There are some surprising people who want to see US bombs dropping on Iraq again. Of course, it is no surprise at all to see the coalescence of a pro-war sentiment among US supporters in the political class.
Yet, beyond the Westminster spear-carriers for US empire, there is a muted, but nonetheless real sentiment among parts of the left. It runs something like this: “I marched against the war on Iraq, I detest US domination, but in this case I have no problem with American airstrikes.”
Why? The answer is the Islamic State. The Islamic State, previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, goes to your head and gets under your skin; it leaves you feeling infested. Back in the days when one did not know much about the jihadis carrying out beheadings, it was possible to think that they were just — as British Prime Minister David Cameron has denounced them — “monsters,” savages, beasts. Or, if one were on the anti-war left, one could simply point out that there was, after all, a war on. A brutal occupation produces a brutal insurgency: case closed.
Illustration: Mountain People
However, that argument was always vulgar, and it would be even more vulgar now to say that the Islamic State’s (IS) success can be explained by reference to an occupation that no longer persists.
Whereas the jihadi ultras of the “war on terror” era were an unpopular, marginalized minority within the Iraqi resistance, always opposed by the mainstream of the Sunni Arab insurgency, IS succeeds because of the support it enjoys within much of the population it seeks to rule. And this support, it should be noted, is gained on the basis of vicious sectarianism. The most depressing aspect of IS’ spread is the alacrity with which local people join them and begin killing ethnic and religious others who, though minorities locally, are blamed for the persecution of Sunni Arabs in the region.
The unutterable, ostentatious horror of IS’ actions — the latest of which is the beheading of British aid worker David Haines — and the way in which it actively solicits disgust, now has to be reconciled with the knowledge that these combatants are educated and tech-savvy and enjoy a popular base. The mainstream press does not offer much help in interpreting this.
Take the character who has been referred to as “jihadi John,” the man supposedly behind a number of the killings. The immediate dilemma faced by the anglophone press is explaining how a British person “from a good area” could be tempted to participate in such grim spectacles. The desperate search for motives, sifting hopelessly through his rap lyrics for clues, is indicative of how misplaced this approach is.
Nor is it just motive that we struggle to explain; it is their astonishing success. Just when did the jihadis get so good? It would be convenient if it were just a matter of firepower. For example, if it were true, as some claim, that the US was arming IS in Syria. However, while there is evidence of some limited US arms making their way to sections of the Syrian opposition hostile to IS, there is none of the US arming Isis.
Of course, in the absence of explanation either of motive or virtuosity, we are very quick to believe anything we hear. For example, the story of 40,000 Iraqis stranded and starving on a mountain — invoked by supporters of intervention — turned out to be exaggerated. The IS siege, far from requiring the flexing of US muscle, was broken by Kurdish peshmerga fighters.
Given the paucity of political explanations for IS’ racing success, US or British bombs seem to offer a tempting short cut. This is what has always given “humanitarian intervention” its compelling ideological power: While we as citizens watch in horror, we know that there are powerful people in the world who could stop this without breaking sweat.
Such a stance, of course, involves taking great risks with the lives of other people one is in no position to consult, by urging on a military and political authority over which we have only minor checks. Worse, the idea that there are simple military solutions to grave humanitarian crises is inherently naive, and therefore creates the potential for even the best-intentioned interventions to go horribly wrong.
It is easy to think that if IS members were identified and vaporized, the murder would end. However, IS would be nowhere if it was not for the generalized rejection by Sunni Iraqis of the sectarian political authority in Baghdad. This is, after all, a state that was built by the US occupiers on the basis of the more sectarian Shia religious parties and their death squads. Trained and deployed by the US, they ended up being worse torturers than former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
The promise that the administration of then-US president George W. Bush made to Sunni groups who joined the counterinsurgency in the context of the “surge” was that their interests would no longer be excluded. That promise was not fulfilled and Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki’s repression of Sunni Arabs is now driving an insurgency against his rule, from which IS is gaining.
Air strikes can destroy bodies, but they cannot destroy political differences. Nor would a renewed occupation solve the problem. The formerly occupying coalition are in no position — even if they had the ability — to replace the administration with something plural and democratic. There simply are no shortcuts: The illusion that there are, or could be, is one of the reasons people were led to war in Iraq in 2003.
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