If America Wants to Defeat the Islamic State, We Must Get the Politics Right by David Ignatius, Washington Post
… The abiding strategic fact about the current war against the Islamic State is that it’s part of a bigger process of reordering the post-Ottoman structure of this part of the world. We don’t know what the outcome will be or what the borders will look like; the United States isn’t even sure what it wants, as the local powers scramble for their selfish interests. But this is the big story we often miss, amid the drone strikes and terrorist bombings.
My trip with Army Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the U.S. Central Command, distilled two themes:
● American military power remains overwhelming. We’re still the arsenal of democracy, to use that hoary phrase, and once the American war machine gets going, it brings devastating firepower on adversaries such as the Islamic State. Now that our military is finally being employed more aggressively against the terrorist group, this enemy is in retreat and, unless we lose patience, it will eventually be shattered.
● American political power, by contrast, is limited and confused. We have conflicting goals. We talk about maintaining unitary states in Syria and Iraq, yet we’ve now created what amounts to a safe zone for Syrian Kurds and their allies in northeast Syria. As Operation Provide Comfort did for Iraqi Kurds 25 years ago, this will encourage an autonomous Kurdish zone. If American strategists have a vision to reconcile these conflicting aims, I don’t see it…
Comments
David Ignatius, in the above article, said: "... the United States isn’t even sure what it wants ..."
Disagree.
What the U.S./the West clearly wants, re: the Greater Middle East and elsewhere, is to transform outlying states and societies more along modern western political, economic and social lines.
The central, underlying problem that the U.S./the West faces, re: this grand political objective, is that:
a. The U.S./the West's "soft power" (the appeal and attractiveness of our way of life, our way of governance, our values, attitudes and beliefs, etc.) is, clearly, not up to the task. Likewise,
b. The U.S./the West's "hard power" (employed to "take up the slack" when one's "soft power" is lacking) is, also, clearly not up to the task.
Explanation:
Our soft and hard power assets -- organized, ordered and oriented to do "defense/contain the spread of communism" in the Old Cold War of yesterday; these such assets have not been adequately re-organized, re-ordered and re-oriented; this, so as to do "offense/advance the spread of market-democracy" in the New/Reverse Cold War of today.
This such dilemma (lack of sufficient soft and hard power assets to get the "advance market-democracy" job done) would appear to have two possible solutions:
a. Abandon or scale back one's such "transformational" goals/objectives/designs. Or
b. Take the necessary steps needed to bring one's "soft power" and "hard power" assets "up-to-speed;" this as per the "offensive"/"transformational" task that has now been set before us.
Note: For those that suggest that, rather, a "lack of strategy" is (a) the key problem and/or (b) the key solution; to these folks, I suggest that -- minus the availability of necessary assets (soft and hard power) -- the ability to devise a viable strategy becomes difficult, if not impossible, to conceive or achieve. Yes?