The caliphate threat
As Americans know well by now, a violent Muslim extremist group has overrun Tikrit, Mosul and other northern Iraqi territory liberated at great cost by U.S. and Iraqi troops and has proclaimed the founding of an Islamic state in much of northeastern Syria and large portions of Iraq.
Its leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, has proclaimed himself the emir of a caliphate - recreating the Islamic state that once stretched over much of the Islamic world. The group has already set about changing its name from ISIS - the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria - to simply the Islamic State.
Is this the final ending for our struggle in Iraq, and does it portend the outcome in Afghanistan? Was it avoidable? The historical evidence suggests that far from the climax, this thrust by ISIS looks like a coming attraction. And yes, it was avoidable.
Restoring the caliphate has been on the list of things to do for Islamists virtually from the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1916. It was then that two European diplomats - Mark Sykes of Great Britain and Francois George Picot of France - drafted what was initially a secret agreement that drew the boundaries of the countries of the current Middle East that became reality after World War I. Islamists regard the Sykes-Picot Agreement as a boil on the face of Islam, and have made every effort to eradicate those boundaries and to unite Muslims under the banner of their religion and the rule of Sharia law.
ISIS itself is a split-off from Al Qaeda, and differs from its parent only as to how to achieve the goal. Al Qaeda says that jihad, or holy war, must come first; ISIS has leaped ahead to proclaim the caliphate even as it wages war.
DROPCAP HERE. Some American observers suggest we have nothing to fear in the ISIS-declared caliphate. It may have grand ambitions, they say, but is unlikely to truly threaten American interests.
While we must understand its limitations, which are real, we ought not be so dismissive of its ambitions. ISIS has been funded generously by wealthy Sunnis in the Middle East, including some in countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar that purport to be our allies. The organization has picked up material and human support as it has taken territory - robbing banks, seizing weapons abandoned by Iraqi troops and drawing recruits with its two most consistently reliable attractions: the religious message and a record of success.
The religious message, contrary to what many in the West, including many in the Obama administration, have suggested, is not some fringe version with no basis in Islam; it is straight from the later passages in the Koran which, because they are later, have more authority than what precedes them, and urge, for example, that believers "fight . . . the disbelievers . . . and let them find harshness in you . . . ."
Certainly as regards Iraq, the Sykes-Picot lines may in fact have been obliterated, although not entirely by ISIS. When the United States established a no-fly zone over the Kurdish regions in northern Iraq when Saddam Hussein was still in power, it helped establish the conditions for achieving a Kurdish state in that part of the world, and it is unlikely Iraq's central government will regain control of them any time soon.
DROPCAP HERE. But before the ISIS phenomenon is taken seriously for the long term as an actual threat to national boundaries, it might be useful to recall a bit of history. This is not the first time that an attempt has been made to redraw the boundaries of the Middle East, and earlier attempts came from actors more substantial than ISIS.
Thus Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt for a time presided over the United Arab Republic, consisting of Egypt and Syria, until it fell apart and Syria went its own way. Nasser's message was nationalistic and pan-Arab, rather than religious, but even when Mohammed Morsi took control of Egypt following the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, and hoisted the flag of the Muslim Brotherhood, he was not able to stay in power. Nor was Saddam Hussein, with substantially greater resources than those available to ISIS, able to make good on his claim that Kuwait was a province of Iraq.
Historical analogies are always imperfect, but these past episodes do not hold out promise for ISIS over the long haul.
Other forces at play in the Middle East create cross-currents that will likely undermine the appeal of a self-proclaimed caliph. ISIS is a Sunni entity; Shiites still run Iraq, and have a strong supporter in Bashar Assad, who remains in control in Syria. Iran, with its advanced and advancing nuclear program, is a Shiite country; however, it is a Persian not an Arab country, a source of tension with Arabs.
Still, those religious and ethnic allegiances can be put aside, at least temporarily. Iran actually hosted members of Al Qaeda, a Sunni Arab organization, when conditions in other countries made things dangerous for them. However, those allegiances persist, and rivers of blood have been spilled in their name.
DROPCAP HERE. To say that ISIS and its self-proclaimed caliph may not have long-term staying power is not to say that they do not pose a threat in the short-term - and that threat is not confined to the Middle East. Intelligence experts have estimated that there are about 4,000 foreign fighters in Syria from Europe and the United States who have been attracted by the ISIS message. The hundreds estimated to have come from the United States carry American passports and could easily return to this country and apply their deadly training here. Those holding European passports could travel not only to their home countries but also without much trouble to this country.
Those who dismiss the violence in the Middle East as a local concern of that region are like the passenger in the back of the boat who refused to help bail because it was only the front of the boat that was sinking.
The unsettling of established regimes following the oddly named Arab Spring represents the thaw of what Yigal Carmon, head of the Middle East Media Research Institute, calls the "frozen swamp" that has constituted politics in that part of the world for generations. Authoritarian regimes have held populations down, and the ethnic and religious tensions between groups of populations have been held down as well.
Now that those regimes have been challenged and in some cases displaced, those tensions are freely erupting. He suggests that it will be a few hundred years until things settle down. But that appears to assume the absence of any outside stabilizing force.
One stabilizing force that has left the scene, at least in Iraq, is the United States, and it has done so with as explicit a message as one can imagine from its president that he at least has no intention of returning if he can help it. In 2011, President Obama announced that the United States no longer had a military presence there, and had left behind a "sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq." Just so no one missed the point, he also announced that our attention would pivot to Asia.
Of course, Iraq is next door to Iran, and the open border between them has allowed Iran to exercise substantial influence over the government of Nouri al Maliki, making him effectively an Iranian puppet; so much for "sovereign" and "self-reliant." ISIS has taken care of "stable."
DROPCAP HERE. Which brings us to whether this could have been prevented, and, perhaps, to whether it can be abated - appropriate questions as we near the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, perhaps the most preventable bloodbath in the bloody history of the world.
The Obama administration was determined to withdraw from Iraq, and made no serious effort to negotiate a status of forces agreement. The administration claims that Maliki refused to sign an agreement that would have given our troops immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts, without which we could not remain.
That is a half-truth exquisitely designed to conceal the other half. Responsible military leaders said a residual force of about 23,000 would have been necessary for our troops to help the Iraqis preserve the secure and stable conditions that existed when Obama took office. He reduced that number to 3,000, suggested that he wanted the Iraqi parliament to approve the immunity arrangement, and made it plain he had no taste for further U.S engagement in Iraq.
Maliki may be, as some have said, a thug, but he is not a stupid thug. He well understood that he could not rely on the United States in that circumstance, and that he could not simply pick up his country and move it to another neighborhood, away from Iran. There was no point in his risking political capital by signing an unpopular agreement for the sake of keeping an inadequate U.S. force in place.
Notwithstanding the President's claim that we cannot have forces in Iraq indefinitely, we have had forces elsewhere in the world indefinitely, and with a stabilizing and salutary effect - notably in Europe, Japan and Korea. Indeed, both Germany (at least the part we controlled) and Japan, developed from totalitarian dictatorships into thriving democracies thanks to the stabilizing presence of U.S. troops; in Japan, even the militaristic Shinto religion was reformed.
It has been suggested that with fewer than 1,000 special force members on the ground, enough intelligence could be gathered to permit U.S. air power to reverse the gains of ISIS, which is deploying and fighting like a conventional army with convoys of vehicles that are vulnerable to attack.
That may be true, but no such attack can have lasting effect without regime change in Iraq, and no such change will occur unless those who would serve in a reconstituted government have the confidence in continued U.S. support that allowed masses of Iraqis to vote in free elections years ago.
That requires an American President who has confidence that his own country is a necessary force for good. And that too may require regime change.
Mukasey is a former U.S. attorney general and former federal judge.
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