Battlegrounds

by H. R. McMaster

  Sadly, U.S. diplomatic and military disengagement from Iraq removed checks on the worst inclinations of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government and cleared the way for the return of large-scale sectarian violence, the extension of Iranian influence over the Iraqi government and Shia population, and the growth of a new version of Al-Qaeda in Iraq—ISIS, the most potent jihadist terrorist organization in history.

  As it disengaged, America failed to contest the Iranian-led effort to hand the 2010 Iraqi national election to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, even though a secular Shia with broad appeal among the Sunni community, Ayad Allawi, had won the popular vote. Maliki seemed to do all he could to restart the civil war. His government purged Sunnis from the army and key governmental positions and reneged on the promise to keep Sunni tribal militias on the payroll, instead dismissing them and providing Al-Qaeda with well-trained recruits who were convinced that the political process was hostile to their interests. After his reelection, Maliki arrested the Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, on terrorism charges based on coerced testimonies, and in 2012, Hashemi was sentenced to death in absentia. Even as he alienated Sunni Arabs and Turkmen, he released large numbers of prisoners who, upon return to their home villages and cities, elicited a hostile response from those who feared the return of Al-Qaeda. The alienation of Iraq’s Sunni population, Iran’s subversion of the Iraqi state, and the effects of the Syrian Civil War propelled the rise of ISIS and the collapse of Iraqi security forces during ISIS’s June 2014 offensive.34

  Anyone paying attention should have seen ISIS, or AQI 2.0, coming miles (and years) away. For those of us who knew Iraq, the ISIS train wreck had already happened, but the world had not yet heard the sound. In 2011, I was in Afghanistan when the situation in Iraq was unraveling. After receiving calls and emails from concerned Iraqi friends who saw the accommodation between Sunni and Shia populations crumbling, I read a report predicting exactly what would happen in the coming months and years. The continued sectarian policies of the Maliki government, combined with the release of Al-Qaeda prisoners, would result in the Sunni communities again concluding that they could protect their interests only through violence. A new version of Al-Qaeda would again portray itself as a protector of those communities and replicate the Al-Qaeda offensive of 2004 to 2006. The report predicted that this renewed offensive would collapse Iraqi security forces already hollowed out by sectarian purges.

  From my office in Kabul, I forwarded the paper to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, at the Pentagon. Dempsey, who understood Iraq and regional dynamics in the Middle East well, found the paper compelling and circulated it across the JCS staff and Department of Defense. Senior intelligence officials gave it a tepid response. Its predictions did not conform to U.S. leaders’ self-delusion that AQI had been defeated and that Iraqi forces were resilient. Some in the U.S. military were unwilling to believe that after over a decade of training, Iraqi security forces would collapse. Strategic narcissism turns fantasy into perceived reality even if a preponderance of evidence is presented to the contrary. Less than thirty months after the December 2011 “end of mission” ceremony for the U.S. command in Baghdad, Mosul fell and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had in December 2004 been released from Camp Bucca prison in Iraq, climbed the stairs of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, in Mosul, to declare the formation of a new caliphate.35

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  TWO THOUSAND eleven was a pivotal year not only in Iraq, but also across the Middle East. Eight years after the invasion of Iraq, the United States withdrew its forces from that country and declared its intention to leave the troubled region behind. The so-called Arab Spring began in Tunisia in late 2010, when a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi publicly self-immolated to protest socioeconomic injustice and autocracy in his country. Bouazizi’s act inspired a series of antigovernment protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions across the Arab-majority regions of the Middle East. The protests highlighted the severe power imbalance between heads of state in populations such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria—eventually leading to the resignation of the Tunisian and Egyptian presidents, a full-scale insurgency that toppled Muammar Gaddafi’s government in Libya, and a civil war that nearly felled the Assad regime in Syria. It was in response to the Arab Spring that the Obama administration, as it disengaged from the Iraq War in a final repudiation of George W. Bush’s invasion in 2003, intervened in Libya in a way that replicated the fundamental folly of Iraq: the use of military force without a plan to influence what happened next. The protests in Tunisia toppled President Zayn al-Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled Tunisia since 1987. The political awakening spread via Twitter and Facebook across Tunisia and then moved east to Egypt, home to eighty-six million, the largest Arabic-speaking population in the world.

  Egypt had been run by Hosni Mubarak, a powerful president who assumed office in 1981, and who maintained power through rigged elections and imprisonment of political adversaries. Stirred by Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia, on January 25, 2011, Egyptians took to the streets to protest the oppressive security regime that denied them freedom of speech and assembly. On February 1, Mubarak conceded to the protest movement. Appearing on national television, he announced that he would step down when his six-year term ended in late 2011. It was not enough to satisfy the protesters, who refused to disband until he resigned. Mubarak did so on February 11, 2011. In eighteen days, the wave of demonstrations rocking the Middle East had forced the resignation of the most powerful leader in the Arab world.

  On February 15, the protest movement poured over Egypt’s western border into Libya, an Alaska-size nation of six million inhabitants. Since taking power in 1969, Gaddafi had maintained power in Libya via an iron fist, control of revenue, and an extensive patronage network. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, where presidents were toppled with a relatively minor death toll, Libya descended into a full-blown civil war.

  After the fall of Ben Ali, the resignation of Mubarak, and Arab Spring-inspired uprisings throughout the Middle East, Arab strongmen in palaces, such as Gaddafi, suddenly appeared seated within houses of cards. Arab monarchies such as those in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates grew nervous while many in the United States and the West saw the Arab Spring as an inevitable burst of freedom from long-suppressed peoples. The relatively new medium of social media was credited with catalyzing the protests and changes in government and extolled for enabling a wave of freedom across the Middle East.

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  ON MARCH 17, 2011, the Obama administration succeeded in getting the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1973, authorizing military intervention in Libya with the goal of saving the lives of pro-democracy protesters from the forces of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. Besides, Gaddafi was endangering the momentum of the nascent Arab Spring. Like the initial invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the NATO-led air campaign was at first declared a tremendous success.

  With the help of NATO airpower, the Libyan rebels over the course of several months were eventually able to depose Gaddafi, who was forced out of a hiding place on October 20, 2011. While his convoy raced across a potholed Libyan highway, American fighter jets zoomed in overhead. American aircraft fired air-to-surface missiles that disabled the convoy. As the shock of the explosion wore off, Gaddafi’s entourage departed their vehicles. Gaddafi’s son hurried him through the desert to the shelter of a nearby drainage pipe underneath a road. Rebels soon pulled Gaddafi from the ditch and tore off his shirt. Two rebels held him upright while another plunged a sharp metal rod through his pants and into his anus. A fourth man videotaped the sodomy while onlookers jeered the violence. Finally, the seventy-year-old dictator, bloodied, bruised, and disoriented, was led to a waiting ambulance. Accounts vary as to what happened next, but Gaddafi did not depart the vehicle alive.36

  The day after Gaddafi’s death, President Obama addressed the world regarding U.S. operations in the Middle East. The president was not committing add
itional ground forces to the region. Rather, turning to Iraq, he declared that “the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.” The president elaborated: “Over the next two months, our troops in Iraq, tens of thousands of them, will pack up their gear and board convoys for the journey home. The last American soldier[s] will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support of our troops. That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”37

  Due to the success of the Libyan aerial campaign, American denial syndrome returned. The purported lesson was not to repeat the mistake of Iraq and put “boots on the ground” in Libya. But without any effort to establish security in post-Gaddafi Libya, NATO actually repeated the mistakes of Afghanistan and Iraq in the extreme, again neglecting the very nature of war as an extension of politics and as driven by human emotion. Chaos and a smoldering tribal conflict ensued. Islamist groups and terrorist organizations thrived in the lawless environment. Eleven months after Gaddafi’s death, a branch of Al-Qaeda commemorated the anniversary of that organization’s 9/11 mass murder attacks on the United States eleven years earlier with an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The well-respected Middle East expert and newly appointed ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was visiting from the capital, Tripoli. Terrorists attacked the consulate and another compound. Security was inadequate, in part due to the desire to keep a light footprint in the country. Ambassador Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service information management officer Sean Smith were killed at the consulate. CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty died at a government annex about one mile away. Stevens was the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979. Libya became both a source and a waystation for refugees desperately seeking the safety of Europe’s shores. Meanwhile, the Syrian Civil War was exploding into a cacophony of violence and, in Egypt, Mohamed Morsi was consolidating power to replace Hosni Mubarak’s nationalist dictatorship with a Muslim Brotherhood Islamist dictatorship. Seasons change. In the Middle East, spring was over.

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  DURING THE Cold War, Iran and Saudi Arabia served as the “twin pillars” of the U.S. effort to contain Soviet influence in the Middle East. The Iranian pillar collapsed during the 1979 revolution, and the Saudi pillar proved to be structurally flawed based on Saudi Arabia’s production and export of a virulent strain of Islam. The countries that had been seen as sources of stability created conditions for a sectarian civil war that would wrack the region for decades. Abadi and other leaders across the Middle East tried to bring communities together, but the legacy of the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, brutal dictatorships, and the emergence of a destructive perversion of Sunni Islam overwhelmed their efforts.

  As frustrating as the American experience in the Middle East was after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, disengagement from the region made a bad situation worse. The United States and other nations are not going to solve the region’s problems, but outsiders can support those, like Abadi and Jibouri, who are determined, despite the daunting tasks before them, to create a future for the region that allows it to emerge from the serial failures of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If the free and open societies of the world turn their backs on the people of the region, they will not be immune to the problems that emanate from it.

  Chapter 8

  Breaking the Cycle

  Terrorism is inseparable from its historical, political, and societal context, a context that has both a local and a global dimension.

  —AUDREY KURTH CRONIN, HOW TERRORISM ENDS

  IN 2020, the situation across the greater Middle East, the region spanning Morocco in the west to Iran in the east and encompassing the northern countries of Syria and Iraq to the southern countries of Sudan and Yemen, remained as confounding as it was wretched. The inability of the United States to develop and implement a sound, consistent policy in cooperation with like-minded nations contributed to the scale and duration of the catastrophe in the region and diminished American influence there. The policies of the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations were consistent with America’s tendency to engage the region episodically and pursue short-term solutions to long-term problems.1 As the experience in Iraq demonstrated, treating symptoms rather than causes of violence perpetuates conflict and magnifies threats to national and international security. Our efforts in the Middle East should focus on ending the sectarian civil war that is at the root of the humanitarian crisis and the threats that emanate from the region. To succeed, those efforts must be executed at a cost acceptable to the American people.

  If Americans are to view the Middle East other than as a mess to be avoided, our strategy must begin with an explanation of what is at stake and how sustained engagement in the region is important to citizens’ security and prosperity. As Middle East analyst Kenneth Pollack observed, the region is important to Americans because problems there do not conform to the city of Las Vegas’s motto—that is, what happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East.2 The failure of the Arab Spring, the Syrian Civil War, and the rise of ISIS reached far beyond the region. From March 2011 to October 2018, the Syrian Civil War alone caused the deaths of more than 500,000 people and displaced more than a quarter of Syria’s 21 million people.3 Bashar al-Assad’s regime forcibly disappeared more than 98,000 men, women, and children and arbitrarily imprisoned more than 144,000 in Syria’s despicable prisons.4 No one knows how many civilians the Syrian regime murdered, but estimates are in the hundreds of thousands.

  As violence intensified, President Barack Obama and U.S. allies in Europe disengaged from the region and decided against options that might have limited the scale and reach of crises in Libya and Syria. A multinational security force in Libya after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, for example, might have prevented the fragmentation of a potentially wealthy country that spans a wide geographic area but has a population of only less than seven million people.5 In Syria, no-fly areas and safe zones such as those established for Iraq’s Kurds in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War might have mitigated the humanitarian crisis, stemmed the flow of refugees, constrained Iranian and Russian influence, impeded the growth of ISIS and other jihadist terrorist organizations, and put pressure on the Assad regime and its sponsors to seek a political resolution of the civil war.6 Viable options to address Syria’s problems diminished over time as moderate opposition to the regime lost ground to Islamist extremists and Russia intervened to prevent Assad’s collapse in 2014, the same year that ISIS conducted its massive offensive across Syria and Iraq. Indeed, the intensifying war in Syria, large-scale sectarian violence in Iraq, chaos in Libya, and, after 2014, a civil war in Yemen created conditions ideal for the growth of ISIS and Al-Qaeda-related groups (such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Nusra Front). Just over a year after al-Baghdadi gave his sermon in Mosul, ISIS directed or inspired attacks, including the mass murder of Parisians in November, mosque bombings in Yemen, attacks on tourists in Tunisia, suicide bombings in Ankara and Beirut, the destruction of a Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula, and the San Bernardino shooting in the United States in December. On March 22, 2016, three ISIS-directed suicide bombings struck the airport and a Metro station in Brussels, killing two civilians. Meanwhile, ISIS’s external plotting against Western targets, including the aviation sector, continued. The more than one hundred Americans who traveled to Syria to join terrorist groups, and the thousands of Europeans who did so, represented a new danger from returning fighters to the United States or to countries with visa waivers for travel to North America.7 ISIS’s reach was not limited to the physical world. The terrorist organization mastered the internet and social media to recruit and inspire attacks. It was apparent that what happened in the caliphate did not stay in the caliphate.

  The argument to war-weary U.S. citizens as well as NATO and EU nations sharing the burden in the Middle East is that preventing the rise of terrorist orga
nizations is less costly than responding after they become an inescapable threat. When the U.S. military was forced to return to the region in support of the Iraqi Army and mainly Kurdish militias in Iraq and eastern Syria, the subsequent five-year campaign to wrest control of territory the size of Britain from ISIS cost far more in lives and treasure than sustaining the effort in Iraq and mitigating the mass atrocity of the Syrian Civil War would have cost.