THE BOSTICK REPORT-I remember walking through the streets of Austin, TX on the night of March 19, 2003. President Bush had just finished addressing the nation about the next day’s invasion of Iraq, roughly six months after Congress had authorized such a thing.
There was this profound since of impending doom around a town that had spent many months protesting this very day. Austin is an island within a conservative Texas, however, and with our dejection came a very real understanding of troop movement. I was personally dissatisfied with the argument for invading Iraq, not because Saddam Hussein was a good leader, but because the premise of WMDs was flimsy and the public debate superficial.
It is from that perspective that I write today in defense of the idea that sending troops back to Iraq might be necessary. Don’t confuse my words, though. This is not making the case that boots on the ground is absolutely necessary today. Rather, this is the argument for the possibility that our capricious, ill-conceived invasion of a sovereign nation in the Middle East 11 years ago and our subsequent bungling of nation building efforts have created a scenario where we are clearly obligated to fix a problem that is now resulting in genocidal efforts and could easily become a global danger.
There are many reasons why we should be discussing the boots on the ground option. Those reasons break down into three main categories: our moral responsibility, the political realities of the Middle East, and the likelihood that a proxy battles against ISIS via the Kurdish Peshmerga would result in boots on the ground in a larger, more globally involved war.
Our Moral Responsibility-First and foremost is the fact that we created this situation. For all of the problems of the Saddam dictatorship, Iraq was a stable country. Islamic extremists were not tolerated under his strong-arm tactics and he had no intention of supplying terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, of which he did not actually possess.
Hindsight arguments aside, no one can debate the fact that we broke Iraq. We did successfully guide Iraqis to create a constitution and working democracy, but the future success of that system is now in grave danger under the march of a terrorist army 12,000 strong.
When talking about the Iraqi Army, we should talk about two armies. There’s the one we trained in a post-Saddam Iraq and the one we disbanded from the Saddam era.
That decision to fire 400,000 soldiers was a bad one. Not just in hindsight, but in real time. It quickly became a point of friction between all parties in charge, with no one – not Donald Rumsfeld, not President Bush, nor L. Paul Bremer – taking responsibility.
The process of disbanding Saddam’s army, coupled with efforts to remove Saddam loyalists from government (called De-Ba'athification), resulted in the rise of Al Qaida in Iraq and the 2006-08 Iraqi Civil War.
Though we managed to get through those bloody years of internal violence, the violence created significant challenges to stabilizing the new democracy of Iraq, something delicately maintained through our withdrawal of troops in 2011.
Should we have kept troops in Iraq as an occupying force present to maintain peace and order like we do in Korea? Perhaps. Looking back, it seems like it would have prevented some of the regional problems we see, though definitely not all. It definitely would have positioned us to stop ISIS at the Iraqi border.
And so it is the history of destabilization that we incited that positions us in a place of definite moral responsibility for today’s Iraq. But, we are morally obligated to take action, not just accept responsibility, to stop ISIS because they are using our tanks, our missiles, and our superior war technology – all abandoned recently by our Iraqi Army – to wreck havoc on religious and ethnic groups dissimilar to them and pursue real genocide against any “infidel” who refuses to commit to their caliphate.
The Current Politics of the Middle East - Strong-arm dictators, like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Bashir Assad and many more have a long history of success in the Middle East. Democracies, not so much.
The rise to power of ISIS is built on brutality. On the battlefield of their religious war to create an Islamic caliphate, they have utilized beheadings, amputations, crucifixions, and executed hundreds at a time. Scary stuff, enough for most of Iraq’s Army and Police to run, literally, away from them on the battlefield. It’s how ISIS got their superior military equipment.
Armed with the weapons given to the Iraqi Army by us, their march across Iraq has positioned them well. They now control the Mosul Dam, Iraq’s major source of electricity and drinking water, as well as most of the oil fields. They do not control Baghdad, yet. But, they have managed to erase the borders between Syria, where they established themselves, and Iraq.
If recent Middle East history plays out unencumbered, ISIS could very well build on their success in staggering ways. Winning hearts and minds across the region has been done so through fear, a powerful tool ISIS wields with deftness.
With Saddam gone, the major powers within the Middle East are essentially Saudi Arabia and Iran. Many have documented their proxy wars via Syria’s civil war, so I won’t go too much into that except to reiterate that the Saudis have been fingered as supplying the anti-government forces in Syria with weapons. ISIS came to Iraq from that battle when their brutal measures were deemed too harsh for the other Islamic terrorist organizations and rebel groups.
Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al Maliki, recently resigned from his position after years of efforts to disenfranchise the same Sunni Muslims disbanded from Saddam’s Army joined ISIS. Al Maliki, a Shiite, didn’t finally step down because of ISIS. He stepped down because Iran, a Shiite government, chose Haider al-Abadi, a Shiite technocrat within Iraq’s government, as Maliki’s replacement. Al-Abadi was swiftly nominated to replace Maliki, who subsequently resigned.
With Iran’s rise of power within Iraq’s government, the Saudis’ support of ISIS as an army to destroy Iraq’s government would spread their proxy war from Syria, where Iran still supports President Bashir Assad against the anti-government forces, supported by Saudi Arabia.
What are the ramifications of those forces aligning in a vacuum created by a lack of American boots on the ground?
Russia, longtime ally of both Syria and Iran, is currently suffering in reputation on the global stage. Putin’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and support of the anti-government forces in the Ukraine has placed him in a precarious political position. With strong economic sanctions settling in, he could view the lack of American presence in Iraq as a tremendous opportunity.
Recall, Putin swept in to fix our problem in Syria over the red line crossed when chemical weapons were used against anti-government forces there. With Iran strongly position with Iraq’s government against the terrorist army of ISIS, Putin may very well see an opportunity to brandish its image on the world stage as the power willing to step in to prevent genocide where the US was not.
With few allies, Russia’s assistance to Iran in an effort to save Iraq from a terrorist army brandishing US weapons would bolster Iran’s international reputation as much as Russia’s. Enter those changing dynamics into the debate over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
The Dangers of Arming the Kurds-Our answer, so far, has been to commit to airstrikes. A good start, I say. They have successfully freed many of the Yazidis from the mountaintop and saved them, so far, from the genocide ISIS is threatening.
The problem is that missile strikes aren’t enough. ISIS is an army now; one entrenched in the urban landscape of Mosul. Air strikes to take ISIS out of densely populated areas will prove messy and as much a humanitarian quagmire as Israel is facing in its pursuit to stop Hamas from firing missiles into Israel.
To stop ISIS, there must be boots on the ground. If it’s not us, then who? The Iraqi Army is gone, and so we turn to the Iraqi Kurds, a group that survived Saddam’s atrocious use of chemical weapons in the 1980s and has a celebrated history of battlefield successes.
Unfortunately, they are no match for the military equipment ISIS is using – again, our military equipment. Calls to arm the Kurds with our equipment as well seem like a good idea on the surface, but digging beneath that surface is disaster.
There are two scenarios that will come from arming the Kurds to fight ISIS. First, what if they lose? We will be in a position where we armed a group, gave them guidance and air support, and they lost. The fire that is ISIS’s spread across the Middle East under that scenario would be chilling. Every other Islamic jihadi organization would bow down to a true caliphate and global power of extremism. Their march up through Syria could easily link in with Hama’s downward spiral against Israel, instigating a broader, global war where we, yes, commit to boots on the ground.
What happens if the Kurds succeed? Then you have more problems. There are three major concentrations of Kurdish groups in the Middle East. They are in Northern Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
Should the Kurds save the day in Iraq, then their semi-autonomous region within northern Iraq will naturally demand full autonomy and recognition as a sovereign state. The Syrian Kurds, close in proximity, would naturally seek to join with their Iraqi brethren.
The Kurds in Turkey are another problem altogether. The PKK, as they are known, are officially a terrorist organization according tot the US and Turkey. But, if the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds have their own country, what is to prevent the Turkish Kurds to secede from Turkey, a nation that is led by an increasingly radical Islamic President. Is this possible? The Iraqi Kurdish President just recently broke frosty relations with the PKK with a visit to one of their Turkish training camps, praising them.
Where do the Iranians, committed to the preservation of a Shiite Iraq, stand on an autonomous country called Kurdistan? How might the Saudis react to the Kurds in a war with ISIS?
Truth Be Told-The political realities of the Middle East and the ramifications of arming the Kurds to act as our proxy in a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia aside, the argument for American boots on the ground should be considered from the moral perspective.
ISIS is a terrorist army of 12,000 strong using our tanks and weapons to commit genocide, destabilize national boundaries, and create a terrorist caliphate.
Whether you’re like me and wanted no part in Bush’s invasion or you’re on the side of Dick Cheney, Halliburton, and the war machine, this is all on us. We are responsible for ISIS now.
I feel the same way about Iraq that I felt on that lonely night in Austin. It was a mistake and the height of American hubris. The argument against boots on the ground, therefore, is easy for me to embrace. We’ve spent way too much money on an ill-conceived war against terror, itself an intangible foe whose defeat is impossible to contextualize.
Look, we’re just recovering from the Great Recession. Employment has bounced back, though many of those jobs are part time for poverty wages and even though a terrorist army is marching across the Middle East at the speed of lightening as it persecutes religious minorities, it doesn’t necessarily parallel global inaction during the recovery from the Great Depression in the 1930s… not yet at least.
Should we shirk our moral and political responsibilities here, we very well may see those parallels rising. But at this point, that kind of global war isn’t this mission.
Even defeating terrorism isn’t and shouldn’t be our mission here. This mission has a fairly clear end goal, unlike before, and that is to remove our military equipment from ISIS’s control. Without our weapons, the relative regional parity in power returns.
(Odysseus Bostick is a Los Angeles teacher and former candidate for the Los Angeles City Council. He writes The Bostick Report for CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 67
Pub: Aug 19, 2014
