Western diplomats once again move battle lines in Islamic State fight

Share

Canada is already worried about one kind of mission creep in Iraq, as more information emerges about a firefight between Canadian special forces in northern Iraq and fighters of the so-called Islamic State. But to hear top Western diplomats speak on Thursday, there might be reason to worry about another.

First it was British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, speaking after a gathering of ministers from 21 countries involved in the fight against the self-declared caliphate that controls swaths of Syria and Iraq. He drew a direct link between Islamic State and the recent violence on the streets of Paris, where Islamist gunmen attacked the offices of a satirical newspaper and a kosher grocery.

Then came U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who effectively declared a global war against extremism. (Mr. Kerry avoided directly saying what sort of extremism, though Mr. Hammond had no qualms about naming "violent Islamist extremism" as the enemy).

The goal of the six-month-old air campaign against IS, he said, was no longer simply about rescuing besieged minorities – the original aim – or even about maintaining the territorial integrity of Iraq. Using the Arabic acronym for the militant group, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL, Mr. Kerry said the war was about "ultimately defeating what [Islamic State] represents, defeating [Islamic State] as an idea."

And so the U.S., Britain, Canada and their allies have once more expanded the definition of what they're trying to achieve, even before they achieve their initial aims.

On one hand, it's good that Mr. Hammond – obviously concerned that some 600 British citizens have gone to Syria and Iraq to join and fight for IS – recognizes there's a link between the war over there and the now-constant state of "terror alert" in London and other European capitals. On the other – and while Mr. Kerry had plenty of detail to offer about how many air strikes the coalition had carried out, and how many IS fighters had been killed – there was puzzlingly little in the way of explanation of how the coalition would fight this wider war against the "idea" of IS.

One way to blunt the appeal of IS, obviously, would be to crush it on the battlefield. But while Mr. Kerry said 2,000 air strikes since August had "definitively" halted the group's momentum, the first reports of gunfire between coalition (in this case, Canadian) troops and IS fighters already have some talking of winding the mission to conclusion. There's simply no public appetite for another Iraq war.

Syria, the heartland of IS and torn by nearly four years of civil war, went almost completely unmentioned at Thursday's summit in London. (The U.S. and five Arab countries have authorized air strikes inside Syria. Canada and the rest of the coalition have restricted their operations to Iraq alone.)

"What is our Syria policy? What are we doing about Assad?" Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, asked. The answer: The U.S. and its allies have no cogent policy on Syria or Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and that allows "ISIS in Syria to take more territory, and ISIS to become a bigger brand."

It is that "brand" – the image of a bunch of devout, Kalashnikov-wielding Muslims standing up to the Western powers they say have done so much ill – that radicalizes many young Muslims in Europe and North America, even luring some to join the fight.

Mr. Hammond appeared to be trying to brace the British public for another long war on Thursday when he warned that it would take "a year, two years" to oust IS from Iraq. He made no mention of Syria. But analysts in the region fear the coalition may be missing the point.

"The idea that you can defeat ISIS in two years is simplistic … The problem is the conditions that created ISIS will remain and something more virulent will emerge in its place," said Rami Khouri, a senior fellow at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.

Talk of a war on extremism raises a chicken-or-egg conundrum: Western governments may say they're battling extremism at home when they fight IS in Iraq. But wars in the Middle East have also proven to breed more radicalization at home and abroad.

The conditions that created IS, Mr. Khouri said, could only be addressed through deft domestic and foreign policy adjustments. As the Paris attacks – where all three perpetrators were French-born – demonstrated a feeling of persecution among Muslims and high unemployment among immigrant communities contribute to homegrown extremism in Europe and North America.

But the perception that Western foreign policy is tilted against the Muslim world, particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is an equally large problem. The U.S. and its allies have gone to war against Islamic State, but reacted too late to the crises that precipitated it. Former Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was allowed to turn the national army into a Shia sectarian force, and the West intervened only when Sunni Muslims showed their anger by backing the IS extremists. Mr. al-Assad was tolerated in Syria – spared air strikes even after he gassed his own citizens – because no one could see a better option.

"When you've had these attacks or attempted attacks in Europe or North America, almost always these young people say they were radicalized by U.S. and European actions in the Middle East," Mr. Khouri said.

In other words, defeating IS "as an idea" might require reconsidering some of ours.