Iraq Is Breaking under Obama’s Lack of Prospects

Only an hour after the appointment was announced, the president stepped before journalists at the White House on Thursday afternoon. Right up until the last minute, Barack Obama had been leading internal and external discussions before announcing America’s initial reactions to the rise of the radical Sunni ISIL troops within northern Iraq.

The U.S. will “send up to 300 military advisers into Iraq,” Obama said. However, the president repeated his assurance that Washington will not deploy any ground troops: “American forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq.” The president, who is receiving increasing criticism from the Republicans due to his current passivity, spoke of a “small number” of advisers, although there was speculation about the deployment of 100 specialist forces before his statement.

The deployment is likely to involve members of the Green Berets and the Navy Seals as well as Army Rangers. Furthermore, Obama announced additional security measures for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which is the largest in the world with 4,500 personnel and security forces. He also confirmed reports that they had started to evacuate some employees. The second step involves intensifying surveillance and reconnaissance measures for the ISIL advance, which will advise the U.S. on “how we might […] counter this threat.”

Is There Any Chance that Iraq Can Be Saved?

The 300 advisers are to be placed in the joint operations center in Baghdad on the side of the Iraqi security forces. Here they are working on the exchange of information and intelligence findings, as well as providing additional training for the Iraqi military. Only a few days ago, the White House announced the deployment of 275 soldiers whose key objective would be to secure the embassy in Baghdad. This amounts to nearly 600 soldiers who are returning to a country in which almost 4,500 military personnel were lost between 2003 and 2011. Exit from the Iraq War, which was initiated by his predecessor George W. Bush in 2003, was one of Obama’s most important campaign promises in 2008.

A fourth measure is to identify potential targets for military action. The key objectives remain, however, to appeal to Iraqi politicians in order to overcome their religious prejudices and to find a unified stance. In answer to the question from a journalist as to whether the U.S. still trusts the pro-Shiite policies of the heavily criticized Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the president responded with a diplomatic recommendation. “It’s not the place for the United States to choose Iraq’s leaders,” he said. However, it’s no “secret that, right now […], there [are] deep divisions between Sunni, Shia and Kurdish leaders. And as long as those deep divisions continue or worsen, it’s going to be very hard for an Iraqi central government to direct an Iraqi military to deal with these threats.”

The next logical question was not asked of the president — namely, does Obama believe that Iraq, which was founded in 1920 from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire through the merger of three provinces, can survive as a unified national state? Again, Obama emphasized the responsibility of the neighboring countries and Iran in particular.

The U.S. has had significant disagreements with Iran. “What’s happened in Syria […] is the result of Iran,” the president said, referring to Tehran’s support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war, in which Assad’s radical forces have prevailed over the insurgents. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant already existed during the Iraqi resistance against the U.S. invasion in 2003. However, they first started to develop their current strength during the Syrian civil war.

Six days earlier, at an appearance in the South Garden in the White House, Obama assured once more that he would not be sending ground troops back into Iraq. Instead, he instructed his security team to “prepare me a number of other options, with which we can support the Iraqi security forces, and I will consider these options over the next few days.”*

The US Wants To Save Face

The deployment of advisers is particularly encouraging to Obama and the Pentagon. The other option was the use of drones or air strikes against ISIL targets, and this is considered to be less promising and too risky. On Wednesday, Chief of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey said to a Senate committee that appropriate objectives could be difficult to identify because Sunni extremists have started to mix with the local population in the conquered regions north of Baghdad.

Experts confirm this concern by declaring that there are no ISIL ranks or military convoys and no uniformity in their troops. American military vehicles, which have been seized from the Iraqi army — an army that provided very little protection — are being transported into the inner cities and villages. An attack on such targets would endanger the lives of civilians.

Furthermore, the military experts in Washington know that the U.S. still has a bad image in Iraq. This applies especially to the regions where Sunnis, who represented the ruling class of the country in the days of Saddam Hussein, currently live. They lost their privileges when the dictator fell, and now they see themselves as marginalized due to al-Maliki’s policies, which are skewed in favor of Shiites. The result: In recent days, many supporters of Saddam’s secular Baath Party joined the supposedly radical ISIL.

This is the reason that Washington is now searching for “measures without an American face,”* in which other countries in the region can play a key role. This includes Iran, with whom the U.S.A has not had any diplomatic relations since 1979. For many years, the U.S., China, Russia, France, Great Britain and Germany have been working with Iran in order to bring an end to what is seen as a militarily motivated nuclear program in Tehran. Last year, there was progress in this area but still no crucial breakthrough in the areas that matter.

Obama Finds Himself in an Awkward Predicament

ISIL’s advancement was already evident last year, but Washington has so far remained passive. Obama’s problem in the face of this challenge is that, on the one hand, he is criticized by the Republicans for not pulling the remaining troops out of Iraq at the end of 2011 and for failing to negotiate the deployment of residual troops under acceptable terms with Baghdad. On the other hand, with the deployment of these Special Forces the president is now being accused of initiating the first step towards sending troops back to Iraq, which Bush ordered the Army to attack in 2003 due to the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction.

However, a bigger problem lies in the lack of acceptable plans for a long-term or at least medium-term prospect. Even if it would be possible to withstand the advancement of ISIL, Iraq will still continue to be divided between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. The fact that this trend could be reversed in the short-term by appealing to Iraqi politicians’ common sense can hardly be expected by observers in Washington. In the U.S., the opinion that Iraq could be even further fragmented in the future, if it even manages to hold together at all, is spreading. Iraq, like Syria, could lose its inner support under the collapse of the Shiite-Sunni conflict and lengthen the alarming list of defeats by “failed states.”

* Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.