensive.

Military bases across the Greater Middle East cost the United States tens of billions of dollars every year, as part of an estimated $150 billion in annual spending to maintain bases and troops abroad. Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti alone has an annual rent of $70 million and at least $1.4 billion in ongoing expansion costs. With the Pentagon now proposing an enlarged basing structure of hubs and spokes from Burkina Faso to Afghanistan, cost estimates reported in the New York Times in the “low millions” are laughable, if not intentionally misleading. (One hopes the Government Accountability Office is already investigating the true costs.)

The only plausible explanation for such low-ball figures is that officials are taking for granted — and thus excluding from their estimates — the continuation of present wartime funding levels for those bases. In reality, further entrenching the Pentagon’s base infrastructure in the region will

commit U.S. taxpayers to billions more in annual construction, maintenance, and personnel costs (while civilian infrastructure in the U.S. continues to be underfunded and neglected).

The idea that the military needs any additional money to bring, as the Times put it, “an ad hoc series of existing bases into one coherent system” should shock American taxpayers. After all, the Pentagon has already spent so many billions on them. If military planners haven’t linked these bases into a coherent system by now, what exactly have they been doing?

In fact, the Pentagon is undoubtedly resorting to an all-too-familiar funding strategy — using low-ball cost estimates to secure more cash from Congress on a commit-now, pay-the-true-costs-later basis.

Experience shows that once the military gets such new budget lines, costs and bases tend to expand, often quite dramatically. Especially in places like Africa that have had a relatively small U.S. presence until now, the Pentagon plan is a template for unchecked growth. As Nick Turse has shown at TomDispatch, the military has already built up “more than 60 outposts and access points…. in at least 34 countries” across the continent while insisting for years that it had only one base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. With Congress finally passing the 2016 federal budget, including billions in increased military spending, the Pentagon’s base plan looks like an opening gambit in a bid to get even more money in fiscal year 2017.

Perpetuating Failure 

Above all, the base structure the Pentagon has built since 1980 has enabled military interventions and wars of choice in 13 countries in the Greater Middle East.

In the absence of a superpower competitor, these bases made each military action — worst of all the disastrous invasion of Iraq — all too easy to contemplate, launch, and carry out. Today, it seems beyond irony that the target of the Pentagon’s “new” base strategy is the Islamic State, whose very existence and growth we owe to the Iraq War and the chaos it created. If the White House and Congress approve the Pentagon’s plan and the military succeeds in further entrenching and expanding its bases in the region, we need only ask: What violence will this next round of base expansion bring?

Thirty-six years into the U.S. base build-up in the Greater Middle East, military force has failed as a strategy for controlling the region, no less defeating terrorist organizations. Sadly, this infrastructure of war has been in place for so long and is now so taken for granted that most Americans seldom think about it. Members of Congress rarely question the usefulness of the bases or the billions they have appropriated to build and maintain them. Journalists, too, almost never report on the subject — except when news outlets publish material strategically leaked by the Pentagon, as appears to be the case with the “new” base plan highlighted by the New York Times.

Expanding the base infrastructure in the Greater Middle East will only perpetuate a militarized foreign policy premised on assumptions about the efficacy of war that should have been discredited long ago. Investing in “enduring” bases rather than diplomatic, political, and humanitarian efforts to reduce conflict across the region is likely to do little more than ensure enduring war.

David Vine, a TomDispatch regular, is associate professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. His latest book, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, has recently been published as part of the American Empire Project  (Metropolitan Books). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other publications. For more information, visit www.basenation.us and www.davidvine.net.