In countering the Islamic State, Washington tends to debate policy options bounded by costs that we are presumptively willing to bear. So we debate: What will the Kurds or the Al Anbar Sunnis be able to do with weapons, if we go around Baghdad? What if we insert several hundred more special forces?
This approach holds risks for the region and for us. As Ronald Reagan said of failing U.S. policies in the mid-1970s, “Wandering without aim describes [our] policy. . . . We gave just enough support to one side to encourage it to fight and die, but too little to give them a chance of winning. Meanwhile we’re disliked by the winner, distrusted by the loser, and viewed by the world as weak and unsure.”
Tactical evaluations are necessary, but sound policy decisions require more. What we should do also depends in some measure on what is at stake for us.
What was at stake for America in the 1990s in Afghanistan? Many then said, “not much.” One group or another would emerge from Afghan squabbles, supposedly with little consequence for realist America. Taliban atrocities against Afghans did little to shift that assessment. One particular outcome—September 11 and 3,000 dead Americans—changed that.
But the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were only one possible outcome of an Afghan terrorist state. Multiple, bipartisan National Commissions in the 1990s warned that America could face a much more catastrophic terrorist attack using biological or other weapons of mass destruction. Casualties from a single day of such attacks, wise men warned, could exceed tens of thousands.
In fact, we now know that Islamic terrorists in the 1990s sought such weapons. Radical rhetoric and Islamic rulings justify such attacks. Herein lay not an unforeseeable risk, but a plausible and well-noted one.
Concern about such an attack rightly or wrongly affected President George W. Bush’s post-September 11 assessment of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Bush feared not Iraq’s current plans, but, as he put it, the “gathering threat” posed by a murderously aggressive regime that had proven WMD capabilities. Might Saddam, left in power, have further disrupted the region, armed terrorists, or surreptitiously launched a WMD attack against America or its allies, dwarfing September 11 losses? These possibilities drove Bush.
By removing Saddam preemptively, Bush accepted the burden of never knowing definitively what risks we might have run.
Now, once again, we must ask: What is at stake for America in Iraq and the Middle East? Once again, many say, “not much,” or at least that the stakes merit only limited assistance from American air support and special forces. It is primarily someone else’s battle, these voices argue, and such aid should enable local forces to defeat or contain ISIS. In any case, they insist, greater American intervention would ultimately be futile and make matters worse. After all, American misadventures brought us ISIS as it is today. In this view, the fracturing of post-Saddam Iraq was inevitable, not the direct result of America’s 2011 withdrawal. Or else they predict that Sunni Iraqis cannot repel fundamentalist control for long, so why start? Even disrupted oil supplies will not greatly impact a largely energy-independent United States. Looking ever further out, President Obama envisions that the region will at some point reach a benign, or at least externally benign, equilibrium.
Perhaps it will, but the fervor of these otherwise debatable views seems conveniently tailored to a preferred course of action. And, so far, not even the most optimistic proponents claim the current course will expel ISIS in less than five years.
If the Islamic State governs for years, what cost might America, not just Iraq and its neighbors, incur? If ISIS, only recently dismissed as junior varsity, controls for years the education and activities of hundreds of thousands of young Iraqi, Syrian, and foreign radicals, what might they someday do? Would vicious men within the ISIS circle, or others inspired by them, develop WMD to trade secretly or use surreptitiously against the United States or our allies? What might break loose if IS should then splinter or fail, as we now hope and wistfully predict?
Let us assess these risks frankly: We don’t know what may come. We know it is possible that horrible consequences may ensue from any decision.
Looking at the deteriorating situation in Eastern Europe in 1938, Winston Churchill predicted, “[D]o not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year….”
Do we accept foreseeable consequences, or at least decide that we are unwilling to pay an uncertain price today for the uncertain chance of avoiding them tomorrow? Or might we resolve that the prospect of dreadful losses merits bearing, however distastefully, higher near term risks and costs?
Fair or not, if the Middle East stumbles, we may suffer. Those are the unwanted stakes. We should say frankly that we choose to run these risks, and not protest our certainty that the current course is optimized to avoid them. Or we should openly revisit—not preemptively dismiss as unacceptable—the question of whether stronger action might reasonably save more in years to come than is perilously ventured today.