OPINION OZ HASSAN Looking for a strategy
Why President Obama’s strategy to defeat the Islamic State fails to deal with the grievances that are fuelling alienation. By Dr Oz Hassan
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N 10 SEPTEMBER, President Obama made an announcement that the US will form an international coalition that will “degrade and destroy” the so-called
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Expressed in terms of a ‘counter-terrorism’ strategy, the US asserted the necessity for airstrikes, the need to support opposition movements inside Syria and Iraq, humanitarian assistance, and the use of broader preventative counter-terrorism instruments. Remarkably, this announcement came just
two weeks after the President publicly declared that the US did not have a strategy in place. The speedy turnaround of the announcements is highly significant not least as it goes some way towards
The US needs a wider
regional strategy, and not just an ISIS strategy
explaining why the declared strategy is problematic. The strategy fails to set out a long-term and holistic strategy for dealing with the social, economic and political grievances that are fuelling alienation, and allowing ISIS to recruit fighters from all over the world. This hastily concocted strategy needs to be tied
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to a wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA) strategy if the US and its allies want to avoid an indefinite extension of American led military engagement and halt the ever-greater levels of spiralling violence that are spreading across the MENA. Simply put, the US needs a wider regional strategy, and not just an ISIS strategy, if it is to help deal with the causes of the region’s security issues, and create a policy through which it can direct its resources, capabilities and goals to achieve realistic ends. The failure of the Obama administration to recognise the need for a wider political strategy is remarkably similar to that first conceived by the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of September 11 2001. The G.W. Bush administration’s first iteration of the ‘war on terror’ focused exclusively on counter-terrorism, attempting to eradicate al-Qaeda by targeting its leaders and eradicating its members through force as if there were a finite number. The Obama administration’s strategy promises a similar approach, yet this carries risks of collateral damage and further radicalisation that will help ISIS find new recruits. Moreover, while ISIS is well organised and hierarchical in nature, removing its
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top leadership without a wider political approach to the region will merely allow new leaders to emerge in their place and prolonged periods of ISIS splintering into cells that will return to their homes across the globe.
Indeed, when the G.W. Bush administration recognised this phenomenon occurring in the mid- 2000s the war on terror evolved into the Freedom Agenda that sought to promote democracy not only as a method of eradicating terrorism, but also as a wider strategy for engaging with the MENA. Problems with the Freedom Agenda aside, as the war on terror evolved, it did at least recognise that its initially narrow counter-terrorism strategy was failing and that a wider regional policy needed to be put in place that challenged the authoritarian status quo. The Obama administration has yet to reach this conclusion in spite of the Arab uprisings and multiple opportunities that have presented themselves. Instead, the White House is formulating policy on an ad hoc and reactive basis. Trying to deal with ISIS in isolation of the
wider regional context, which favours restricted civil societies, well-established authoritarian elites, poorly administered bureaucracies, and fractured and divergent identities fitting within mismatching state boundaries, shows that the Obama administration is treating the symptoms of the current regional crisis rather than the cause. Moreover, forming a coalition that includes some of the region’s most authoritarian states will surely mean that the US turns a blind eye to their contribution to the current climate and their human rights violations carried out in the name of domestic ‘wars on terror’. In attempting to deal with ISIS, the US needs regional partners and allies but doing so in a manner that seeks to maintain the regional status quo and ignores the causes of political upheaval will lead to further alienation, sectarian divide and radicalisation. President Obama’s hastily developed strategy may well suit an appetite for a response to the atrocities carried out by ISIS, but it also carries serious risks of failure by design. n
i Oz Hassan is an Assistant Professor of US National Security at the
University of Warwick and a visiting scholar on the Democracy and Rule of Law Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C.
He is currently working on his ESRC Future Research Leaders project entitled Transatlantic Interests and Democratic Possibility in a Transforming Middle East (2013-2016) Contact Dr Oz Hassan, University of Warwick Email
o.a.hassan@warwick.ac.uk Web
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/hassan/
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