Islamic State & its massive havoc

Inder Malhotra

ONLY the other day The New York Times published, under the heading “Truth About the Wars”, the confidential views of Major-Gen Michael K. Nagata (retired), formerly a senior commander of the special forces in the Middle East  for more than a decade beginning with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. By now it is well established that this war was launched by the neo-conservatives on the demonstrably false accusation that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction. In this particular case WMD turned out to be Words of Mass Deception. So candid and significant are Gen Nagata's revelations that they need to be quoted at some length and in his own words, not paraphrased. “As a senior commander in both Iraq and Afghanistan”, he records, “I lost 80 soldiers. Despite these sacrifices and those of thousands more, all we have to show for it are two failed wars. This fact eats one every day and Veterans Day is tougher than most”.  

For this disastrous outcome the General blames the US policy of regular “surge” in the deployment of troops at various stages of both the wars in the hope that this would do the trick. What happened instead was that, in the end “shackled to a corrupt, sectarian government in Baghdad and hobbled by our fellow-Americans' refusal to commit to a fight lasting decades, the surge just forestalled today’s stalemate. The remnants of Al-Qaida and the Sunni insurgency we battled for more than eight years simply re-emerged as the Islamic State, also called ISIS”. Arguing that American military is made for Desert Storm, not Vietnam, Nagata confessed that as a General he, along with his colleagues, had got it wrong. “We backed ourselves, season by season, into a long-term counter-insurgency in Iraq and then compounded it by extending it to Afghanistan”.

No wonder that an in-depth study of the Islamic State by Yale University on “where it came from and what it really wants” begins with General Nagata's blunt commentary. The broad conclusion of the study is that that “ISIS is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse”. This runs counter to President Barack Obama’s assessment on which his policy is based. In all his speeches he emphasises that, instead of being Islamic, the ISIS is “totally un-Islamic” or even “anti-Islamic”, and that it is Al-Qaida's “jayvee team”. However, the author or authors of the Yale report stand by their conclusions and cite General Nagata again to the effect that “we have not defeated the Islamic State's idea and we do not even understand the idea”. Indeed, the Yale report goes so far as to assert that official misreading of the ISIS may have contributed to “significant strategic errors”.

It was only in June last that the Islamic State seized Mosul, the second biggest and important city in Iraq, but now rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr Baghdadi has been its leader since 2010 but only on July 5, 2014, did he emerge from obscurity and declare himself the Caliph of all Muslims. Thereafter he has rarely spoken on camera. But the objectives and programmes of the ISIS are viral on the social media. The report adds that it is wrong to believe that Jihadism is monolithic, if only because the ISIS is vastly different from others. Among the 16 decisions, edicts, and duties it displays on its billboards, licence plates and coins, peace is rejected as a matter of principle, while a “humongous genocide” is a valued objective. The ISIS describes itself as a “harbinger of imminent end of the world and a path to the Day of Judgment”. Everyone is enjoined to adopt “Prophetic Methodology” defined as a return to the seventh century legal environment. In September last the chief spokesman of the Islamic State, Sheikh Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, called upon the Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head, run him over by car, poison him or destroy his crop”.  The Islamic State now awaits the Army of “Rome” whose defeat at Dabiq in Syria “will initiate the countdown for apocalypse”. 

There is a deep and widespread feeling that a mere bombing of the Islamic State to help the Iraqi Shias and Kurds fighting the ISIS Sunnis is not enough. Yet no Western power is prepared to put boots on the ground to join those fighting the Islamic State.  At present the mood of the ISIS's enemies is buoyant because 30,000 Iraqi troops are engaged in “liberating” Tikrik, a major town near Mosul. However, several such interludes have come and gone without anything worthwhile being achieved. There is a difference between political Islam, best represented by Muslim Brotherhood that won an election in Egypt, the most powerful country in the Arab world. But when Egypt's army chief, Gen Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, threw out the Brothers and took over, the happiest country was Saudi Arabia under the late King Abdullah. There is a possibility that the Saudi policy might change under the new King Salman. 

On the other hand, Iran continues to be the strongest supporter of the Shias in Iraq and this factor has added to America's keenness to have a nuclear agreement with it. Washington and Tehran are inching towards such a deal notwithstanding the messy, if powerful, opposition to it that the Republican of the US and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, are jointly offering to the point of insulting President Obama on American soil.

Strangely, the head of Iraqi Parliament's defence committee has confirmed that the US-led coalition's planes airdrop weapons for the ISIS, too, and that the Iraqi army had shot down two British planes that had dropped arms to the Islamists in the Anbar province. If really so, what hope can there be to defeat the Islamic State?