How to lose the next war in the Middle East: the short answer, fight it!

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The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, known as "the mother of all bombs", and the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used by the US in a conflict. The US military dropped it on a tunnel complex used by Islamic State militants in Afghanistan. Picture by ABACA/ABACA/PA Images. All rights reserved. Make no mistake: after 15 years of losing wars, spreading terror
movements, and multiplying failed states across the Greater Middle
East, America will fight the next versions of our ongoing
wars. Not that we ever really stopped.  Sure, Washington traded
in George W. Bush’s expansive, almost messianic
attitude toward his Global War on Terror for Barack Obama’s more
precise, deliberate, even cautious approach to an unnamed version of
the same war for hegemony in the Greater Middle East.  Sure, in
the process kitted-up 19 year-olds from Iowa became less ubiquitous
features on Baghdad’s and Kabul’s busy boulevards, even if that
distinction was lost on the real-life targets of America’s wars —
and the bystanders (call them “collateral damage”) scurrying
across digital drone display screens. 

It’s hardly a brilliant observation to point out that, more than
15 years later, the entire region is a remarkable mess.  So much
worse off than Washington found it, even if all of that mess can’t
simply be blamed on the United States — at least not directly. 
It’s too late now, as the Trump administration is
discovering, to retreat behind two oceans and cover our collective
eyes.  And yet, acts that might still do some modest amount of
good (resettling refugees, sending aid, brokering truces, anything
within reason to limit suffering) don’t seem to be on any American
agenda.

So, after 16 years of inconclusive or
catastrophic regional campaigns, maybe it’s time to stop dreaming
about how to make things better in the Greater Middle East and try
instead to imagine how to make things worse (since that’s the path
we often seem to take anyway). Here, then, is a little thought
experiment for you: what if Washington actually wanted to
lose? How might the U.S. government go about accomplishing that? Let
me offer a quick (and inevitably incomplete) to-do list on the
subject:

As a start, you would drop
an enlarged, conventional army into Iraq and/or Syria. This would
offer a giant red, white, and blue target for all those angry, young
radicalized men just dying (pardon the pun) to extinguish some new
“crusader” force.  It would serve as an effective
religious-nationalist rallying cry (and target) throughout the
region.

Then you would create a news-magnet of a ban (or at least the
appearance
of one) on immigrants and visitors of every sort from predominantly
Muslim countries coming to the United States.  It’s hardly an
accident that ISIS has taken to calling the president’s proposed
executive order to do just that “the
blessed ban” and praising Donald Trump as the “best caller to
Islam.”  Such actions only confirm the extremist narrative:
that Muslims are unwelcome in and incompatible with the West, that
liberal plurality is a neo-imperial scam.

Finally, you would feed the common perception in the region that
Washington’s support for Israel and assorted Arab autocrats is
unconditional.  To do so, you would go out of your way to hold
fawning public meetings
with military strongmen like Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi,
and suggest
that, when it came to Israel, you were considering changing American
policy when it comes to a two-state solution and the illegal
Israeli settlements in Palestine.  Such policies would feed
another ISIS narrative: U.S. support for illiberal despots and the
failure of the Arab Spring is proof that practicing Muslims and
peaceful
Islamists will never successfully gain power through the
democratic process.

Key to such a losing strategy would be doing anything you could to
reinforce ISIS’s twisted narrative of an end-of-days battle between
Islam and Christendom, a virtuous East versus a depraved West, an
authentic Caliphate against hypocritical democracies.  In what
amounts to a war of ideas, pursuing such policies would all but hand
victory to ISIS and other jihadi extremist groups.  And so you
would have successfully created a strategy for losing eternally in
the Greater Middle East.  And if that was the desired outcome in
Washington, well, congratulations all around, but of course we all
know that it wasn’t.

Let’s take these three points in such a losing strategy one by
one. (Of course "losing" is itself a contested term, but
for our purposes, consider the U.S. to have lost as long as its
military spins its wheels in a never-ending quagmire, while gradually
empowering various local "adversaries.")

Just a few thousand
more troops
will get
it done…

There are already
thousands of American soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Syria, to
say nothing of the even more numerous troops and sailors stationed on
bases in Kuwait,
Bahrain, Turkey, and other states ringing America’s Middle Eastern
battlefields.  Still, if you want to mainline into the fastest
way to lose the next phase of the war on terror, just blindly
acquiesce in the inevitable
requests of your commanders for yet more troops and planes needed
to finish the job in Syria ( and Iraq, and Afghanistan,
and Yemen, and so on).

Let’s play this out.  First, the worst (and most plausible)
case: U.S. ground forces get sucked into an ever more complex,
multi-faceted civil war — deeper and deeper still, until one day
they wake up in a world that looks like Baghdad,
2007, all over again.

Or, lest we be accused of defeatism, consider the best case: those
endlessly fortified and reinforced American forces wipe the floor
with ISIS and just maybe manage to engineer the toppling of Bashar
al-Assad’s Syrian regime as well.  It’s V-Day in the Middle
East!  And then what?  What happens the day after? When and
to whom do American troops turn over power? 

* The Kurds? That’s a nonstarter
for Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, all countries with significant Kurdish
minorities.

* The Saudis? Don’t count on it.  They’re busy bombing
Houthi Shias in Yemen (with U.S.-supplied ordnance) and grappling
with the diversification of their oil-based economy in a world in
which fossil fuels are struggling.

* Russia? Fat chance. Bombing “terrorists”? Yes. Propping up
an autocratic client to secure basing rights? Sure. Temporary
transactional alliances of convenience in the region? Absolutely. But
long-term nation-building in the heart of the Middle East? It’s
just not the style of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a country with its
own shaky petro-economy.

* So maybe leave Assad in power and turn the country back over to
what’s left of his minority, Alawite-dominated regime? That,
undoubtedly, is the road to hell.  After all, it was his
murderous, barrel-bombing, child-gassing acts that all but caused the
civil war in the first place.  You can be sure that, sooner or
later, Syria’s majority Sunni population and its separatist Kurds
would simply rebel again, while (as the last 15 years should have
taught us) an even uglier set of extremists rose to the surface.

Keep in mind as well that, when it comes to the U.S. military, the
Iraqi
and Afghan “surges” of 2007 and 2009 offered proof positive that
more ground troops aren’t a cure-all in such situations.  They
are a formula for expending prodigious amounts of money and
significant amounts of blood, while only further alienating local
populations.  Meanwhile, unleashing manned and drone aircraft
strikes, which occasionally kill large numbers of civilians, only add
to the ISIS narrative.

Every mass casualty civilian bombing or drone strike incident just
detracts further from American regional credibility.  While both
air strikes and artillery barrages may hasten the offensive progress
of America’s Kurdish, Iraqi, and Syrian allies, that benefit needs
to be weighed against the moral and propaganda costs of those dead
women and children.  For proof, see the
errant bombing strike on an apartment building in Mosul last
month.  After all, those hundred-plus civilians are just as dead
as Assad’s recent victims and just as many angry, grieving family
members and friends have been left behind.

In other words, any of the familiar U.S. strategies, including
focusing all efforts on ISIS or toppling Assad, or a bit of both,
won’t add up to a real policy for the region.  No matter how
the Syrian civil war shakes out, Washington will need a genuine “what
next” plan.  Unfortunately, if the chosen course predictably
relies heavily on the military lever to shape Syria’s shattered
society, America’s presence and actions will only (as in the past)
aggravate the crisis and help rejuvenate its many adversaries.

“The blessed ban”

The Trump administration’s proposed “travel ban” quickly
became fodder for left-versus-right vitriol in the U.S.  Here’s
a rundown on what it’s likely to mean when it comes to foreign
policy and the “next” war.  First, soaring domestic fears
over jihadi terror attacks in this country and the possible role of
migrants and refugees in stoking them represent a potentially
catastrophic over-reaction to a modest threat.  Annually, from
2005 to 2015, terrorists killed
an average of just seven Americans on U.S. soil.  You are
approximately 18,000
times more likely to die in some sort of accident than from such
an attack.  In addition, according to a study
by the conservative Cato Institute, from 1975 to 2015 citizens of the
countries included in Trump’s first ban (including Iraq and Syria)
killed precisely zero people in the United States.  Nor
has any refugee conducted
a fatal domestic attack here.  Finally, despite candidate and
President Trump’s calls for “extreme vetting” of Muslim
refugees, the government already has a complex, two-year vetting
process
for such refugees which is remarkably “extreme.” 

Those are the facts.  What truly matters, however, is the
effect of such a ban on the war of ideas in the Middle East.  In
short, it’s manna from heaven for ISIS’s storyline in which
Americans are alleged to hate all Muslims. It tells you everything
you need to know that, within days of the administration’s
announcement of its first ban, ISIS had taken to labeling it
“blessed,” just as al-Qaeda once
extolled George W. Bush’s 2003 “blessed invasion” of Iraq.
Even Senator John McCain, a well-known hawk, worried
that Trump’s executive order would “probably give ISIS some more
propaganda.” 

Remember, while ISIS loves to claim responsibility for every
attack in the West perpetrated by lost, disenfranchised,
identity-seeking extremist youths, that doesn’t mean the
organization actually directs them. The vast majority of these
killers are self-radicalized citizens, not refugees or immigrants.
One of the most effective — and tragic — ways to lose this war is
to prove the jihadis right. 

The hypocrisy trap

Another way to feed the ISIS narrative is to bolster perceptions
of diplomatic insincerity. Americans tend to be some of the least
self-aware citizens on the planet. (Is it a coincidence that ours is
about the only population left still questioning the existence
of climate change?) Among the rare things that Democrats and
Republicans agree on, however, is that America is a perennial force
for good, in fact the force for good on Earth. As it
happens, the rest of the world begs to differ. In Gallup global
polls,
the United States has, in fact, been identified as the number one
threat to world peace!  However uncomfortable that may be, it
matters.

One reason many Middle Easterners, in particular, believe this to
be so stems from Washington’s longstanding support for regional
autocrats.  In fiscal year 2017, Egypt’s military dictator and
Jordan’s king will receive
$1.46 and $1 billion respectively in U.S. foreign aid — nearly 7% of
its total assistance budget.  After leading a coup to overturn
Egypt’s elected government, General Sisi was officially persona
non grata in the White House (though President Obama reinstated
$1.3 billion in military aid in 2015).  Sisi’s recent visit to
the Trump White House changed all that as, in a joint press
conference, the president swore that he was “very much behind”
Egypt and that Sisi himself had “done a fantastic job.”  In
another indicator of future policy, the State Department dropped
existing human rights conditions for the multibillion-dollar sale of
F-16s to Bahrain's monarchy.  All of this might be of mild
interest, if it weren’t for the way it bolstered ISIS claims that
democracy is just an “idol,”
and the democratic process a fraud that American presidents simply
ignore.

Then there’s Israel, already the object of deep hatred in the
region, and now clearly about to receive a blank check of support
from the Trump administration.  The role that Israeli leaders
already play in American domestic politics is certainly striking to
Arab audiences. Consider how unprecedented it was in 2015 to see
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticize
a sitting president before a joint session of Congress in an Israeli
election year and receive multiple, bipartisan standing ovations. 
Even so, none of this prevented the Obama administration,
domestically labeled “weak on Israel,” from negotiating a record
$38 billion military aid deal with that country. 

While violent Palestinian fighters are far from blameless, for 40
years Israel has increasingly created facts on the ground meant to
preclude a viable Palestinian state.  Netanyahu and his
predecessors increased
illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories, built an
exclusion wall, and further divided the West Bank by constructing a
network of roads meant only for the Israeli military and Jewish
settlers.

Although most world leaders, publics, and the United
Nations see the Jewish settlements on the West Bank as a major
impediment to peace, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel was once
the president
of a fundraising group supporting just such an Israeli
settlement.  The notion that he could be an honest broker in
peace talks borders on the farcical.

All of this, of course, matters when it comes to Washington’s
unending wars in the region.  Even Secretary of Defense James
Mattis, soon after leaving the helm of U.S. Central Command
(CENTCOM), recognized
that he “paid a military security price every day as a commander of
CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as biased in support of
Israel.”  So, you want to lose?  Keep feeding the ISIS
narrative on democracy and Israel just as the Trump administration is
doing, even as it sends
more troops into the region and heightens
bombing and drone
raids from Syria to Yemen.

Send in the cavalry…

If the next phase of the generational struggle for the Middle East
is once again to be essentially a military one, while the Trump
administration feeds every negative American stereotype in the
region, then it’s hard to see a future of anything but defeat. A
combination of widespread American ignorance and the intellectual
solace of simplistic models lead many here to ascribe jihadist
terrorism to some grand, ethereal hatred of “Christendom.” 

The reality is far more discomfiting. Consider, for instance, a
document from “ancient” history: Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa
against the United States.  At that time, he described
three tangible motives for jihad: U.S. occupation of Islam’s
holiest lands in the Middle East, U.S. attacks on and sanctions
against Iraq, and American support for Israel’s “occupation” of
Jerusalem.  If ISIS and al-Qaeda’s center of gravity is not
their fighting force but their ideology (as I believe it
is), then the last thing Washington should want to do is substantiate
any of these three visions of American motivation — unless, of
course, the goal is to lose the war on terror across the Greater
Middle East and parts of Africa. 

In that case, the solution is obvious: Washington should indeed
insert more troops and set up yet more bases in the region, maintain
unqualified support for right-wing Israeli governments and assorted
Arab autocrats, and do its best to ban Muslim refugees from America. 
That, after all, represents the royal road to affirming al-Qaeda’s,
and now ISIS’s, overarching narratives. It’s a formula — already
well used in the last 15 years — for playing directly into the
enemy’s hands and adhering to its playbook, for creating yet more
failed
states and terror groups throughout the region.

When it comes to Syria in particular, there are some shockingly
unexamined contradictions at the heart of Washington’s reactions to
its war there.  President Trump, for instance, recently spoke
emotionally about the “beautiful babies cruelly murdered” in
Idlib, Syria.  Yet, the administration’s executive order on
travel bans any Syrian refugees — including beautiful
babies — from entering this country.  If few Americans
recognize the incongruity or hypocrisy of this, you can bet that
isn’t true in the Arab world.

For ISIS, today’s struggle in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere is part
of an unremitting, apocalyptic holy war between Islam and the West. 
That narrative is demonstrably false.  The current generation of
jihadis sprang from tangible grievances and perceived humiliations
perpetrated by recent Western policies.  There was
nothing “eternal” about it.  The first recorded
suicide bombings in the Middle East didn’t erupt until the early
1980s.  So forget the thousand-year struggle or even, in Western
terms, the “clash
of civilizations.”  It took America’s military-first
policies in the region to generate what has now become perpetual war
with spreading terror insurgencies. 

Want a formula for forever war? Send in the cavalry… again.

Note: The views expressed in this article are
those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not
reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the
Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

This article first appeared on TomDispatch on April 18, 2017.