There Are Other Options
War, in short, is a terrible option.
But the fact remains that IS is a determined and brutal threat to millions of people on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian border (and beyond, if you believe the ambitions expressed in some of its more fanciful maps). And given IS’s origins in Al Qaeda in Iraq—a group born and nourished in the chaotic years following the 2003 US invasion—the United States bears no small share of responsibility for the current state of affairs. That means Washington should shoulder some of the responsibility for fixing it.
There’s plenty that the United States can do to weaken IS on the more technocratic front. To start, it can freeze the bank accounts of IS’s funders, negotiate partnerships with villages where oil pipelines run to cut IS’s oil revenues and work with partners in Europe and Turkey to stem the flow of Western fighters into the conflict. The United States should also dramatically increase its support for the UN’s badly underfunded humanitarian assistance programs in Syria, and send support to neighboring countries like Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey that have absorbed millions of refugees.
More fundamentally, the White House must recognize that IS flourishes not simply because of its resources—and much less on account of its ideological appeal—but because of political breakdown on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian border.
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The answer, then, is political. But the current campaign of airstrikes and arms peddling threatens to deepen the political crises in Iraq and Syria, not resolve them. Instead, the Obama administration should work to ameliorate political conditions on each side of the border.
In Syria, it should convene rebel groups, the regime, civil society activists and regional players like Turkey, Iran, Russia and the Gulf States to restart negotiations for a political solution to the war. If there’s a silver lining to these latest airstrikes, it’s that the administration can use them as leverage to get Assad and the rebels to the table.
In Iraq, it should condition all further assistance on the development of a more inclusive political order that protects the country’s minorities—not just smaller groups threatened by IS like Christians, Turkmen and Yazidis, but also the country’s millions of Sunnis. The administration could also link its nuclear negotiations with Iran to the political crisis in Iraq—quietly exploring, for example, an agreement to allow Iran to enrich more uranium for peaceful nuclear power generation in exchange for a pledge from Tehran to rein in the Iranian-backed militias most likely to sow sectarian discord in Iraq.
These are tall orders, and they’re unlikely to see quick results even if pursued aggressively. But given the horrendous legacy of US wars in the region—and not to mention America’s failure to destroy even a single terrorist group after over a decade of continuous military mobilization—diplomacy is a much better option than the guaranteed failure we’re currently embarked on.
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