ANDREW HARROD: ON AMERICAN POLICY AND IRAQ, LIBYA AND SYRIA
“Fourteen years after 9/11 we are worse strategically than where we were on 9/11,” stated former Congressman Pete Hoekstra at a November 13 Center for Security Policy (CSP) Washington, DC, briefing. A pleasant view from offices overlooking Washington, DC’s National Mall on a sunny day was perhaps the only bright spot during panelist presentations on a volatile Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region before some 20 CSP affiliates.
Hoekstra began this MENA tour d’horizon with Libya, where Americans “as a country snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory” by overthrowing Muammar Ghaddafi’s dictatorship in 2011. By 2003, American confrontation for over 30 years with had convinced a once dangerous adversary to cooperate with the United States and avoid the fate experienced by Ghaddafi’s peer in Iraq, Saddam Hussein. “When we decided to take him out he was doing everything we had asked him to do and had been doing it for eight or nine years,” stated Hoekstra, who met with Ghaddafi three times between 2003 and 2009.
Hoekstra cited several improvements in Ghaddafi’s behavior, such as reparations payments to victims of his regime’s terrorism like those of the 1989 Pan Am 103 bombing. “His nuke program was crated up, shipped to the United States,” and is “now sitting in a warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant fromIndiana Jones,” Hoekstra commented comically. Ghaddafi also engaged in critical intelligence cooperation with the United States on the basis of having “been fighting radical jihadists for decades.”
Ghaddafi “did a lot of bad things,” Hoekstra stated, but to depose him the United States “allied with folks who have blood on their hands much more recently” fighting in the global jihad. More Al Qaeda fighters per capita came from two Libyan cities, Derna and Benghazi, than anywhere else in the Middle East. Ghaddafi’s fall therefore turned Libya into a “cesspool of radical jihadists.”
Not much is left of the mostly middle class town of Kubani as the West arms “rebel” revolutionaries to “stabilize” the area. January 2015. (Reuters/Osman Orsal)
Following Hoekstra’s description of Libyan chaos, Israeli analyst Elliot Chodoff stated that “in many ways Syria is Libya on steroids.” Syria suffers from a “civil war, a religious war, an ethnic war, an insurgency, a regional war, and a global war all at the same time,” he noted. “By pressing one of the buttons we have no effect on any of the others or if we do in trying to solve one, we actually may exacerbate others.”
Unlike Ghaddafi, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad actually represented significant elements of Syrian society, meaning that his regime would outlast his individual demise. Assad’s fellow Alawite Muslims, ten percent of Syria’s population, had logically concluded that “if they lose, they are going to be massacred” by Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, Chadoff stated. Although a relatively small minority, Syria’s Alawites nonetheless counted some 2.5 million people who dominated Syria’s military and enjoyed foreign support from Iran, its proxy Lebanese Hezbollah, and Russia.
Scared by jihadists in groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), secular Sunnis among Syria’s middle and business classes formed the second largest support group for the Assad regime, Chodoff noted. A “Sunni secular businessman…wants to do what every other businessman in the world wants to do at the end of the day; he wants to have his martini or the equivalent. If Al Qaeda or ISIS takes over his country he is not going to have it.” Additionally, Chodoff stated, “he wants his wife to dress like Mrs. Assad,” a Vogue fashion model, but “under ISIS his wife is going to have a fashion choice: black burqa, grey burqa, brown burqa.” Such a person supports Assad simply because “it’s his lifestyle” at stake.
“If we take the Russians out of the picture,” Chodoff noted, “everybody else who is fighting in Syria, is fighting essentially from the same ideology, and that is the radical Islamic ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Whether Sunni jihadists or Shiite supporters of Assad from Hezbollah and Iran, they “will fight each other to the death, but they have one thing in common, and that is that they all hate us.” Asking “what do you do with this mess” in Syria’s conflict, Chodoff stated that “sometimes you just sit back and watch it with all the tragedy involved,” for “there is no good guy in this game.”
While Obama overthrew a stabile regime in Libya, he failed to support any chance of a stable Iraq, CSP fellow Jim Hanson criticized. When Obama removed American forces from Iraq in 2009, he “didn’t end the war, because the enemy got a vote,” Hanson stated. Iraq “may never have turned into a stable democracy, but we will never know” after Obama’s withdrawal of American influence allowed Iraq to drift into sectarian strife.
Should Christian refugee children be allowed to celebrate Christmas?Hanson advocated moving beyond the Iraqi state, an “artificial construct of the post-colonial era.” The Shiite-dominated Iraqi government in Baghdad now “is essentially a puppet of the Iranian regime” that has alienated Iraq’s Sunnis after having “treated them like the dogs.” Yet fighting ISIS’ globally recruiting “intercontinental caliphate,” an “anathema to peace,” required that these Sunnis replicate the Anbar Awakening uprising against Al Qaeda, he noted. Winning Sunni support once again would require American support for their self-determination, despite the risks of Iraq’s fractured Sunni community, while he also favored recognition of the de facto state created by Iraq’s pro-American Kurds.
Yet a Balkan-like breakup of Iraq and Syria into independent states of Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, and others did not appear as a panacea to the panelists. Hoekstra wondered how clear borders could emerge in the ethnically mixed but strategically valuable oil-producing region of Kirkuk, Iraq. Chodoff also questioned how new states could solidify in a where region control among various groups had always fluctuated and predicted that they would undergo a “consolidation into zones” of influence without distinct borders. “The entire attempt to export the European state system into the Middle East has failed,” he stated, meaning that the MENA region’s new normal is unlikely to be stable for the foreseeable future.
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