America’s national interests in the oil-rich Middle East endure. Washington should turn to a familiar playbook to ensure Iraq does not fall apart—and drag down the region with it.
By James Kitfield and Max Angerholzer III, August 19, 2014
Iraq is disintegrating. The country’s weak social fabric has been torn by sectarian violence and the merciless attacks of an Islamic extremist group bent on civil war. The White House is struggling to fashion a coherent response, even as polls show a majority of Americans disapproving of the president’s handling of the crisis. Nervously eyeing upcoming mid-term elections, lawmakers from the president’s own party are agitating for a change of course before it is too late.
Seemingly snatched from recent headlines, that is actually the situation that former president George W. Bush confronted in the summer of 2006. With the United States on the brink of its first military defeat since Vietnam, the Bush administration was searching for a new strategy. At that time, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG) was founded to chart a new way forward in Iraq, and to build Congressional support for that strategy on both sides of the political aisle. We believe the ISG experience and recommendations offer important lessons as policy makers and lawmakers contemplate the current Iraq crisis.
Of course, the perceived U.S. stakes involved have changed. In 2006, there were tens of thousands of U.S. troops still in Iraq. After launching a war of choice to topple Saddam Hussein, President Bush understood that the United States would be held accountable for whatever tragedies attended Iraq’s violent breakup. By contrast, President Obama campaigned for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq, and he can argue that the Iraqis—not the Americans—squandered the chance for a better future purchased at great cost in American blood and treasure.
And yet our national interests in the oil-rich Middle East endure. At a time when U.S. commitment to its international partners is being widely questioned, the violent breakup of Iraq along sectarian lines would directly threaten U.S. allies such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Lebanon. The United States also still holds a strategic partnership agreement with the government in Baghdad.
More to the point, Al Qaeda in Iraq—the Sunni extremists fomenting civil war in Iraq in 2006—has since taken root in the fertile soil of the Syrian civil war, darkly blossoming into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). After capturing wide swaths of territory in both Syria and Iraq, ISIS occupies a larger sanctuary, is better financed, and has proven more wantonly murderous than core Al Qaeda was prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. And ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has made no secret of his plans to take his jihad directly to the United States homeland. Beyond the immediate strategic partnership between the United States and the Iraqi government, countering ISIS is central to the global struggle against jihadist terrorism.
The fact that an initially reluctant Obama administration has rushed advanced weapons and roughly a thousand military advisers to Iraq, while directly launching airstrikes against ISIS targets in northern Iraq, shows that President Obama understands that the United States still has vital national interests in Iraq and the region.
However, the U.S. response to date has been largely reactive, which is why the Iraq Study Group’s emphasis on developing a long-term strategy—and building political support for it—is instructive. Co-chaired by former secretary of state James Baker, and former Congressman and 9-11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton, the ISG report made three principal proposals, each as relevant today as in 2006.
Read the Entire Article at The National Interest website:
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/blueprint-save-iraq-disaster-11098?page=2