New Issue of Infinity Journal!
[Mark Safranski / “zen“]
Our friends at Infinity Journal have the latest edition out today. For newer readers, Infinity is a peer review e-zine on strategy that has published some of the more eminent figures in strategic studies, military history and security studies, new rising young scholars, an international set of active duty and retired military officers and serious students of war. The current issue boasts such topics as Clausewitzian theory, preventive war, the limits of air power and Chinese strategic thinking ( Registration is required but is always free).
I would however like to draw your attention specifically to their featured exclusive:
Does the U.S.’s War on the Islamic State Make Sense?
by Ron Tira
….The regional competition is multilateral[vii], with quite a large number of participants: global powers, regional powers and sub-state actors. Of them, the most competent challenges to the U.S. and its traditional regional allies come from Iran, its sub-state Shiite proxies and from Russia.
Iran is a serious competitor that poses the most severe threat to Saudi Arabia, the Gulf principalities and Israel. Iran possesses nuclear capabilities and ambitions, a robust ballistic missile apparatus, and long, subversive tentacles. Its regional footprint is also growing, from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, to Gaza, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s eastern provinces. Hezbollah is armed with more high-trajectory weapons than most NATO allies – combined, with high-impact shore-to-sea/shore missiles, cruise missiles, UAVs and cutting-edge surface-to-air missiles. Hezbollah is no longer a solely-Lebanese actor, and its footprint can be found throughout the Shiite-Sunni frontline. Iran and Hezbollah are ambitious, aggressive and skillful in orchestrating ends, ways and means. In contrast, IS’s objectives are unattainable and it is unable to orchestrate ends, ways and means[viii]. Hence, there is no comparison between the risk posed to America’s traditional regional allies by Iran and Hezbollah and the one posed by IS’s proverbial Toyota hordes.
Russia is pursuing an aggressive Middle Eastern policy[ix], aimed at gaining regional ground at the expense of the U.S. as well as accruing chips for its global game. There is no comparison between the risks posed to American interests by Russia’s new assertive posture – running in an arch from the Baltics, through Crimea, the eastern Mediterranean and Syria’s Tartus harbor – and the risks posed by IS’s street fighting in Syria’s battered Sunni heartland.
In fact, IS #1 and other extreme Sunni Jihadist organizations are a primary balancer of Iran and its proxies. IS and its ilk stand between Iran and its hegemony bid in the Sunni parts of Iraq. They also stand between Iran and Russia and their ambitions in Syria. IS pins Iran and Hezbollah down to the quicksand, and increases their expenditure in blood and treasure. IS both attrits Iran and Hezbollah as well as keeps them busy from pursuing other interests, with potentially graver consequences.
Furthermore, the fact that the U.S. has surprisingly prioritized the fight against IS ahead of containing the Russians[x], resulted in the need or at least desire to collaborate with the Russians against IS. It is this order of priorities set voluntarily by the U.S. that made Russia so artificially important, and unnecessarily given the Kremlin powerful global cards….
Read the rest here.
October 25th, 2016 at 4:57 pm
“setting up safe havens for refugees within Syria and Iraq, refugee enclaves in neighboring countries, as well as European law enforcement operations in international waters and at Europe’s borders”
.
Refugee camps and safe havens will quickly be overrun by ISIS unless they’re defeated. Look at Palestinian camps in Jordan and Lebanon in the 70s to see that those are always prime areas for lawlessness and extremism to flourish because of the misplaced intentions of the so-called International Community.
The author missed (or ignores) the fact that ISIS isn’t contained and isn’t operating independent of other actors. They receive strategic and operational direction from former Ba’athist officers (themselves allowed to “squirt” away), they receive material assistance from Turkey and Qatar, and they receive theological direction from Saudi Arabia. Comparing them to the defeated secular Arab dictators is not a good analogy. Those regimes, distasteful as they were, stabilized the region by keeping warring cultures separated (if only temporarily). Saddam’s downfall was trying to take advantage of the strategic vacuum of the end of the Cold War and expand. ISIS, also expanding in the vacuum of a worldwide American retreat, is a cancer that destabilizes the region by trying to destroy cultures.
If left unchecked, there’s no reason to believe ISIS can’t become a Sunni version of Hezbollah, with no ability for the kind of strategic restraint or discretion, to use your term, that Hezbollah exercises with Israel. There’s no reason to think its benefactors won’t absorb their poisonous nature, if they haven’t already, to project it further outside the region.
ISIS delenda est. They must be annihilated.
October 25th, 2016 at 6:40 pm
I think Tira’s emphasis on balancing ISIS threats against Hezbollah/Iran threats is a product of the limited strategic options of the IDF gravitating to the least bad option from an Israeli security perspective. The US strategic calculus starts without an existential or potentially existential variable; we have a wider set of potential options and we could, hypothetically, decide crushing Hezbollah/Assad is more useful a strategic outcome than crushing ISIS. Or we could decide the exact reverse. Or we could decide to do very little. We have the luxury of rationalizing any of these courses of action. That said, we don’t because making strategic choices carries a cost in political capital so our default is to not choose or hedge just enough tactically as the moment requires. This is of course is not restraint per se; it’s nonsensically ineffective on the ground but if the “real conflict” is domestic politics, our incoherence makes perfect sense. it suits career interests in DC politics well.
October 25th, 2016 at 8:39 pm
It may be overly-presumptuous of me to interpret what’s best when I don’t have rockets pointed into my livingroom. However, I believe Israel’s biggest threat comes from the south. If ISIS infiltrates Egypt’s military or allies with Hamas, it will be worse than the game theories playing out in the north.