Back to Iraq

AMERICA’S last two presidents have got things wrong in Iraq in opposite ways. George W. Bush went into the country in 2003 guns blazing, with 148,000 soldiers and too little thought of how to stabilise it after Saddam Hussein had been defeated. The consequences were disastrous.

Barack Obama took a different approach. Americans, he reckoned, were not capable of bringing peace to this complex, violent and distant place. He allowed the troops’ mandate in the country to run out with insufficient attention to what might follow, and then applied the same logic in Syria where he did little to support moderate opponents of Bashar Assad. His policy aided the rise of the Islamic State (IS), a Sunni terrorist group, that has taken territory in Syria and Iraq.

Now the prospect of a caliphate run by extremists bent on attacking the West has persuaded a reluctant Mr Obama that he cannot walk away from the Mesopotamian mess, and he is trying a new tack—combining modest military force with hard-nosed political brinkmanship (see article). Given conditions in the region, the chances of success are limited. But they are better than those offered by any other approach.

A risky bet

When on August 8th jets from an aircraft-carrier in the Gulf bombed IS and halted its advance, critics argued that Mr Obama was doing too little, too late. America had sat by for two months and watched IS conquer parts of northern Iraq. A humanitarian disaster followed: thousands of Yazidis, members of a Kurdish-speaking sect, fled into the mountains to escape the jihadists. IS tried to take Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurds, threatening their peaceful, prosperous enclave.

Certainly, more will need to be done to root out the extremists. But Mr Obama deserves credit for learning from past mistakes. He is the fourth American president in succession to bomb Iraq. In order to break that sequence, it is not enough just to unleash another round of shock and awe. The jihadists would only regroup. A politically stable Iraq is needed, run by a government that is broad-based and popular.

The one headed for the past eight years by Nuri al-Maliki, a member of the Shia majority, was nothing of the kind. It alienated Kurds and excluded Sunnis, who make up a quarter of the population. Some Sunnis came to support the extremists of IS, seeing them—often reluctantly—as the only defence against a brutal security apparatus. An all-out American attack on IS risks being seen as a sectarian move.

Mr Obama’s gamble has been to withhold all but minimal military support in order to force political change in Baghdad. That strategy has come at a cost. IS has consolidated its hold on Iraq’s second-biggest city, Mosul, and captured a dam that supplies much of the country with water. It is well-armed and self-financing. But political change appears now to be under way in Baghdad. Mr Maliki may with luck be replaced as prime minister by Haider al-Abadi, a more inclusive figure. The Americans alone did not usher Mr Maliki out. He made enemies among Iraqis, including in his own party. Iran also fell out with him. Even so, pressure from Mr Obama helped see him on his way.

Mr Maliki has been an awful prime minister. If Mr Abadi, also a Shia, appoints a cabinet that includes senior Sunnis in prominent positions, as seems likely, he will reduce popular support for the extremists, which should help persuade Sunni rebels to switch sides. That would pave the way for concerted military action by the Iraqi government to regain territory lost to the extremists. With America acting as its air force, it should be possible to push back IS. The extremists’ numbers are limited and their equipment still no match for the West.

There are dangers here: if American bombing caused many civilian casualties, the extremists would have more chance of portraying themselves as protectors of Sunnis against a hostile Shia-led government and its infidel allies. American soldiers will still be in harm’s way. Even in the age of satellite-guided bombs, precise strikes depend on the presence of special forces to identify targets. But a plausible path to forcing the jihadists out of Iraq would open up.

The trickier question for Mr Obama is what to do if Iraq lives down to expectations, and fails to get a better prime minister or a more inclusive government. The jihadists’ ambitions to establish an Islamic caliphate cannot be tolerated. But an all-out assault may bolster Sunni support for IS and risk the disintegration of Iraq. The Kurds live in a more-or-less defined territory: it is possible to imagine the formation of an independent Kurdish state. Sunnis and Shias do not. A break-up of the country could lead to bloodshed on an unprecedented scale. The capital is shared by the sects, as are surrounding areas. America may then be reduced to conducting occasional punitive missions to keep IS contained.

And once again Syria

In all events, Western leaders must prepare the public for a lengthy military engagement in this part of the world. Even if confronted by America’s full military might, the extremists could melt back into the population of Mosul, a city of 2m people where they have had a strong underground presence for years. They could also slip back across the nearby border with Syria, where they have a safe haven in swathes of land they have seized during the civil war. From there they would probably continue to foster instability in Iraq.

That raises an uncomfortable truth for Mr Obama. His judgment is that the jihadists can be properly dealt with only by creating long-term stability in Iraq. A similar situation exists in Syria. Yet the president has long resisted intervening there, and been backed in this by a war-weary American public and Congress as well as international lawyers. Still, in the long run America is unlikely to be able to destroy or even contain militant jihadism without involving itself in Syria.

Mr Obama’s new approach in Iraq seems to be working. But more decisive action against the jihadists will be needed. The Americans are back on the ground, and they will be there for a while.