ISIS, Strategy, and the Use of Force
In the wake of the attack on Paris, critics are again voicing displeasure with the Obama administration’s approach towards the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIS). From the left, doves argue that we are neglecting the fight against so-called “root causes” of ISIS’ rage and are not making a serious effort to target its ideology. From the right, hawks demand a more aggressive effort to fight ISIS and view the Obama administration’s strategy as comically weak and inept. Whether the posited problem is too much violence or not enough violence, however, neither group of critics is dealing with the central problem: how violence is to be used to achieve our goals.
Unfortunately for the doves, war is not a genteel debating club. Arguing with ISIS on the Internet is not going to deal with the problem of ISIS’ state and army. However, if doves often minimize or deny the necessity of bloody and messy fighting, hawks fetishize it to the detriment of basic strategic sense. Their belief about how to fight ISIS boils down to a baldfaced plea to “exterminate them” and “leave behind smoking ruins and crying widows.” Yes, war is rooted in killing and destruction. The purpose of armies is to fight and kill. But what separates war from murder is that war is justified as an effort to achieve a normatively desirable political aim.
That aim can be something as lofty as “a better peace.” Or it can be as simple as mere survival. Until we understand and grapple with this, we will continue to struggle to understand how we can protect ourselves from the barbaric savages that call themselves the Islamic state.
ISIS, Strategy, and the Use of Force
It is often said that the war against ISIS is very complex. Recent wars in general, we are told, exhibit “unparalleled complexity.” Is this true? The ISIS problem in particular has innumerable complexities, but they are not new. Yes, the war against ISIS involves combating a fearsome and authoritarian ideology. But this could be said of every political-military struggle America has engaged in since 1941. Proposals to consider the so-called “war of ideas” often neglect how we fought previous ones. The purely military aspect of fighting ISIS involves countering ISIS’ combination of positional warfare and hit-and-run attacks. But the idea that ISIS is somehow the first enemy to utilize both would be news to most veterans of the Vietnam War that fought equally flexible and creative Communist ground forces.
The paradox of the counter-ISIS war, as Clausewitz once said, is that war is very simple but the simple also grows more difficult and complex the closer one examines the details. The struggle to defeat ISIS is no exception to this maxim. All strategy amounts to a belief about how to use force to achieve a desired goal. In strategy there are several primary uses of force. Force can be used to compel an adversary to modify their behavior or deter them from fighting. Force can be used to destroy an adversary’s capability to fight. And force can be used to eliminate the opponent as a political entity, as the US did when it overthrew Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government in 2003.
The current strategy that the administration is using is a combination of airstrikes and indirect support to local field armies. The policy it is pursuing seems to be cutting ISIS down to size in the hope it can pass off the problem to its successor. Even if the administration wanted to escalate, its hands are tied. The public is unhappy with the administration’s war against ISIS, but there is little to no appetite for direct US involvement. The Paris attacks could lead to a more aggressive effort, but regardless there is scant evidence that it has done much to change public views right now.
There are signs that the administration’s preferred option is working. ISIS has lost 25% of its territory since the summer. However, there are other signs that the strategy has some serious pitfalls. Kurdish forces, for example, are a major US ally in the fight against ISIS. But their desire to fight ISIS is limited. They currently fight ISIS in the service of a narrower Kurdish quest for political autonomy. This problem highlights the inconvenient fact that success in the counter-ISIS war requires coordinating and motivating a cobbled-together coalition that sometimes views each other — not ISIS — as the enemy.
Regardless of what we believe about the Obama administration’s admittedly inept decision-making and abject refusal to take responsibility for its failures, even the best criticism of the administration’s plan of action is incomplete without proposing a better option. It is not, for sure, the responsibility of the critic to propose a better solution. But if they do not, defenders of the Obama administration will inevitably say that critics have only demonstrated the flaws of the current strategy. Have many critics suggested better alternatives? A quick look at both dovish and hawkish alternatives to the administration’s policy and strategy suggests otherwise.
Why We Need a War on the “War of Ideas”
As J.M. Berger recently noted, some critics of the current counter-ISIS effort believe we should invest more in the “war of ideas.” Counter ISIS’ ideology, the argument goes, and their pool of recruits will dry up. Target their appeal to disaffected communities and they won’t be able to operate. These well-meaning critics’ arguments, however, are disconnected from both political and military realities.
First, the idea that all of the variegated governments from Europe to the Middle East are both willing and capable of resolving all of the overlapping grievances and motivations that might possibly cause a disaffected youth to join ISIS is laughable. Despite the United States’ own ostensible commitment to fighting ISIS, President Obama himself cannot unilaterally stop other American political figures from broadcasting Islamophobic messages that critics believe aid ISIS recruiting.
Furthermore, critics that believe in the “war of ideas” want to have it both ways. ISIS is anathema to Islam, they say, suggesting that it is an alien virus that any true Muslim’s immune system will reject. On the other hand, unless governments redress so-called “root causes” and tightly control any and all public messaging about Islam, ISIS will reap a recruiting windfall. It is difficult to believe that someone can both see ISIS as totally opposed to their value system and somehow simultaneously be vulnerable to ISIS recruiting at the same time.
As Shadi Hamid argued, this confusion is part and parcel of the ways in which Western analysts of the ISIS conflict engage in amateurish theology and sociological analysis. Nonetheless, what ISIS believes themselves to be is ultimately more important than the justification or coherency of those beliefs. ISIS could kill in the name of Cthulhu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the problem would still be the same — — ISIS is killing.
Lastly, even if we somehow addressed all of the issues that motivate ISIS recruits, ISIS would still have a state and an army of battle-hardened killers. Fussing over how to fight ISIS on the Internet is merely a convenient dodge that helps us avoid pondering how to fight and kill them on the ground (or help other people do it for us).
Harry Potter and the Horrible Hawks
It is not as if hawkish critics of the ISIS struggle have any better ideas. One recent narrative about how we defeat ISIS envisions both a ghoulish and indiscriminate attack on ISIS’ capitol of Raqqa and the politically infeasible idea that we will raise taxes and cut social entitlements to do it. Another author argues that we should forcibly conscript Syrian refugees and send them back to fight in the very place they ran away from. Both of these ideas combine a twisted moral compass with a basic disregard for military practicality.
Wiping Raqqa off the face of the Earth and other macho fantasies totally disregard the ethical dictates of both international humanitarian law as well as basic American military codes of conduct. Sending refugees back home to fight is similarly odious. Aside from their moral turpitude, neither argument gives much insight about how to accomplish the most basic task of strategy: use military force to accomplish political ends.
No one has defined the political goal of the counter-ISIS campaign as nuking Syria from orbit. Likewise, forcibly conscripting refugees and sending them back to fight against their will is also a strategic nonstarter. We are only in the counter-ISIS fight because the Iraqi army we trained collapsed rather than fight back against ISIS. If a professional military force could melt away so easily, one can only wonder what will happen when a bunch of refugees forced to fight take the field.
The logical problems with both ideas, however, are not unique. Hawks can only offer emotive pleas for blood, not propose serious solutions. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, for example, called on the US to “bomb the absolute stink” out of ISIS and “sanction and isolate” any nation that refuses to participate in the aforementioned stink-bombing crusade. Donald Trump thinks that we should “bomb the hell out of ISIS.”
Given American military might, if simply deploying a fleet of bombers to reduce Raqqa to ruin was a viable option, why has the US not done so already? Hawks may believe that a weak and vacillating Obama is to blame, but Senator John McCain — a man who once jokingly sang about bombing Iran — supports a more indirect strategy.
Conclusion
Doves have an impossible dream of somehow utterly removing ISIS’ ideological appeal and an aversion to actually fighting and killing ISIS on the ground. Hawks want to bomb and invade ISIS but cannot articulate a coherent conception of how it would be done. Neither group of critics is grappling with the primary problem at hand: how to use force to achieve strategic aims.
Despite what we have been told, the conflict against ISIS is not really terribly complex, if “complexity” means that we cannot understand the problem. Unless critics believe that ISIS is an Oxford debating society, any solution will inevitably involve the use of force. Doves either underplay the use of force or deny its utility altogether. Hawks fetishize it but lack the instrumentally rational mindset necessary to properly apply it against ISIS.
Force is not something to be avoided; we must either use it ourselves or find someone to deploy it for us if we hope to make ourselves more secure. However, force is also not something used for its own sake. It is a tool used to achieve a desired goal. Until critics get more serious about strategy and the use of force, they will not provide serious alternatives to the administration’s current approach.
