It’s unclear how the U.S. will approach fighting the Islamic extremists in Iraq. After a month of airstrikes, there doesn’t seem to be any indication of a decline in hostilities against the jihadists until the group no longer poses the threat of destabilization in Iraq, despite reports that American forces may have injured or killed the self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
In football terms, we’re going to run up the score until the other team leaves the field in tears.
If the administration is insistent on continuing the fight against the extremists, who now call themselves the Islamic State group, then it needs to set clear political and military objectives to reach, instead of repeating ad nauseum the platitude that it will “degrade and destroy” IS.
For the past month, the United States has been targeting IS fighters, bases and munitions facilities with air strikes and arming the Kurdish Peshmerga to fight on the ground for us. In short, we’re following the game plan of killing them from the air, while the Kurds and Iraqis kill them from the ground.
Last week, President Barack Obama approved a plan that will send 1,500 more American troops to Iraq, and he has asked Congress for an additional $5 billion to fund the effort. This will bring the total number of U.S. boots on the ground to 3,100, despite the president’s reassurance that “American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission.”
Whether the conflict is ours to fight or if it’s even legal is another discussion altogether. The fact is we are engaged with a bunch of fanatics, and if we are insistent on continuing this fight, it should be our goal to see it to completion.
Now that we’ve determined IS has to go, we have to establish our end goal for Iraq. The actions of the administration tell us that it is to eliminate IS through military force, but not much else. One can assume it’s to stabilize the government in Baghdad, but to what end?
The military actions the U.S. takes have to keep our political end goal in mind.
It was Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz, the strategic giant and author of the indispensable military treatise “On War,” who said “the political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.”
Clausewitz is saying that war should never be fought as the end, but rather as the means to a political end.
We thought we had set up a stable government in Iraq when we withdrew U.S. forces in 2011, but what resulted was a power vacuum that the IS filled these past months.
We cannot guarantee our job in Iraq will be done unless we have a realistic plan to preserve the power of the Iraqi government within its own borders. Otherwise, that vacuum will be continuously filled by our adversaries in the region.
Once the extremist group is reduced to nothing more than a bad memory, every effort needs to be made to ensure long-term stability in Iraq. Otherwise, military intervention may become a regular event.
The administration must set clear political goals, and use the appropriate force to see them to completion. We can’t just airstrike our problems away, and Congress can’t give the president carte blanche for military action.
Ryan McGehee is a 21-year-old international studies, political science and history senior from Zachary, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @JRyanMcGehee.