The US is back in Iraq, but does it have a plan?

The US air strikes in northern Iraq are dragging the US back into a region it sought to leave, but is there an exit strategy?

President Barack Obama has reinvolved the US military in Iraq but does he have an exit strategy? Photo: AP / Jacquelyn Martin

With its air strikes on Islamic State positions in northern Iraq, the US has reinvolved itself militarily in a conflict from which President Barack Obama had vowed to disengage. This poses questions about the overall policy outlook driving these events and whether there is an end game in mind

One view is the air strikes are primarily to assuage some of Mr Obama’s domestic critics. Although the American public is deeply reluctant about any further military involvement in the Middle East, reports of persecution of religious and ethnic minorities in regions now under Islmaic State control have led to calls for a response. The US had already conducted humanitarian actions such as airdrops of emergency supplies to some of the 40,000 Yazidis who fled into the mountains to escape persecution for following a pre-Islamic religion related to Zoroastrianism.

The Islamic State attacks on the Yazidis and on Christian villages are of a scale where some observers contend that the United Nations’ genocide convention could be invoked, creating a duty on the international community to intervene. Politicians are usually at pains to avoid using the emotive word “genocide” for this reason, but Mr Obama used it twice in his speech about authorising military strikes. Britain is considering joining the ­intervention.

Another view is to see this as a tacit admission that the US policy of relying on local militias, such as the Kurdish Peshmerga, to keep the Islamic State in check has proved inadequate. With Iraq still under a caretaker government since the election in April and little prospect that the divisive sectarian policies of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki will be replaced by an inclusive governing philosophy, the US had to choose between the unappealing option of military intervention or the even less appealing option of allowing the Islamic State to gain control of the oil-rich area governed by the Kurdish Regional Government.

More important than parsing the possible motivations leading to this intervention is the need to understand the broader strategy being followed, and particularly whether an end game has been envisaged. This is less clear. One need only look to Syria for an example where the US was so reluctant to be involved that its intervention proved inadequate to empower moderate groups and instead allowed radical groups to flourish.

The US has a greater stake in Iraq, not least because it helped create the vacuum the Islamic State has filled. Now that is has re-engaged, the question is whether it has a thought-out plan.