June 12, 2017
AMERICANISM VS. rEALISM:
Was the Rise of ISIS Inevitable? (A. TREVOR THRALL and JOHN GLASER, 6/06/17, Cato)
In the latest issue of Survival, Hal Brands and Peter Feaver address an important debate in American foreign policy circles. Was the rise of ISIS inevitable, or was it the result of misguided U.S. policies? Most agree it is the latter, but the dispute gets fraught on the question of whether it was U.S. military interventionism or inaction that deserves the blame. Some say it was the invasion of Iraq that led to the rise of ISIS. Others insist it was Obama's decision to withdraw from Iraq in 2011.Brands and Feaver use counterfactual analysis to assess whether different U.S. policy decisions at four "inflection points" could have nipped the rise of ISIS in the bud. The first of these points was the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. The other three occurred during the Obama administration and include the decision not to press Iraq to allow the United States to leave behind a significant number of U.S. troops, the decision not to intervene aggressively early on in the Syrian civil war, and the decision not to intervene more forcefully to help the government of Iraq defeat ISIS before it took the city of Mosul.The authors take a middle road, arguing that, "the rise of ISIS was indeed an avertable tragedy," but that both restraint and activism share the blame. Had U.S. policymakers not invaded Iraq in 2003, or been more aggressive in Iraq and Syria from 2011-2014, they argue, "ISIS might not have emerged at all." [...]The most problematic issue is their treatment of the invasion of Iraq. By bundling the invasion of Iraq with the other three inflection points, the authors introduce a false sense of equality among them, making it seem as if they were all the same sort of decision, and of equal magnitude. In so doing, they obscure the most critical lesson from not only the invasion of Iraq but from the entire war on terror: the fact that American military intervention creates more problems than it solves, leading to destabilization and the amplification of civil conflicts.
For the Realist, it is always worthwhile to keep even genocidal dictators in place because they provide "quiet." America, on the other hand, exists to destabilize any regime where the citizenry is not allowed self-determination.
On the other hand, Brands and Feaver are nearly correct about the aggression required to prevent ISIS, but that aggression needed to be directed by the Shi'a, starting in 2003.
Posted by Orrin Judd at June 12, 2017 6:58 AM