Obama take note: there will be no easy solutions in Iraq

The Middle East has entered a new phase and there are no easy fixes to its problems, writes Alan Philps

As he prepares to leave office after more than a decade in power, Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, has been musing on the reasons why the war on terror has served to increase the strength and reach of extreme radicalism. George W Bush’s war, he told the BBC, was not fought “with honesty or genuinely”.

What Mr Karzai means is not hard to fathom: either the Americans were completely incompetent in their conduct of this war, or there is a darker explanation, that the objective was not to create stability, but in fact to engulf the greater Middle East from Syria to Afghanistan in blood-soaked chaos.

Mr Karzai clearly tends to the latter explanation. One can mock his conspiracy theory, but a visiting Martian sizing up the regional situation – the implosion of Syria, the collapse of the US-built Iraqi state, the endemic violence in US-allied Pakistan and the attempted resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan – might conclude that Washington was hell bent on spreading mayhem.

As Barack Obama deliberates on what to do to save Iraq from civil war and division on ethnic and sectarian lines, he might well ponder on the question asked by Mr Karzai.

The first lesson from the war on terror is that it is not unlike many other armed conflicts: in some important ways, it produced the opposite of the desired effect.

The US went into Vietnam to save the region from communism. The end result was communist governments all over Indochina. The Russians sent troops into Afghanistan in 1979 to stabilise it for socialism. They ended up leaving a wrecked country that became the crucible of modern jihadism.

The second lesson is that wars rarely end when the history books say they do. The Second World War ended in 1945 with what seemed like a definitive full stop, unconditional surrender by Germany and Japan. But then the victors fell out and waged a 40-year stand-off known as the Cold War. Only extremely limited uses of military force – such as Vladimir Putin’s lightning seizure of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine – are likely to meet the objectives of their planners.

The third lesson is that the world is utterly different from the Bush era. A decade ago, Washington’s power was unopposed. Russia was on its knees and the rising powers – China, Brazil, India – were still thought of stock market plays rather than countries of real influence in the world. Washington created its own reality, and if it wanted to invade a country such as Iraq, no one could stop it. It was an era of easy decisions.

With hindsight, the only real debate that mattered in the run-up to launching the Iraq war was inside Washington – between Donald Rumsfeld’s belligerent defence department and the more cautious diplomats at the State Department. No one else counted. It did not actually matter whether Britain joined the invasion. The US could do anything on its own. Mr Obama has seen the fruits of hubris.

With Russia and China actively challenging US dominance, and countries such as India and Brazil keen to explore alternatives to US leadership, he has to seek alliances, often in unlikely places. If the Bush era was one of easy decision-making, the present time is one of difficult choices and uneasy partnerships.

That means Iran and Russia. There has been excited talk of Washington working with Iran to turn back the Sunni Muslim extremists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) whose fighters are in control of much of the north and west of the country. But the reality is that Iran is the only power that can rescue the beleaguered government of prime minister Nouri Al Maliki. The most Mr Obama could do would be to offer air power and missile strikes. These would not turn back ISIL, but they would be a symbol of support for Iraq and its Iranian-backed government.

But does Mr Obama want to help to prop up Mr Al Maliki, whose sectarian policies have alienated Iraq’s two significant minorities, the Sunnis and the Kurds? The US has a clear interest in preventing the establishment of a jihadist emirate on the borders of Syria and Iraq. But with Mr Al Maliki in power – absent a radical shift away from the revanchist sectarian bias he has shown since US forces quit Iraq in 2011 – there is no future for Iraq as a state.

This decision does not just affect Iraq. If Iran is accepted as the dominant power in Iraq – the perverse consequence of Mr Bush’s war – then what does that mean for Syria? US policy in Syria has been dithering at best, but the Iraq crisis will cause it to collapse under the weight of its contradictions. The Bashar Al Assad regime seems home and dry. If Washington uses air power to fight ISIL in Iraq, how can it support ISIL’s comrades-in-arms fighting the Assad regime in Syria? It would be defending one sectarian regime in Iraq and opposing another in Syria.

The contradictions extend also to the negotiations on limiting Iran’s nuclear programme. With a deadline for a deal only a month away, the talks appear to be stalled. Now the Iranians are quietly suggesting that the Americans should show some more flexibility on the nuclear issue if the two countries are going to work together on Iraq. Iran has been under pressure from US sanctions, but the Iraq crisis has given it a new and unexpected form of leverage. Try as they might to separate the nuclear dossier from the Iraq crisis, the Americans will find they are inevitably connected.

It is not surprising that Mr Obama has ruled out sending the marines back to Iraq. The use of military force to deal with complex problems may still be trumpeted by Dick Cheney, former US vice president and one of the architects of the Iraq war, but it is a blunt instrument. The region has entered a new period where there are no quick fixes – which in any case rarely fix things for long.

Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs

On Twitter: @aphilps