No Need to Oppose US Airstrikes in Iraq

On August 8, the Pentagon announced that the U.S. had launched airstrikes in northern Iraq consisting of two fighters dropping two 500-pound laser-guided bombs. Approximately ten hours prior, U.S. President Barack Obama had issued a statement detailing his authorization for the U.S. military to initiate targeted airstrikes in Iraq as necessary, marking his first time issuing a specific order for airstrikes in his five and a half years as U.S. president.

The story leading up to the airstrikes has been that of extremist organization ISIL aggressively expanding into northern Iraq and taking hold of areas once occupied by Christians, with many of those Christians now in grave peril.

All things considered, Obama has been a cautious president when it comes to war. The limits that he established within his presidential order to only launch "targeted" airstrikes as necessary have achieved the improbable in being well-received on both sides of the aisle. But despite the commencement of airstrikes, many analysts believe that the campaign against ISIL will be limited in scope and does not portend a return to Iraq for the U.S. military. The U.S. has already set its resolve to leave Iraq, and these airstrikes are only a short interlude within the larger exit strategy.

The Iraq War and civil war in Syria have fragmented the Middle East and laced it with a multitude of political fault lines. One might even say that the region looks to be fast spinning out of control and drawing ever nearer to the brink of chaos. The fragile Israeli-Palestinian truce has crumbled, peace is yet a distant prospect in Syria and the dramatic emergence of ISIL has completely ripped the curtain away from the enormous rifts within the Middle East.

However, the pattern shaping U.S. interests in the Middle East remains intact, with three major policy objectives. The first is to control the region's oil, the second is to uphold the security of Israel and the third is to use its grip on Middle Eastern oil to maneuver itself into a commanding position over Western Europe and East Asia. By developing shale gas technology and boosting domestic oil production, the U.S. has significantly reduced its reliance on Middle Eastern oil, and consequently does not fear unrest in the region to the same degree as it had in the past. Furthermore, events in Iraq and Syria have had little effect on the other two major strategic objectives.

The U.S. has thus deleveraged its business in the Middle East, a fact that will henceforth have a strong bearing upon its stance toward problems in the region. For now, the U.S. is still in the transitional phase of its withdrawal. After all, as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government in Iraq was heavily dependent on U.S. support in its rise to power, the U.S. has an obligation to help that administration maintain at least a modicum of operational capability.

The Middle East is faced with the emergence of new and politically inexperienced factions, a process that will be painful and fraught with uncertainty. There will be no other foreign powers willing to fill in for the slackened U.S. hold over the Middle East or wrestle over leadership in the region. Forces internally within the Middle East will see more opportunities to compete, with the likely emergence of several "dark horses" from the contest. ISIL is terribly violent in the eyes of the outside world, but its expansion, which has come like an autumn gale sweeping away the fallen leaves, has shown that the area possesses the necessary political and cultural environment for the organization to grow. Several areas within the Middle East lack the intrinsic capability to check fundamentalism, and the political strongmen who suppressed extremist religious forces in the past have largely been unseated as dictators.

Although petrodollars have built areas of affluence and wealth within the Middle East, those areas still lie on the periphery of the modern civilizations of the world, and regional instability will long remain a riddle for the international community to solve. With the transformed structure of the Middle East, the regional interests and relationships of external powers will change accordingly, and for the time being it is difficult to predict who – between the U.S. and other powers – will get the worst of the deal.

The direct blow to China's interests from the rise of ISIL and beginning of U.S. airstrikes will be limited. Rather more detrimental to China is the fact that our reliance on Middle Eastern oil is on the rise and at a rate that exceeds other nations. This is the strategic vulnerability of China's investment in Middle Eastern affairs.

Of course, it is improbable that the Middle East will devolve entirely into a state of anarchy and burn the bridges that have connected it with the rest of the world for nearly a century. There are many who wish to see a stable Middle East, and it is unlikely that they will allow extremist forces to absorb piece after piece of territory entirely unchecked. There typically comes a global outcry in opposition to U.S. military action abroad, but this case has proven to be an exception to the rule.

The violent pace at which ISIL is expanding has put every major player in the region on its guard. The outside world cannot upturn the soil upon which ISIL has taken root, but the organization must be made to clearly realize the limits of its influence.