After weeks of anguished debate in Washington over what to do to reverse the seemingly unstoppable advance of ISIL, US president Barack Obama announced his decision on Wednesday. He had been under pressure from hawks, including the contenders for the Republican 2016 presidential nomination, to reverse his “weakness” and make a bold move. Top of the list of options promoted by senator John McCain, one of the most experienced voices in Washington on foreign and security policy, was to send US front line spotters to the battlefield to call in precise air strikes on the jihadists.
In the end, the president’s decision was enough to win a few headlines and give the impression of movement but not to make a real difference. He is sending a further 450 military advisers to train Sunni Muslim volunteers in the Iraqi army. Training will take place at a new base in Anbar province of which the capital, Ramadi, has been in ISIL hands for the past month.
The United States already has some 3,000 trainers and advisers in Iraq so the new contingent does not mark a radical departure. This should not be a surprise. Earlier this week Mr Obama said Washington did not have a “complete strategy” for Iraq, a comment that aroused howls of derision in Washington, given that ISIL’s first major conquest in Iraq, the capture of the northern city of Mosul, is now a year old. But Mr Obama has a reason for the lack of strategy: he blamed it on the Iraqi government for failing to meet a commitment to mobilise enough Sunni recruits for the Americans to train.
Anbar, a vast desert area with the Euphrates snaking through it, is the heartland of Iraq’s minority Sunnis. The Americans insist that the force that takes on ISIL must not be Shia militias, which are largely under the control of Iran and are the most effective fighters. Rather, it should be a national Iraqi army with a sectarian balance. As the Iraqi army still does not inspire confidence among recruits, there is a stalemate.
America’s indecision has been seized on by General Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s military chief inside Iraq, who was quoted by a newspaper as saying the US military did not do a “damned thing” to resist the ISIL takeover of Ramadi. Giving a spin to a common conspiracy theory that Washington is somehow behind the rise of the jihadists, he asked if the Americans were “an accomplice to the plot”.
A more sober assessment has come from Salim Al Jabouri, speaker of the Iraqi parliament, who told Foreign Policy that the Americans were “not really looking at our problems or not paying attention to us”. It was, of course, the Iraqis who demanded the full withdrawal of US troops, leaving a vacuum that ISIL has filled. But Mr Al Jabouri is right in that Mr Obama is looking first and foremost at US public opinion and the looming presidential election.
Mr Obama has always worked on the basis that American public opinion does not want to get involved in another Middle East war. He said in May last year that the US would only use force “when our people are threatened, when our livelihood is at stake, or when the security of our allies is in danger”. To Mr Obama’s legal brain, all this no doubt seems logical. His legacy is elsewhere: a nuclear deal with Iran. But there is a growing body of opinion that questions why Mr Obama is standing idly by when half of Syria and up to one third of Iraq is under ISIL control. The Economist has described his “deliberate neglect” of the problems of the Middle East as “callous”. The contenders for the Republican presidential nomination are – with the notable exception of libertarian Rand Paul – demanding that Mr Obama stem the tide of jihadism.
For the moment, Mr Obama is sticking to the line that the American people want him to manage the problem, not send in the cavalry. The word from the White House is that none of the three options tried so far – military intervention and occupation (Iraq), military intervention without occupation (Libya), and hands-off (Syria) – has succeeded. The intriguing question is how long the light touch approach can continue in Washington’s increasingly fevered pre-election atmosphere.
Mr Obama cannot run for a third term so his actions might seem irrelevant to the election. But that is not the case. With Hillary Clinton likely to be the Democratic nominee, her fate is tied to that of the incumbent.
If the accusation that Mr Obama is weak on foreign policy sticks to him, then she is tarnished too, as his first-term secretary of state. So the task of keeping a Democrat in the White House still depends to a certain extent on Mr Obama. It is a rare thing for a two-term US president to hand over to a successor from the same party, but it would be sweet revenge against the Republicans who have opposed Mr Obama at every turn.
The small steps he has been taking in Iraq may, in the end, be enough for him to hold the line. But what if ISIL, which seems able to recover from every loss with new recruits, makes some spectacular advance during Ramadan? Only a fool would suppose that ISIL is not planning some kind of action. That may change the calculus and Mr Obama’s domestic political concerns will then require some more forceful action.
One thing is certain: the cause of nation-building in Iraq, in which 4,487 Americans have already died, counts for little in Washington. At this stage in the electoral cycle, it’s all about American politics.
Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs
On Twitter: @aphilps
