Obama's Isis strategy: The least worst option

Strategies are not blueprints. They are not supposed to be full of operational detail and way-points. They represent an orientation; a commitment to do something or do something differently. That is what President Obama gave the US public earlier this week. His speech followed a couple of weeks of intensive quiet diplomacy before and after the NATO Summit to make sure that there was broad domestic and foreign support for his announcements. There was a determination to avoid the glaring errors of the Syria vote this time last year and to get it right by assembling a coalition of supporters before any statement was made. In the domestic arena Republicans may grit their teeth but they cannot oppose his military action with the mid-term elections approaching and on the back on the beheading videos that have galvanised the nation. At the international level Secretary of State John Kerry has shuttled across the Middle East yet again and was in Jeddah on the eve of the speech explaining the strategy to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey and Jordan, among others. Indeed King Abdullah II of Jordan was making it pretty plain at the NATO Summit last week that if the international community did not mobilise against Isis then Jordan would go it alone, since he calculated that the risks of inactivity were greater than the risk of military action for Jordan. President Obama is not acting alone. He is putting the US where is often prefers to be in these cases; supplying the lead and the muscle to a group of allies and friends who explicitly want it.

Will it work? The action he proposes is certainly legal enough. A new Iranian government is requesting help and the Arab League this week added its voice to a consensus for action. Syria is in the midst of a civil war and is effectively ungoverned. The Assad regime largely lacks legitimacy. Isis is avowedly genocidal, tyrannical and trumpets its contempt for all existing domestic and international law. Attacking Isis in Syria—particularly in Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor—will be both necessary and legally justifiable even under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter with or without a Security Council resolution. There is a mainstream of political support in the region that will make the legal arguments stick.

Operational success, however, will be a different matter. Airstrikes will certainly help "degrade" Isis in the President’s words but it can only be "destroyed" by people on the ground. And for that the US will rely initially on the Kurdish Peshmerga guerrillas and on the small but very effective Syrian Kurdish fighters alongside some of the reforming Free Syrian Army. Ultimately, it will have to rely on the numbers that only the Iraqi Army can provide and after Maliki’s disastrous policy of reorganising the army the US left him to the point where they were totally incapable of revolution, but also incapable of fighting anyone, it will take some time to effect the reorganisation that is now required.

So the strategy is to buy time, to reverse the perception of success Isis has created, build up the forces in Iraq and Syria that will defeat it on the ground, and make the most of the natural weaknesses of Isis as they bully the Syrian tribal leaders who initially accepted them with their hard-line Wahabist demands. Like al-Zarqawi ’s al-Qaeda-Iraq almost 10 years ago, the Isis brand of Islamo-fascism alienates the Sunni tribes on which they rely to "occupy" the ground their fast-moving but thin forces managed to take so effectively. In such a volatile situation this will not emerge as the most consistent strategy the US has ever produced but that does not mean it will not work. It just means that it will likely have many unintended consequences, as all strategies do, and that it is based on the realisation that doing nothing at this juncture would be worse. Isis have money, publicity, and at least the appearance of success. Given a few months more in a permissive environment Isis could have the reality of success, not just the appearance. The international community does not have months to play with but rather weeks only to prevent that happening. This is why the US is moving now.