US air strikes won’t solve Iraq’s problems
With the US launching air strikes against the terrorist group Islamic State in the Kurdish region, the situation in Iraq has come a full circle. The operation marks the renewal of American military engagement in the West Asian country, less than three years after President Barack Obama withdrew from there the last US soldier, concluding, what he had once called, a “dumb war”. It also marks the failure of America's 2003 intervention in Iraq that ousted Saddam Hussein and created a treacherous power vacuum which now threatens to swallow the entire country. After all, the Islamic State, a group which grabbed headlines for being so violent and barbaric that even Al Qaeda was repulsed by it, is essentially the product of the malevolent and conflicting forces that were unleashed in the aftermath of that invasion. The group came of age in Syria, fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and in this past year, it has gained significant strength — its ranks have swelled, it is flush with arms and money, and it now holds such large swathes of territory in the heart of the Muslim world that it has declared an Islamic Caliphate. Meanwhile, the democratically elected, West-supported Government in Baghdad has been reduced to a non-entity; it's US-trained army has collapsed like a house of cards. Hardly capable of protecting his capital, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's corrupt and hollowed out regime has little control over the rest of the country — and for this, he is just as much to blame. Instead of building strong state institutions after the war, he wasted this past decade on Shia triumphalism, marginalising Iraq's Sunni population and eventually tearing up the country on sectarian lines.
As Iraq floundered under Prime Minister Maliki, the rest of the world looked away, even as the humanitarian crisis, unravelling under the Islamic State's reign of terror, gained unconscionable proportions. last week, after the Islamic State attacked the Kurdish town of Sinjar, the region's vulnerable Yazidi minority fled to the hills, where they are now trapped without food, water or shelter, in searing temperatures. The plight of the Yazidis as well as serious concerns about the safety of American diplomatic and military personnel, posted in the Kurdish region since early this year, and who now live in the constant shadow of a Benghazi-like attack, form the immediate causes for this round of American military intervention. But even if the air strikes bring some relief in the short term, they will not solve the larger problem of a failed state that Iraq poses. For that, a long-term political solution, backed by military might and implemented in a bipartisan manner, is necessary.
The situation is Iraq also has some valuable lessons for other raging conflicts. libya, for instance, has been unable to get back on its feet since the Western ouster of Muammar Gaddafi and is now similarly threatened by Islamist militias. Afghanistan is in slightly better position but the gains are fragile and can be reversed especially if the ongoing change-in-Government process is not seen to its logical conclusion. In fact, those gains will most certainly be undone if political instability in Kabul prevents the Afghan authorities from signing of a bilateral security agreement with the US, much like it happened in Iraq.