Baghdadi's Boys: The Next Campaign in our Endless War

By Matthew Hutchings on September 15, 2014

[image courtesy of jihadist website Welayat Salahuddin, posted June 11th 2014]

President Obama gave his ISIS speechon Wednesday. It was measured and cautious, two traits which are the defining characteristics of the Obama Administration, for good and for ill. The coalition for this next foreign adventure will include the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, Poland, Turkey, Canada, and Australia, and the promise from on high is that it will probably outlast the current administration. The plan for the US is to provide airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, battlefield surveillance, and intelligence and logistics support. Local allies on the ground; the Free Syrian Army, the Kurdish Peshmerga, The Jordinians, Iraqi regulars and what Sunni militia can be persuaded to join will do the difficult work of pushing the would-be caliphate builders back to their strongholds of power in the cities they control, and ultimately retaking those cities- not an easy task even if the population of those cities weren’t sympathetic to their occupiers.

He was right to say that the Islamic State is not a state at all, but he was wrong to say, as he did not long ago, that the group was the “junior varsity team”. If anything they are the breakout stars of a game that has had few real successes to it’s name besides Bin Laden and September 11th. In less than a year, Al-Baghdadi turned what was just another upstart Sunni militia among the wide array of upstart Sunni militias into something scary enough to demand the west’s attention. Much has been made of the “original” Al-Qaeda based in Pakistan breaking ties with Baghdadi’s crew. The media have spun it as hype, claiming that they were too gruesome even for Ayman al-Zawahiri, the big boss. But in reality, the break was over the fact that Baghdadi was hitting his stride and making all the other jihadists look bad. They had talked the talk since forever, but he was walking the walk.

After years of changing their name and declaring a global caliphate every time they seized a settlement, ISIS victories suddenly gained momentum around the same time the Syrian Civil War entered a long and bloody stalemate. By seizing a large amount of territory on both sides of the Syrian/Iraqi border they could claim to have de-facto nullified the Sykes-Picot Agreement. This was the treaty in which Britain and France divided up the Ottoman Empire into numerous smaller countries, which did not match the ethnographic and tribal lines of the people that lived there, a classic colonial tactic to keep the population fighting amongst themselves. This tactic worked wonders in colonies from Asia to Africa, and it also cemented a deep hatred of the west that would be passed down for generations. The colonists are always quick to forget, but the colonized never do. They bide their time and count their cattle, waiting for the day when the opportunity to get even presents itself. We have the watches and they have the time.

By smashing that symbolic border, Baghdadi was able to present himself as the rightful leader of the jihad movement, ordering all Muslims to swear allegiance to him personally. Some credit must be given to the man. From all accounts Baghdadi is smart, capable, and has learned from years of skirmishing in Iraq, back when ISIS was part of AQI (Al-Qaeda in Iraq). His personal security detail knows what they are doing and there are precious few details about who he was before he assumed the self-styled mantle of caliph. Alas for the triumphant Bahgdadi, his rule of a Pennsylvania-sized caliphate with one capital in Mosul and one in Raqqa will go down in history as the zenith of his power. His swarming armies of Toyota Hiluxes and their mounted machine guns are great at overrunning Sunni towns the government has already abandoned, but against air power on a flat desert plain they are hopelessly vulnerable. This explains some of the frustration in the voice of that British rapper Jihadi as he monologues on the cowardice of the Americans for bombing ISIS out of the Mosul Dam instead of coming to fight them on the ground, after which he decapitates his second American journalist. He sounded rather like a cranky child who hasn’t yet been told that the world isn’t fair and doesn’t bend for wild ideological fantasies, no matter how potent they are in the mind of the fantasizer. Allah is most merciful, but even he cannot stop a Hellfire missile traveling at Mach 1.3 or hide a long train of vehicles in featureless stretches of dirt and dust.

And what of the United States? Where will this next chapter of conflict fit into our legacy? Quite snugly next to all the others, in fact.

Out of the 238 years that the United States of America has existed as a nation, it has been involved in a war or other armed conflict during 216 of those years. Since the end of the Second World War and the permanent mobilization of the US military and it’s accompanying armaments industry, the US military has created more than 1000 overseas military installations and has been deployed outside of our borders non-stop, right up to the present day. Out of the 69 years between VJ day and today, every single one has seen some kind of US military action on foreign soil. Out of the 13 years between September 11th, 2001 and today, there has been not one day of peace.

This is nothing new. Empire is an American habit as old as the republic itself, although the average American would fervently deny that we have one. This empire exists in the blind spot of willful ignorance left by our national narrative of ourselves as the eternal defenders of human freedom and potential. Perhaps the Global War on Terror was a step too far, too fast. Perhaps people will wake up and see that our professed responsibility to guarantee world security and “our interests” is merely a modern version of the White Man’s Burden that justified colonialism in ages past. Perhaps people will finally grow tired of spending most of their tax money on war, and we will crumble in violent revolt. Perhaps our hegemony will fade relatively quietly and peacefully, as Britain’s did. Perhaps the proponents of hegemony are right, and the United States is destined to dominate the entire human race and shepherd it into some grand future age. Perhaps Pax Americana will last a thousand years. Perhaps the future will be more complicated than anything we can now imagine. Perhaps the next great war in the chain will wipe us all out and the cockroaches will inherit the earth. Who knows.

What is absolutely certain is that the war will go on, and while the tactics and the proclaimed enemies may change, the excuses and the costs will remain much the same. While it is a fairly sure bet that ISIS will not be able to stand against the coalition that is assembled against it, it is also a fairly sure bet that their defeat will not bring final victory.

In an endless war there is always one more campaign to fight.

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