BLOOD YEAR

Correspondence

Martin Chulov

Having been central to US counterterrorism strategy in the second administration of George W. Bush, David Kilcullen is uniquely placed to discuss its legacy.

From 2004 to 2009, no Australian citizen was closer than Kilcullen to the heart of US strategic decision-making in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Asia and the Horn of Africa. That time at the coalface, as well as his stand-back reflection since, has helped shape his Quarterly Essay Blood Year, perhaps one of the most important contributions yet to the global debate on how to deal with what’s left behind.

There’s much to agree with in Kilcullen’s analysis of how the ISIS juggernaut rose to be the existential threat to the post-Ottoman state system that it so clearly is today. Few could dispute his characterisation of events from 2005 to 2009, in particular how the obstinacy of senior officials played a lead role in Iraq’s disintegration and how US disengagement gradually emboldened the sectarian agenda prosecuted with such disastrous effect by Nouri al-Maliki.

I would add to this litany a profound cultural ignorance that failed to see how difficult it would be for societies rooted in thousands of years of tribal custom to embrace a new way of life that values individual liberties above all else. And a strategic blindness to how US detention centres were to become incubators in which ISIS would organise and plot. Without facilities such as Camp Bucca, ISIS leaders would not now pose the same threat.

Kilcullen’s conclusion – that deeper military re-engagement with committed local partners is the only short-term way to slow ISIS’s momentum – also stands to reason. But he, along with everyone else in the global policy sphere, is yet to come up with an approach about what to do beyond a containment plan.

The region is more combustible than at any time in the past century. The Sunni/Shi’a showdown now rumbling through the heart of Arabia eclipses in significance some rather notable events along the way: the creation of Israel in 1948, Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, the decade of war with Iraq that followed, and two US wars against Saddam Hussein.

The region’s two biggest power players, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have been engaged in a battle for absolute power for the last five years and show no inclination to compromise. Nor are they likely to as Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, where it all began, continue to crumble.

State control in all of these countries is now a facade. Non-state actors have primacy over national institutions in all cases. In Lebanon, the militia cum political bloc Hezbollah runs the show. In Iraq, Shi’a militia groups – all backed by Iran – are more powerful than the country’s military. In Syria, it’s the same story. ISIS has rendered the border between Iraq and Syria irrelevant.

A root cause of this is ISIS’s ability to tap into two narratives, each of which resonates with the region’s Sunnis. The jihadi group has been busily riding a suppression narrative on one hand, and a line that Iran has been ascendant at their expense since Saddam was toppled on the other.

The belief is that Sunni disenfranchisement started with the ousting of Saddam, a Sunni strongman in a land of majority Shi’as. It was then advanced by the killing of the patron of Lebanon’s Sunnis, Rafiq Hariri, two years later – an assassination blamed on Hezbollah. Disempowerment was then consolidated by the failure of the West to support the Syrian opposition in any meaningful way, so the view goes.

The US nuclear deal with Iran earlier this year has sealed the argument, in the eyes of many Sunnis, as it has with Washington’s long-standing Sunni allies in the region, who refuse to accept Obama’s claim that such a pact will keep everyone safer in the long run.

The bottom line is that with the regional body politic having so spectacularly failed, ISIS has been able to position itself as a political alternative, which can advance the interests of the majority Muslim sect. In doing so, it can claim to be restoring lost dignity as well as offering safety in numbers to those over whom it lords.

A large part of ISIS’s constituency is made up of people who have accepted at least part of this narrative, in the absence of anything else to cling to. Most do not buy into the ISIS ideology but see the group as a bus to a destination – wherever that might be.

If there is to be a way out of this diabolical mess, this group – the Sunnis of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – need to be given genuine power in an inclusive political process: precisely the formula that was shattered by Maliki as the US left Iraq. With trust so eroded, it is very difficult to see how this could happen. At a local level, there is perhaps a glimmer of residual hope.

In the election of 2010, the bloc of Ayad Allawi, a secular Shi’a, won more seats in Iraq’s parliament than Maliki (91 to 89), with much of his support coming from Sunnis. He could not, however, build a coalition that gave him the numbers to form a government. The United States backed Maliki, turning a blind eye to his sectarian ways, and the rest is history.

More broadly, if Humpty Dumpty is ever to be put back together, it will need more than all the king’s horses and men. Nothing short of a grand bargain, bringing in all the region’s stakeholders – Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Russia and the United States – is likely to generate real traction. All will need to recognise that mutually assured destruction awaits the region if a power-sharing compromise is not struck. 

To the extent that Obama has had a strategy, it has been about the nuclear deal – a good-faith test that could develop into a broader neighbourly role. So far, that has been an impossible sell to Saudi Arabia. And even a full-blown existential crisis may not change that.

One final observation I would like to make on Kilcullen’s excellent essay is that by the time Obama entered the White House, he could not have forced an extension of the US presence in Iraq even if he had wanted to. Maliki formed his government in late 2010 with Iran’s endorsement, after a pact brokered by the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, and endorsed by Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq.

The condition of the backing was that not a single US remain outside Baghdad’s Green Zone. For the United States to stay, Obama would practically have had to reinvade. One insider present at the video conference that sealed the US exit told me that the scenes on each end of the link that day could not have been more different. In the White House situation room sat a phalanx of generals, along with Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and others. In Baghdad, Maliki sat with an empty notebook and a translator. The discussion that ended Iraq as it then was took less than five minutes.

Martin Chulov