Kenneth M. Pollack's Blog, page 3

The refugee crisis won’t end until the civil wars do

There is no question that the United States and countless other governments in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East can be doing much more to manage the refugee crisis stemming from the Syrian civil war. Building more and better camps. Providing more and better food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies. Establishing more and better security for camps and other refugee communities. Simply admitting more refugees, in both the border states and those far away. These and other steps would do much to alleviate the plight of so many fleeing the horrors of civil war in Syria.

They are all things that we can and should undertake.

But, there are some important “buts” to consider as well. First, while Syria is the worst part by far, it is still only part of the regional refugee crisis. Almost 12 million Syrians have been displaced internally or externally, but so too have 4.2 million Iraqis, 2.2 million Yemenis, and at least 1 million Libyans by their own civil wars. And they join roughly 5 million Palestinians and 4 million Sudanese displaced by earlier conflicts.

Second, even if the international community did 10 times as much to help Syrian (and other Middle Eastern) refugees as it is doing now, it would only be a drop in the bucket. Whether the United States takes in 8,000 or 80,000 refugees, it barely dents the millions. What’s more, as long as these civil wars burn on, they will generate more and more refugees. Even if we somehow found a way to take in all 4 million Syrians who have fled so far, what do we do with the millions more who are likely to flee in the next 5 years?

[A]s long as these civil wars burn on, they will generate more and more refugees.

And that’s not to mention the 400,000 who have already died in Syria since 2011, and the hundreds of thousands more who may die in the next five years of fighting there if the war is allowed to rage on.

If we really want to address the humanitarian crisis being created by the Syrian civil war and stop its dangerous spillover onto Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Europe, the only way to do so in a meaningful fashion is to end the civil war there. 

The problem here is the myth that has taken root that it is not possible for one country to end a civil war in another country. It is. We have done it before—in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and (unfortunately only temporarily) in Iraq. Others have done it in East Timor, Cambodia, Lebanon, and elsewhere. As I have written with the great scholar of civil wars, Barbara Walter, it is entirely possible to lay out a strategy that would allow the United States and its allies to bring a negotiated end to the civil war in Syria (and Iraq, Libya, and possibly Yemen as well). 

Of course, doing so will not be quick, easy, or cheap but it does not have to be as ruinously expensive as our Iraq fiasco or as endless as our Afghan fiasco. Indeed, both of those conflicts as they have because the United States has steadfastly refused to apply the lessons of prior civil wars to these conflicts. Unfortunately, we are determinedly repeating the same mistake in Syria, refusing to adopt the one course of action that history has demonstrated can work.

Since 2011, repeatedly what American strategy toward the Syrian civil war would look like based on the historical evidence from 150 civil wars over the past century. I have been helped enormously by the work of a community of scholars on civil wars that for several decades—beginning long before 9/11—has been gleaning this history for its lessons. 

[C]ivil wars don’t admit themselves of half-measures.

One of the most important lessons of this scholarship is that civil wars don’t admit themselves of half-measures. There is one approach that third parties have used to end a civil war by peaceful negotiation that has worked not only to end conflicts, but to create the circumstances in which it is less likely that the civil war will flare up again in a few years, as is too often the case otherwise. In the case of Syria, if the West does not want to intervene and occupy the country as we did in Iraq and Bosnia, then is to build a (reasonably) capable, conventionally-armed and organized, new Syrian opposition army. When backed by U.S. air power, advisors, intelligence, and logistical support, such a force could defeat Da’esh (the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State), the Nusra Front and all other potential rivals, including the Assad regime if it comes to that, and secure the territory it conquers to enable a new bottom-up political process to take hold. 

It sounds hard, and it won’t be easy, but it is far from impossible, and the history of civil wars suggests that it is the only strategy that can actually work. I fear that if we don’t do now what will be hard but can work, then five years from now we will be holding yet another conference on the Syrian refugee crisis, because it will have gotten so bad that managing it will be beyond any policy. 

Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack



             

Iraq Situation Report, Part III: Kurdistan

Editors’ Note: Brookings senior fellow traveled to Iraq from March 9 to March 19 with Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. They had extensive meetings in Baghdad, Sulaymaniyyah, and Irbil with Iraqi, Kurdish, American, and British officials. This is the third and final installment of a survey on the situation in Iraq. (Read and .)

Kurdish military fortunes improving

Developments within the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) are every bit as complicated as those in Baghdad. In the military realm, the Peshmerga are enjoying a similar improvement to the Iraqis in their fortunes. Da’esh attacks are now regularly beaten back with heavy losses and the Kurds are very comfortable holding their positions as long as they have American fire support. Limited Kurdish offensives have also been increasingly successful, again as long as they have American air and Special Operations Forces (SOF) support, command and control, and other assistance. As with the Iraqis, the Peshmerga cannot match first-world military capabilities, but their effectiveness is improving. 

The Peshmerga have not availed themselves of training from the U.S.-led coalition to counter Da’esh to the same extent that the Iraqis have, but the Kurds can boast that at least their party-specific formations have shown higher levels of morale and unit cohesion than Iraqi formations. (The coalition has made clear that it will only train integrated formations of Peshmerga so as not be training one party’s militia to potentially fight the other.) The Kurds continue to complain that Baghdad is blocking weapons from reaching them, but U.S. officials insist that no such diversions are taking place and the Kurds are getting everything they have been promised, even if it is not what the Kurds want (and, I would argue, justifiably need).

Indeed, the Kurds still have too few Milan anti-tank guided missile launchers, too few Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, too little artillery or other armored vehicles, given the size of the front they are defending and the ability of Da’esh to employ large, armored suicide-bomb vehicles. This leaves the Peshmerga heavily dependent on coalition air power, which is fine as long as that is available. So far, it consistently has been, but the looming Mosul offensive will be highly complex and demanding, and there is some chance that the situation could get out of hand. Providing the Kurds with additional heavy weapons would help to mitigate this risk, even if it is slight.

Political paralysis, Kurdish style 

As in the south, the problems lie overwhelmingly in the political and economic realms. Kurdish politics is fragmenting in a mirror image of Iraq’s splintering polity. The strong, working relationship forged by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in the aftermath of their 1996 civil war seems in danger of breaking down again. Many PUK members openly delight in the KDP’s misfortunes and side with the Gorran (or Movement for Change) party in opposition to the KDP on many critical issues. The KDP and the Gorran party are locked in an acrimonious death grip, with Gorran accusing the KDP of ruling illegally and dictatorially, and the KDP accusing Gorran of being nothing but spoilers with no practical plan of action. 

Kurdish politics is fragmenting in a mirror image of Iraq’s splintering polity.

The rupture that occurred last fall (when Gorran party members attacked several KDP party facilities and the KDP blocked the Gorran speaker of parliament from entering Irbil) still has not been healed. Pragmatic elements on all sides are looking for ways forward, and some reasonable plans have emerged, but it has been distressingly difficult to see them enacted. That is especially true because Gorran chief Nawshirwan Mustafa is said to be in self-imposed exile in London (“pouting” was the word one senior Kurdish official used), refusing to see anyone or do anything. In his absence, Gorran party officials cannot unite around one course of action and accept the overtures from the KDP, including President Masoud Barzani. 

In addition, the splits within each party are also becoming acute. Within the KDP, two rival camps continue to battle for the soul of the party. On the one hand are those who favor a rapid move toward independence. They believe that Turkey will support it and that it will resolve most or all of Kurdistan’s problems by enabling the new Kurdish state to sell oil at the international rate, issue debt, buy weapons directly, and control its own monetary policy. This group is opposed by a rival that worries that independence will make the KRG too dependent on Turkey and that while a Kurdish state will have the legal authority to do all of those things, it won’t be able to do so as a practical matter. Instead, they favor a more deliberate process of moving toward independence in 5 to 10 years, during which time bilateral negotiations could work out thorny issues like the status of Kirkuk and the border between Iraq and a new Kurdish state. In the interim, this group believes it important for the Kurds to reconcile with Baghdad, if only to alleviate their financial circumstances.

For its part, the PUK has not yet settled on a stable, effective answer to the problem of the loss of party founder (and President of Iraq) Jalal Talabani to illness. Talabani’s wife, Hero Ibrahim Ahmed (or Hero Khan), former KRG Prime Minister Barham Salih, KRG Vice President Khosrat Rasul Ali, and other senior PUK leaders are all jockeying for power—either to succeed Talabani as undisputed leader of the PUK, or else to gain ascendancy in a power-sharing arrangement among them. At present, Hero Khan appears to be slowly gaining the upper hand, but it is a tedious process and she is not yet able (or willing, her critics claim) to exercise decisive leadership. That leaves the PUK able to cause problems for the KDP, but unable to advance a coherent agenda of its own, which is frustrating to both parties. 

I found it striking how stuck the Kurds are, and how even the best and brightest among them do not have a clear—or clearly plausible—plan for extricating themselves from the political deadlock. It is going to take a lot of hard bargaining, a considerable willingness to overlook past grievances, and a certain amount of luck to do so.

Oil and independence

Between the internal divisions and the economic crisis, many senior Kurdish officials indicated that they think it unlikely that the Kurds would declare independence this year. In fact, a considerable number averred that it was unlikely that they could even hold a proposed referendum on independence, which the KRG had hoped to conduct this fall, around the time of the U.S. elections. Those who doubt that the KRG will be able to do so uniformly argue that a referendum would be too costly for the cash-strapped KRG. Some also suggested that given the extent of the divisions and feuds among the Kurds, a putative referendum on independence could turn into an actual referendum on the KDP’s leadership, which could prove both disastrous for the cause of Kurdish independence and dangerous to the stability of Kurdistan.

Consequently, the Kurds may opt for a new oil deal with Baghdad instead. If independence is pushed further out on the horizon, the Kurds will need to find some other way to deal with their own financial circumstances, which are far more precarious than Baghdad’s because the Kurds cannot control their monetary policy, issue debt, or take other steps available to a sovereign nation. The Kurds have not paid salaries to their own bloated public sector for months, and even the police have gone on strike to protest. A new deal with Baghdad would allow the Kurds to sell oil at the market rate (they currently must sell at a discount to convince buyers to accept the legal risk that Iraq might take them to court). It would also allow the Kurds to get their share of the anticipated International Monetary Fund and foreign aid packages, which Irbil needs even more badly than Baghdad. Indeed, the Kurds are so desirous of a new deal that their more pragmatic leaders are now talking about accepting 17 percent of Iraq’s actual, total oil revenues (i.e. Kurdish and Iraqi oil sales combined) rather than demanding 17 percent of the federal budget as in their prior agreement. 

[F]inancial circumstances...are far more precarious than Baghdad’s because the Kurds cannot control their monetary policy, issue debt, or take other steps available to a sovereign nation.

Inevitably, the newfound Kurdish interest in a deal has been matched by a sudden Iraqi reluctance. Baghdad seems to understand that it now holds the whip hand in the negotiations and is not in any rush. The Kurds are hurting worse than the Iraqis, and Baghdad has the prospect of getting much bigger infusions of cash than the Kurds. Both the United States and the IMF have stated that their assistance assumes that about 17 percent would go to the Kurds, but without a new oil-sharing agreement it is not clear that Baghdad will legally have to comply, or that those donors could circumvent Baghdad and deliver the money directly to the KRG. There is widespread agreement that signing a new deal would avoid the need to arbitrate all of this and therefore that it would be best to strike one before the money starts to flow. But many in Baghdad seem quite willing to let the Kurds twist in the wind, either out of spite or to secure an even better deal. 

One very positive development is that the United States has agreed to provide military funds to pay many of the Peshmerga’s most important costs—including food, medical supplies, and other basic needs—to the tune of several tens of millions of dollars per month. This is a big boost for the Kurds, and by itself will reduce the Kurdish budget deficit to a considerable extent. It will also provide the United States with greater leverage over Kurdish military operations, which grows in importance as the battle for Mosul looms ever nearer. Mosul north of the Tigris is a Kurdish city—and not just a Kurdish city, but a KDP city. Kirkuk, on the other hand, is an overwhelmingly PUK city. Many in the KDP fear that when Kirkuk is finally assimilated into the KRG, it will tip the political-demographic balance in favor of the PUK. Thus, there is widespread speculation that the KRG may move to claim the Kurdish half of Mosul as part of the liberation of the city to preserve the current balance between the Kurdish parties. The United States understands that prospect, and the embassy and American military leadership accordingly want to maximize their ability to influence Kurdish actions during the liberation of Mosul. 

KRG economics

To a much greater extent than in Baghdad, the financial crisis is promoting and enabling real economic reforms in the KRG. To their great credit, Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani and Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani have enacted real reforms and are pushing to implement others. They have slashed government salaries across the board (ranging from a 15 percent cut for the lowest-paid to a 75 percent cut for the highest). They have used low oil prices to begin removing subsidies on gasoline. They have secured World Bank funding to enable them to recapitalize the electrical grid (which could save them as much as 40 percent on their domestic power production costs) and are looking to install meters and begin charging their citizens for electricity usage in the near future. They plan to begin privatizing the electrical providers and to convert the power plants to natural gas (to be supplied by the nascent Kurdish gas industry). 

They also brought in a former Lebanese minister of finance to overhaul the finance ministry—believing that no Kurd would trust any other Kurd to do so. In a similar, and even more far-reaching move, they have secured assistance from the British government to bring in Deloitte Accounting to perform a comprehensive audit of the KRG Ministry of Natural Resources (the oil ministry) to identify and eliminate corruption. (The Kurdish Prime Minister told us with admirable candor: “look, I know that none of my people will believe that we are being transparent with the oil ministry no matter what we do, if we do it ourselves.” Hence his decision to bring in Deloitte and the Brits to do it instead.) 

Moreover, Prime Minister Barzani and Deputy Prime Minister Talabani are pushing forward other important reforms, like eliminating expensive and corrupt “allowances” for public sector workers, requiring every government employee to register in a biometric database to eliminate “ghost soldiers” and payroll padding, and building new government websites to enable “e-government” transactions that would remove both the need for many current government employees and the payoffs currently required to get anything done in the existing, corrupt, person-to-person system. If coupled with proposed new initiatives in education, worker retraining, investment laws, and other areas, such moves could have a huge impact on Kurdish economic fortunes.

Even if Kurdistan does not turn out to be the hydrocarbon juggernaut it was once thought to be, it will still have significant production.

However, the down side of Kurdish economic fortunes is that the Kurdish oil industry is facing grim prospects and Irbil’s leadership does not yet seem willing to acknowledge that reality. Simply put, the major international oil companies aren’t finding the hydrocarbon deposits they’d hoped for in Kurdistan. The number of wells sunk that have yielded real returns is far less than expected. That by itself has cooled the ardor that the international oil companies once felt for Kurdistan. Combine that with the inability of the KRG to repay them for the loans that many extended to Irbil because of the financial crisis, and you get a major shift in oil companies’ interest away from Kurdistan. Yet Kurdish leaders still focus largely on their financial problems and many do not seem to have come to grips with the widespread perception that the region is not yielding new hydrocarbon deposits as expected. 

All of this further emphasizes the importance of Kurdish reform plans. Even if Kurdistan does not turn out to be the hydrocarbon juggernaut it was once thought to be, it will still have significant production, just not as much as the Kurds dreamt of. They probably will never be “Abu Dhabi in the mountains,” and so must shift their political and economic sights in a different, more practical direction. Their reform agenda creates a real prospect that they can do so, and in so doing lay a firm economic foundation for independence at some point in the next decade. As always in the Middle East, the question is whether the reforms are continued after the immediate crisis has passed.

Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack



             

Iraq Situation Report, Part II: Political and economic developments

Editors’ Note: Brookings senior fellow traveled to Iraq from March 9 to March 19 with Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. They had extensive meetings in Baghdad, Sulaymaniyyah, and Erbil with Iraqi, Kurdish, American, and British officials. This is the second of a three-part survey on the situation in Iraq. ()

Persistent political paralysis

As has too often been the case in Iraq, is not being matched by equivalent (or even commensurate) political progress. I continue to see Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi as a decent, intelligent man who wants to take Iraq in what I consider to be the right direction: toward ethno-sectarian reconciliation, more efficient government, and a more balanced foreign policy (or at least reduced foreign influence in Iraq). He continues to make smart moves in the military sphere, he has taken some important steps to decentralize power to the provinces, and his desire for a more technocratic and less political (or cronyist) government is laudable. However, his government continues to have little to show for all its good intentions, and that is costing the prime minister support in a variety of quarters.

[Abadi's] government continues to have little to show for all its good intentions.

Unfortunately, the prime minister has undermined his own courageous efforts several times by mishandling the politics of important programs. He failed to consult with key Iraqi powerbrokers before announcing his reform agenda at the end of last summer, and so got little buy-in for his proposals. He made the same mistake several weeks ago, suddenly announcing a cabinet reshuffle, only to find that effort similarly sandbagged and beset by Iraq’s various political parties, especially rival Shiite groups. 

He continues to operate with an inordinately small staff that, while very able man-for-man, lacks the manpower to drive Iraq’s elephantine bureaucracy. That staff is working primarily on a series of long term political and economic reforms which seem extremely intelligent, creative, and necessary. (While I heard descriptions of these reforms, I did not see any of the plans themselves, let alone anything indicating how and when they would be implemented. So while they sounded like exactly what Iraq needs, I cannot state unequivocally that I know what they will entail or even that they are more than just a theoretical program) Moreover, because these reforms are designed to address Iraq’s deep, structural problems, they will inevitably take a long time to begin and show results. There is a real danger that even if they prove to be as perfect as they sound, they may come too late to address Iraq’s (and Prime Minister Abadi’s) pressing, current problems. 

These circumstances have opened the door to Abadi’s key Shiite rivals. Muqtada al-Sadr is trying to usurp the prime minister’s reform platform, staging regular public demonstrations demanding that the prime minister make good on his pledges—which Sadr’s people continue to block behind the scenes. Former Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has moved on his own to “handle” the security problems caused by Sadr’s street protests, threatening to make Abadi look ineffectual while simultaneously backing up his own claims that he is the only (Shiite) leader who can handle the security threats that Iraq faces. Meanwhile, the Marja’iye, the Shiite clerical establishment of Najaf, evinces frustration with Abadi’s inability to enact the reforms that he has announced and that they have demanded, but it is not pushing for his replacement. 

Indeed, while some extremely knowledgeable Iraqis believe otherwise, we saw little evidence that Abadi was likely to fall in the near future. Again, the Marja’iye is not happy with the situation, but they have not turned against him the way that they did with Maliki in the summer of 2014, which was the key to Maliki’s removal. None of the major parties who would have to unite to bring Abadi down can agree on a replacement. The Iranians, for their part, do not appear to be pushing a specific replacement even though they are wary of Abadi for pushing back on them several times in the past. Moreover, the United States staunchly backs Abadi, both because he is a good man in a hard job, and because it does not want to re-open Iraq’s political can of worms to form a new government (a process that could take months) in the midst of a military campaign that is finally starting to gain some traction. 

Michael Knights and Kenneth Pollack speak with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. Photo credit: Office of the Prime Minister of Iraq.

The Lebanonization of Iraq

Consequently, I have an unfortunate sense that Iraq is drifting toward “Lebanonization.” Indeed, this might actually represent a good case outcome for Iraq, given the potential for catastrophic military success to produce a resumption of the civil war as an alternative, worst case scenario. By Lebanonization, I mean not only the existence of a Hezbollah-like, Iranian-dominated militia with all of the problems that that entails, but the utter paralysis of the political process, which in turn paralyzes the wider governance and economic systems of the country. Inevitably, there are efforts by folks outside of Baghdad to do for themselves because Baghdad can’t do anything for them. Some of these local efforts are being encouraged and even funded by the U.S. embassy and international NGOs. But as we have seen in Lebanon, there is a very real limit to how much local action can make up for the paralysis of the organs of the central bureaucracy. It limits growth, stunts development (especially for future generations because of its impact on the educational sector) and encourages a widespread disillusionment that can be either enervating or explosive—and can shift quickly from one to the other.

As part of this debilitating process, reconciliation among Sunni and Shiite Arabs remains moribund. President Fuad Massoum has convened a committee on reconciliation to try to push the process forward, but the committee rarely meets, and when it does, it accomplishes little. Sunni leaders are pleased with Abadi’s willingness to decentralize authority and resources to the governors of Anbar and Salah al-Din provinces to help with the reconstruction of Ramadi and Tikrit respectively, but still regard it with suspicion, fearing that the prime minister is giving them that rather than seats at the table in Baghdad. 

[R]econciliation among Sunni and Shiite Arabs remains moribund.

Even some of Abadi’s closest allies among the moderate Sunni leadership are becoming frustrated that there is so little tangible progress on reconciliation. Of course, the Sunni leadership remains badly fragmented (even more so than the ever more fragmented Shiite leadership), but the government makes little effort to unify them or to use proxies to negotiate on behalf of the Sunni community. As , I believe it critical for the United States to take on that role because I do not believe the Iraqis are able to do so themselves. That point was only reinforced by my impressions from this trip.

Many Sunni and Shiite leaders (as well as many American officials) are touting “bottom-up” reconstruction—average Sunnis and Shiites living, working, and rebuilding communities together. While that is a terrific thing—both useful and probably necessary—the history of civil wars demonstrates that there are very sharp limits on what can be achieved from the bottom up if there is not a corresponding top-down effort. Without it, the bottom-up approach is likely to start running into hard “ceilings” that will divide them again, leading to further disillusionment or renewed violence. Without a broad agreement at the top regarding the basic distribution of political power and economic benefits—and so framing a vision of a future Iraq—the bottom-up approach can only go so far. 

[T]here are very sharp limits on what can be achieved from the bottom up if there is not a corresponding top-down effort.

Some help for the economy?

Iraq’s financial crisis remains acute as a result of persistent low oil prices. That, plus the frustrating bureaucratic logjams and burgeoning security problems in southern Iraq (a result of the shift in Iraqi security forces to the north to battle Da’esh), have created significant headaches for the international oil companies operating in southern Iraq. Since Baghdad unfortunately insisted on contracts that left those companies with very low profit margins, the oil companies have shown less interest in investing in southern Iraq in the face of these problems. 

Excluding the Kurdish region, Iraq is producing about 4 million barrels per day (mbd), with about 3.2 mbd going to exports. Baghdad expects that that will grow only to about 4.1 or maybe 4.2 mbd in 2016. Projections of 6, 9, or even 12 mbd of production—which once were common—now seem a long way off, if they are ever to be realized. Moreover, many Iraqi government officials are concerned that oil production might even begin to decline in 2017. 

Iraq recently signed a contract with an Italian engineering firm to begin repairing the damage to Mosul dam. The contract was brokered and shepherded by the U.S. embassy, which believes that if the dam can last until the Italians begin work (probably in June), they should be able to avert a natural disaster of biblical proportions. 

Of greatest importance for Iraq, some major infusions of cash may be just over the horizon. Iraq is negotiating with the International Monetary Fund for financial relief which, altogether could amount to more than $9 billion. In addition, the Obama administration is trying to put together a bilateral package that could be worth $1 to $1.5 billion. American diplomats will then use both to try to raise additional funds for Iraq from other members of the Counter-ISIL Coalition. 

The likely prospect that Iraq will receive billions in foreign aid at some point in 2016 has greatly mitigated the sense of panic in Baghdad. In one respect, relieving that pressure was much needed. However, it threatens to eliminate support for desperately needed economic reforms, such as those that Prime Minister Abadi’s team is reportedly working on. If that turns out to be the case, it could be (yet another) important missed opportunity.

[T]here are efforts by folks outside of Baghdad to do for themselves because Baghdad can’t do anything for them.

Shifting patterns of foreign influence in Iraq

Finally, as many of the points above (and ) should have suggested, American influence in Iraq has increased in meaningful ways. Simply put, the United States is investing significant new resources in Iraq—from additional military assets to considerable financial aid to more active diplomatic and military leadership—and doing so is bearing obvious fruit. Ambassador Stuart Jones has proven himself to be an able and highly intelligent diplomat, extremely savvy but also very constructive in his engagements with the Iraqis. Brett McGurk, the Special Presidential Envoy for the Counter-ISIL Coalition, is a keen legal mind and a true problem-solver, who has earned the trust of virtually the entire gamut of Iraqi politicians in over a decade of constant engagement. 

Between McGurk and Ambassador Jones’s embassy on the civilian side, and Lieutenant General MacFarland’s team on the military side, there is a real sense that—for the first time in a long time—the United States is punching at its weight, and might even be punching above it. Of greatest importance, it is the combination of skillful personnel with some real resources to work with that has enabled the United States to once again exert meaningful influence on Iraqi activities.

The change is evident in Baghdad. Iraqis no longer dismiss the United States and its wishes, as was the case from 2012 to 2015. Now, the fact that the United States wants Abadi to remain in power appears to be of real importance to Iraqis—and we heard that as a reason for why he’s likely to remain in power more often than any explanation having to do with the Iranians. Iraqis increasingly recognize that only military operations backed (if not run) by the Americans are likely to succeed, and that the formations trained by the U.S.-led coalition are unquestionably the best in the army, able to do things that other Iraqi formations, including the Hashd ash-Shaabi, simply cannot. Moreover, Iraqis know that only the United States can help them with their severe financial problems, and the billions of dollars the United States is working to get Baghdad have forced a great many Iraqi leaders to take notice.

Nevertheless, Iranian influence remains very strong, unquestionably greater than that of the United States, as American diplomats readily attest. But Iranian influence is noticeably diminished in recent months. There are reports indicating that even the Iranian-backed formations within the Hashd ash-Shaabi are not getting paid. Many Shiites question why Iraqi Hashd formations are being sent by the Iranians to Syria to fight and die for the Assad regime. Although the Hashd continue to make progress with their ethnic cleansing campaign in Diyala province (and may be trying to extend it to Salah al-Din province) they are doing poorly in Anbar. While the Americans and Iraqi Army liberated Ramadi, the Hashd have floundered at Fallujah. Iraqis know that Iran lacks the financial resources or international diplomatic clout to help Baghdad with its financial problems the way that the United States can (and is). As one indication of this shift, the billboards on display in Baghdad in 2015 thanking Ayatollah Khamene’i and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps for saving Baghdad from Da’esh are gone. 

An uncertain trajectory

Politically and economically, Iraq’s trajectory is currently a negative one. The country is politically fragmented at all levels and the centrifugal forces appear to be gaining strength. This, in turn, has paralyzed the government, suggesting that the most likely paths for Iraq are toward a situation analogous to the Lebanon of today, if not the Lebanon of 1975 to 1991. Moreover, there is no obvious solution from the Iraqi side, nothing out there that can currently be foreseen that seems likely to pull Iraq off its current path and put it onto a more positive and constructive one.

However, recent developments continue to suggest that the United States could serve as that much-needed catalyst to shift Iraq to a more positive trajectory, if it were willing to do so. In the past six months, a team of able American personnel with real resources at their disposal have engineered some important and unexpected changes in key areas. There is no reason to believe that they could not do more if given the opportunity and the assets to do so. The only question is whether the White House is willing to do so, or if it will once again walk away from Iraq prematurely, and leave yet another Mess-o’-potamia for its successor to clean up.

Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack



             

Iraq Situation Report, Part I: The military campaign against ISIS

Editors’ Note: Brookings senior fellow traveled to Iraq from March 9 to March 19 with Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. They had extensive meetings in Baghdad, Sulaymaniyyah, and Erbil with Iraqi, Kurdish, American, and British officials. This is the first of a three-part survey on the situation in Iraq.

The military campaign is gathering steam

The U.S.-led coalition’s military campaign to “defeat” Da’esh (the Arabic acronym for ISIS) appears to be going better than is widely realized. The media has begun to pick up on this, but so far, the accounts do not seem to do it justice. The coalition has trained (or retrained) six Iraqi brigades, typically called the “Mosul Counterattack Brigades” or just the “Counterattack Brigades.” It was these formations that did most of the work at Ramadi and several are being shifted north to begin the Mosul operation. They are performing considerably better than other Iraqi brigades, a fact that is increasingly understood throughout the Iraqi government, boosting their prestige and the influence of the United States.

Coalition air power is hitting Da’esh much harder than in the past, not because any additional assets have been allocated, but because the American military leadership has been able to convince the Iraqis to forego copious on-call fire support and plastering the ground in front of Iraqi formations with air strikes before even the smallest Iraqi offensive. As a result, U.S. commanders have been able to direct far more strike sorties against deliberate targets such as Da’esh’s oil, money, bomb-making plants, transportation, and leadership targets. Moreover, the coalition has been able to employ Special Operations Forces (SOF) more aggressively and creatively than in the past, achieving some impressive synergies with the air and conventional ground campaigns. 

The United States has also put some additional assets into the fight in Iraq, such as the tube artillery deployed to Makhmur and advanced multiple-rocket launcher systems that have been employed elsewhere in Iraq. As the press is already reporting, there are probably about 5,000 American troops in Iraq—not the 3,800 the U.S. government typically claims—and they are far more involved in combat operations than most recognize. Moreover, expect the U.S. military to ask for both more assets and more permissive rules of engagement to enable them to provide greater direct support to Iraqi forces in the field as part of the operations against Mosul.

[T]here is growing evidence to suggest that Da’esh is taking a beating.

As a result, there is growing evidence to suggest that Da’esh is taking a beating. Da’esh has not mounted a successful offensive operation essentially since Ramadi and Palmyra in May 2015. Moreover, whenever they have tried during the past six months, the attack has been smashed quickly and efficiently, typically suffering 60 percent or higher casualties (a historically catastrophic rate). There are indications that the morale of Da’esh fighters in Fallujah and Mosul is growing somewhat fragile, with Da’esh commanders worrying that their troops will neither attack nor defend as strenuously as they once had. As further evidence of problems, Da’esh is increasingly shifting both new recruits and experienced cadre from Iraq-Syria to Libya. 

In contrast, the sense of momentum and coming victory by the coalition is also encouraging more and more Sunni tribesman to abandon Da’esh—or simply find the courage to defy them—and join Sunni Popular Mobilization Forces (Hashd ash-Shaabi, or Hashd in Arabic). American military and embassy personnel reported that since the fall of Ramadi, several thousand had shown up for training from Anbari tribes. They described it as a sudden and dramatic change from the prior 18 months.

The Iraqi high command remains very problematic, but even there the coalition command team appears to have made some noteworthy progress. The coalition seems to have more say in which Iraqi commands are entrusted to lead key ground operations, and has been able to inject some greater alacrity into the typically ponderous Iraqi military leadership. Of course, this last problem has been greatly ameliorated during the campaign along the Euphrates valley because Da’esh’s defenses are crumbling west of Ramadi. Still, Iraq’s command and control problems may be the most important impediments to further progress, at least at present.

Baghdad’s announcement that the liberation of Mosul has begun is a bit premature.

Baghdad’s announcement that the liberation of Mosul has begun is a bit premature. As has been widely reported, Iraqi forces are pushing toward Qayyarah West airfield, west of the Tigris river south of Mosul. Qayyarah West can then serve as a logistical hub and staging base for a more deliberate assault toward Mosul somewhat later. Assuming that the Iraqis and the coalition continue to prioritize the liberation of Mosul over finishing off the Da’esh strongholds along the Euphrates valley, and barring some unforeseen development that hamstrings the Iraqis or revives Da’esh’s fortunes, it is entirely possible that Mosul could fall in the next 6 to 12 months.

Credit for this progress should go to Lt. General Sean MacFarland, the commander of Operation Inherent Resolve, and his team, who have taken a disorganized and fragmented effort and turned it into something starting to resemble a well-oiled machine. MacFarland and his team, many of them seasoned Iraq veterans, are demonstrating how much can be achieved even with relatively modest U.S. and Western forces, and even when you are forced to “punch with somebody else’s fists,” as they say.

The persistent danger of catastrophic success

While the military campaign against Da’esh is starting to move ahead smartly, the civilian side of the effort is not keeping pace. This is deeply problematic because, as I warned over a year ago, even decisive military success against Da’esh is likely to prove ephemeral if there is no plan (nor any effort to implement such a plan) to create a political context where tactical military victories can be translated into enduring, political achievements. Indeed, the situation could actually be worse under those circumstances because we will have removed the common threat of Da’esh, which is one of the few forces currently holding various Iraqi groups together.

[E]ven decisive military success against Da’esh is likely to prove ephemeral if there is no plan...to create a political context where tactical military victories can be translated into enduring, political achievements.

First off, there does not appear to be plan for the stabilization and reconstruction of Mosul after it falls. In U.S. military parlance, these tasks are part of Phase IV of any campaign plan. Infamously, the United States did not have an articulated, resourced Phase IV to the operations plan for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, hence the catastrophic failure of the post-invasion occupation for the next three years. In 2011, the United States effectively had no Phase IV plan for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq either. Arguably, such a plan existed on the military side, but it was never implemented by the civilian side once the military withdrew. Either way, Iraq’s slide back into civil war by mid-2014 was the inevitable result of this parallel failure. Today, we are facing another massive military operation (the fall of Mosul and the final “defeat” of Da’esh in Iraq) and once again we do not yet have a Phase IV plan. And while we still have some time, building such a plan, resourcing it, and preparing to implement it are such monumental tasks that they should have begun six months ago.

This is especially problematic because the intelligence suggesting the fragility of Da’esh’s forces in Mosul—and the convergence of all manner of Iraqi, coalition and regional forces around Mosul—raise the possibility that Da’esh forces there might implode or flee before the coalition is ready to take the city deliberately. That would trigger a stampede of various groups claiming parts or all of Mosul that could lead to all kinds of internecine conflict. In these circumstances, the United States would have to try to get the Iraqis to quickly improvise a plan. Given the difficulty of getting the Iraqi military (and civilian) leadership either to improvise or to move quickly in small operations, the prospect that we would need them to do both for a massive undertaking like Mosul seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Having those plans and everything necessary to implement them must be a top priority, lest the “liberation” of Mosul turn into yet another American-Iraqi fiasco.

Stabilizing Iraq is a lesser task included in the current mission, meaning that it often gets short shrift for attention and resources.

Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that the military campaign remains solely aimed at Da’esh. Stabilizing Iraq is a lesser task included in the current mission, meaning that it often gets short shrift for attention and resources. As I have repeatedly argued elsewhere, the history of civil wars demonstrates that this is a huge mistake. It could easily produce the collapse of Da’esh and its replacement by “son of Da’esh” which will almost certainly be even worse than Da’esh (just as Da’esh is the “son of” al-Qaida and even worse than it) because we will not have addressed the circumstances that gave rise to Da’esh in Iraq and Syria in the first place.

The militia question

Another critical political-military problem is the question of the Hashd ash-Shaabi. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is clearly well aware of both the importance of the Hashd (they were critical to halting the Da’esh offensive against Baghdad in 2014) as well as their potential to undermine Iraq’s future stability and security if they endure as an Iranian-backed alternative military—an Iraqi Hezbollah. We noted that even key Hashd ash-Shaabi commanders duly intoned that they intend for Hashd personnel to eventually be incorporated into the armed forces, although it is impossible to gauge their sincerity. 

The government’s original plan was to start paying the Hashd, and so use the “power of the purse” to gain control over them. Once that was accomplished, Baghdad would eventually demobilize most and integrate the rest into the Iraqi armed forces. Unfortunately, Iraq’s financial crisis has made that impossible. Instead, the government is now considering conscription as a way to handle the problem. The idea is that if there is universal conscription, all of the members of the Hashd will eventually be conscripted and placed immediately under the armed forces. 

Universal conscription could be hugely beneficial to Iraq in many ways. At the most basic level, universal conscription would mitigate Iraq’s massive (and growing) problem with youth unemployment. It would allow Iraq to build an integrated, non-sectarian military force that could be accepted by the populace and help to bind it together. More than that, as the Israelis demonstrated beginning in 1948, because military service is such a powerful method of socialization, conscription would allow Baghdad to build a new Iraqi political culture to heal the rifts that have occurred since 2005 (and to a lesser extent since 1991). Indeed, some Iraqi military personnel are actively exploring the Israeli model to think about how Iraq might use conscription to help heal the rifts and build a new, unified Iraqi society. 

It is not clear, however, if conscription will solve the problem of the Hashd. First, Iran or its Iraqi allies may block it, although this too is far from certain. Nevertheless, the Iranians or key leaders of the Hashd may conclude that it is just too useful to them to have the Hashd as an independent military responsive to them as a check on Baghdad and the United States. Both Tehran and its Iraqi friends wield considerable influence in Iraq, although that influence has waned somewhat as a result of the greater and more successful U.S. effort (see below). 

Second, even if the Iranians or the Hashd leadership chooses not to block conscription, they might insist on exemptions for the Hashd personnel—or that the Hashd remain as a standing force and get its share of new recruits. Finally, Iraq is probably still several years away from being able to implement conscription, and the Hashd could do a lot of damage between then and now, including institutionalizing itself in ways that might make it much harder to eliminate when and if conscription ever materializes. Thus, conscription is a great idea and it could be a solution to the problem of the Hashd, but there is no certainty it will be. 

Ephemeral or durable?

The purely military aspects of the campaign appear to be progressing well, finally beginning to hit on all cylinders. A superb American command team has found important news to greatly improve the impact of U.S. air power, SOF, and direct support. The Iraqi Army has been partly rebuilt, and those units retrained and re-equipped by the coalition are performing noticeably better than the others. While the coalition’s military power is slowly building, the increasing pressure on Da’esh is diminishing its capacity to resist.

Unfortunately, as has been a trademark of American involvement with Iraq at least since 2003 (and arguably since 1991), military success is not being matched with the commensurate political-economic efforts that will ultimately determine whether battlefield successes are translated into lasting achievements. In particular, the absence of developed and resourced plans to deal with post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction, and the lingering question regarding the future status of the militias raise huge questions about whether these victories will prove as ephemeral as America’s many past triumphs in Iraq.

Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack



             

Security and public order

The security situation facing the Middle East is grave and appears to be trending toward greater violence and instability. The states of the region have tended to focus on traditional, external threats but the internal threats they face—from domestic unrest, state failure, and civil war—have become both more common and dangerous.

It is highly unlikely that these security problems will solve themselves or that regional states will be able to resolve them on their own. Given the ongoing importance of Middle Eastern energy resources to the international economy, the region’s central geographic location, its multiplicity of terrorist groups, and the extent of regional anger at numerous other countries for their predicament, it would be a mistake to assume that these security problems will not affect the wider world. Already the problems of terrorism and refugees generated by Middle Eastern upheaval have made many Americans, Europeans, Russians, and Middle Easterners want to take action themselves.

To avoid a catastrophic descent, the Middle East will require considerable external assistance to address its security problems over the short and long terms. Only the United States has the combination of capabilities and potential willingness to lead, develop, and implement these strategies. If the United States is unwilling to do so, it is unlikely that any other state can or will, and the security problems of the Middle East will likely worsen as a result.

Although the United States remains indispensable to such an effort, it should not be expected to shoulder the burden by itself. Moreover, there is reason to believe that other countries—in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere—could be persuaded to do more, including potentially leading a wider campaign in certain areas. This is especially so as refugees, terrorist groups, and other manifestations of spillover from Middle Eastern civil wars increasingly affect other states.

Nevertheless, realizing such support will require the United States to formulate a coherent, feasible strategy; commit itself to leading the effort; and contribute sufficient resources to the effort so that other countries believe the strategy has a reasonable expectation of success.

Ultimately, the only way to eliminate the recurrent, worsening security crises of the Middle East is to help the states of the region address the deep structural problems in their economic, political, and social systems through a process of long-term reform.

In the meantime, important steps need to be taken to address immediate security problems, particularly the civil wars raging across the region, but these cannot be allowed to supersede the need for sustained reform, as has been the case too often in the past.

Longer-term solutions

It is critical that the strategies employed by regional and external actors working together to address the security problems of the region be crafted so they do not impede long-term political, economic, and social reform. Instead, these strategies should include steps to enable and encourage such reforms.

Eventually, a critical goal for the Middle East should be to establish an inclusive security condominium 5 along the lines of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), which later developed into the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), that can address security concerns via cooperative and collective measures, and enable the reform that is necessary to address the deeper structural problems of the region:

The organization must include those states that the United States and its allies consider enemies, particularly Iran, so that the security condominium can supplement—and perhaps someday supplant— traditional political-military tools.
Such an organization should begin in the Gulf, with the GCC states, Iran, and Iraq; the United States; and potentially China, India, Turkey, and Great Britain. Over time, as the concept develops and works out its initial, inevitable teething pains, it should expand to include the rest of the Middle East, and perhaps the Maghreb as well.
It should begin as a forum simply to discuss security problems, and then hopefully graduate to include confidence-building measures and eventually arms control agreements.
Like the CSCE/OSCE, the organization should attempt to address all of the cross-regional problems: security (both internal and external), economic progress, and political development.


Downloads

Security and public order


Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack


Publication: The Atlantic Council

Image Source: © Mohamed Al-Sayaghi / Reuters


             

Fight or flight: America’s choice in the Middle East

Editors' Note: The modern Middle East has rarely been tranquil, but it has never been this bad, writes Ken Pollack. The next U.S. president is going to face a choice in the Middle East: do much more to stabilize it, or disengage from it much more. This piece was originally published in Foreign Affairs.

The modern Middle East has rarely been tranquil, but it has never been this bad. Full-blown civil wars rage in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Nascent conflicts simmer in Egypt, South Sudan, and Turkey. Various forms of spillover from these civil wars threaten the stability of Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia. Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia have risen to new heights, raising the specter of a region-wide religious war. Israel and the Palestinians have experienced a resurgence of low-level violence. Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates have weathered the storm so far, but even they are terrified of what is going on around them. Not since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century has the Middle East seen so much chaos.

Moreover, it is unlikely to abate anytime soon. No matter how many times Americans insist that the people of the Middle East will come to their senses and resolve their differences if left to their own devices, they never do. Absent external involvement, the region’s leaders consistently opt for strategies that exacerbate conflict and feed perpetual instability. Civil wars are particularly stubborn problems, and without decisive outside intervention, they usually last decades. The Congolese civil war is entering its 22nd year, the Peruvian its 36th, and the Afghan its 37th. There is no reason to expect the Middle East’s conflicts to burn out on their own either.

As a consequence, the next U.S. president is going to face a choice in the Middle East: do much more to stabilize it, or disengage from it much more. But given how tempestuous the region has become, both options—stepping up and stepping back—will cost the United States far more than is typically imagined. Stabilizing the region would almost certainly require more resources, energy, attention, and political capital than most advocates of a forward-leaning U.S. posture recognize. Similarly, giving up more control and abandoning more commitments in the region would require accepting much greater risks than most in this camp acknowledge. The costs of stepping up are more manageable than the risks of stepping back, but either option would be better than muddling through. 

Man, the state, and civil war

Grasping the real choices that the United States faces in the Middle East requires an honest understanding of what is going on there. Although it is fashionable to blame the region’s travails on ancient hatreds or the poor cartography of Mr. Sykes and Monsieur Picot, the real problems began with the modern Arab state system. After World War II, the Arab states came into their own. Most shed their European colonial masters, and all adopted more modern political systems, whether secular republics (read: dictatorships) or new monarchies.

None of these states worked very well. For one thing, their economies depended heavily on oil, either directly, by pumping it themselves, or indirectly, via trade, aid, and worker remittances. These rentier economies produced too few jobs and too much wealth that their civilian populations neither controlled nor generated, encouraging the ruling elites to treat their citizenries as (mostly unwanted) dependents. The oil money bred massive corruption, along with bloated public sectors uninterested in the needs or aspirations of the wider populace. To make matters worse, the Arab states had emerged from Ottoman and European colonialism with their traditional socio-cultural systems intact, which oil wealth and autocracy made it possible to preserve and even indulge. 

This model clunked along for several decades, before it started falling apart in the late twentieth century. The oil market became more volatile, with long periods of low prices, which created economic hardship even in oil-rich states such as Algeria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Globalization brought to the region new ideas about the relationship between government and the governed, as well as foreign cultural influences. Arabs (and Iranians, for that matter) increasingly demanded that their governments help fix their problems. But all they got in response was malign neglect.

The Middle East’s travails began with the modern Arab state system.

By the 1990s, popular discontent had risen throughout the Middle East. The Muslim Brotherhood and its many franchises grew quickly as a political opposition to the regimes. Others turned to violence—rioters in the Nejd region of Saudi Arabia, Islamist insurgents in Egypt, and various terrorist groups elsewhere—all seeking to overthrow their governments. Eventually, some of these groups would decide that they first had to drive away the foreign backers of those governments, starting with the United States. 

The pent-up frustrations and desire for political change finally exploded in the Arab Spring of 2011, with large-scale protests breaking out in nearly all Arab countries and the toppling or crippling of the regime in five of them. But revolutions are always tricky things to get right. That has proved especially true in the Arab world, where the autocrats in each country had done a superb job of eliminating any charismatic opposition leader who might have unified the country after the fall of the regime and where there were no popular alternative ideas about how to organize a new Arab state. And so in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, the result has been state failure, a security vacuum, and civil war.

If the first-order problem of the Middle East is the failure of the postwar Arab state system, the outbreak of civil wars has become an equally important second-order problem. These conflicts have taken on lives of their own, becoming engines of instability that now pose the greatest immediate threat to both the people of the region and the rest of the world.

For one thing, civil wars have a bad habit of spilling over into their neighbors. Vast numbers of refugees cross borders, as do smaller, but no less problematic, numbers of terrorists and other armed combatants. So do ideas promoting militancy, revolution, and secession. In this way, neighboring states can themselves succumb to instability or even internal conflict. Indeed, scholars have found that the strongest predictor that a state will experience a civil war is whether it borders a country already embroiled in one. 

Civil wars also have a bad habit of sucking in neighboring countries. Seeking to protect their interests and prevent spillover, states typically choose particular combatants to back. But that brings them into conflict with other neighboring states that have picked their own favorites. Even if this competition remains a proxy fight, it can still be economically and politically draining, even ruinous. At worst, the conflict can lead to a regional war, when a state, convinced its proxy is not doing the job, sends in its own armed forces. For evidence of this dynamic, one need look no further than the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, or Iranian and Russian military operations in Iraq and Syria.

Withdrawal symptoms

As if the failure of the postwar Arab state system and the outbreak of four civil wars weren’t bad enough, in the midst of all of this, the United States has distanced itself from the region. The Middle East has not been without a great-power overseer of one kind or another since the Ottoman conquests of the sixteenth century. This is not to suggest that the external hegemon was always an unalloyed good; it wasn’t. But it often played the constructive role of mitigating conflict. Good or bad, the states of the region have grown accustomed to interacting with one another with a dominating third party in the room, figuratively and often literally.

Disengagement has been most damaging in Iraq. The U.S. withdrawal from the country was the most important of a range of factors that pulled it back into civil war. Scholars have long recognized that shepherding a nation out of a civil war requires some internal or external peacekeeper to guarantee the terms of a new power-sharing arrangement among the warring parties. Over time, that role can become increasingly symbolic, as was the case with NATO in Bosnia. The alliance’s presence there dwindled to a militarily insignificant force within about five years, but it still played a crucial political and psychological role in reassuring the rival factions that none of them would return to violence. In the case of Iraq, the United States played that role, and its disengagement in 2010 and 2011 led to exactly what history predicted. 

This phenomenon has played out more broadly across the Middle East. The withdrawal of the United States has forced governments there to interact in a novel way, without the hope that Washington will provide a cooperative path out of the security dilemmas that litter the region. U.S. disengagement has made many states fear that others will become more aggressive without the United States to restrain them. That fear has caused them to act more aggressively themselves, which in turn has sparked more severe counter-moves, again in the expectation that the United States will not check either the original move or the riposte. This dynamic has grown most acute between Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose tit-for-tat exchange is growing ever more vituperative and violent. The Saudis have taken the stunning step of directly intervening in Yemen’s civil war against the country’s Houthi minority, which they consider to be an Iranian proxy that threatens their southern flank.

Even as the Middle East careens out of control, help is not on the way. The Obama administration’s policies toward the region are not designed to mitigate, let alone end, its real problems. That is why the region has gotten worse since President Barack Obama entered office, and why there is no reason to believe that it will get any better before he leaves office.

In his 2009 speech in Cairo, Obama did claim that the United States would try to help the region shift to a new Arab state system, but he never backed his speech up with an actual policy, let alone resources. Then, in 2011, the administration failed to put in place a coherent strategy to deal with the Arab Spring, one that might have assisted a transition to more stable, pluralistic systems of government. Having missed its best opportunities, Washington now barely pays lip service to the need for gradual, long-term reform.

As for the civil wars, the administration has focused on addressing only their symptoms—trying to contain the spillover—by attacking the Islamic State, or ISIS; accepting some refugees; and working to prevent terrorist attacks back home. But the history of civil wars demonstrates that it is extremely hard to contain the spillover, and the Middle East today is proving no exception. Spillover from Syria helped push Iraq back into civil war. In turn, spillover from the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars has generated a low-level civil war in Turkey and threatens to do the same in Jordan and Lebanon. Spillover from Libya is destabilizing Egypt, Mali, and Tunisia. The Iraqi, Syrian, and Yemeni civil wars have sucked Iran and the Gulf states into a vicious proxy war fought across all three battlefields. And refugees, terrorists, and radicalization spilling over from all these wars have created new dilemmas for Europe and North America. 

In fact, it is effectively impossible to eradicate the symptoms of civil wars without treating the underlying maladies. No matter how many thousands of refugees the West accepts, as long as the civil wars grind on, millions more will flee. And no matter how many terrorists the United States kills, without an end to the civil wars, more young men will keep turning to terrorism. Over the past 15 years, the threat from Salafi jihadism has grown by orders of magnitude despite the damage that the United States has inflicted on al-Qaida’s core in Afghanistan. In places racked by civil war, the group’s offshoots, including ISIS, are finding new recruits, new sanctuaries, and new fields of jihad. But where order prevails, they dissipate. Neither al-Qaida nor ISIS has found much purchase in any of the remaining strong states of the region. And when the United States brought stability to Iraq beginning in 2007, al-Qaida’s franchise there was pushed to the brink of extinction, only to find salvation in 2011, when civil war broke out next door in Syria.

Even as the Middle East careens out of control, help is not on the way.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, moreover, it is possible for a third party to settle a civil war long before it might end on its own. Scholars of civil wars have found that in about 20 percent of the cases since 1945, and roughly 40 percent of the cases since 1995, an external actor was able to engineer just such an outcome. Doing so is not easy, of course, but it need not be as ruinously expensive as the United States’ painful experience in Iraq.

Ending a civil war requires the intervening power to accomplish three objectives. First, it must change the military dynamics such that none of the warring parties believes that it can win a military victory and none fears that its fighters will be slaughtered once they lay down their arms. Second, it must forge a power-sharing agreement among the various groups so that they all have an equitable stake in a new government. And third, it must put in place institutions that reassure all the parties that the first two conditions will endure. To some extent unknowingly, that is precisely the path NATO followed in Bosnia in 1994–95 and the United States followed in Iraq in 2007–10.

History also shows that when outside powers stray from this approach or commit inadequate resources to it, their interventions inevitably fail and typically make the conflicts bloodier, longer, and less contained. No wonder U.S. policy toward Iraq and Syria (let alone Libya and Yemen) has failed since 2011. And as long as the United States continues to avoid pursuing the one approach that can work, there is no reason to expect anything else. At most, the U.S. military’s current campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria will engineer the same outcome as its earlier one against al-Qaida in Afghanistan: the United States may badly damage ISIS, but unless it ends the conflicts that sustain it, the group will morph and spread and eventually be succeeded by the son of ISIS, just as ISIS is the son of al-Qaida.

Stepping up

Stabilizing the Middle East will require a new approach—one that attacks the root causes of the region’s troubles and is backed up by adequate resources. The first priority should be to shut down the current civil wars. In every case, that will require first changing the battlefield dynamics to convince all the warring factions that military victory is impossible. In an ideal world, that would entail sending at least small numbers of U.S. combat forces to Iraq (perhaps 10,000) and potentially Syria. But if the political will for even a modest commitment of forces does not exist, then more advisers, airpower, intelligence sharing, and logistical support could suffice, albeit with a lower likelihood of success.

Regardless, the United States and its allies will also have to build new indigenous militaries able to first defeat the terrorists, militias, and extremists and then serve as the foundation for a new state. In Iraq, that means retraining and reforming the Iraqi security forces to a much greater degree than current U.S. policy envisions. In Libya, Syria, and Yemen, it would mean creating new indigenous, conventional militaries that (with considerable American support) would be able to defeat any potential rival, secure the civilian populaces, and enforce the terms of permanent cease-fires.

In all four civil wars, the United States and its allies will also have to undertake major political efforts aimed at forging equitable power-sharing arrangements. In Iraq, the United States should take the lead in defining both the minimal needs and the potential areas of agreement among the various Shiite and Sunni factions, just as Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in 2007–9, and his team accomplished as part of the U.S. surge strategy. That, plus giving material resources to various moderate Iraqi political leaders and their constituencies among both the Shiites and the Sunnis, should allow the United States to hammer out a new power-sharing deal. Such an arrangement should end the alienation of the Sunni population, which lies at the heart of Iraq’s current problems. This, in turn, would make it much easier for the Abadi government and the United States to stand up Sunni military formations to help liberate the Sunni-majority areas of the country from ISIS and help diminish the power of the Iranian-backed Shiite militias.

In Syria, the ongoing peace talks in Vienna provide a starting point for a political solution. But they offer little more than that, because the military conditions are not conducive to a real political compromise, let alone a permanent cessation of hostilities. Neither the Assad regime nor the Western-backed opposition believes that it can afford to stop fighting, and each of the three strongest rebel groups—Ahrar al-Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra, and ISIS—remains convinced that it can achieve total victory. So until the reality on the battlefield shifts, little can be achieved at the negotiating table. If the military situation changes, then Western diplomats should help Syria’s communities fashion an arrangement that distributes political power and economic benefits equitably. The deal would have to include the Alawites, but not necessarily President Bashar al-Assad himself, and it would need to assure each faction that the new government would not oppress it, the way the Alawite minority oppressed the Sunni majority in the past.

The turmoil in Libya mirrors that in Syria, except that it is receiving far less international attention. Thus, the first step there is for the United States to convince its partners to take on a more constructive role. If the United States should lead in Iraq and Syria, then Europe needs to lead in Libya. By dint of its economic ties and proximity to Europe, Libya threatens European interests far more directly than it does American ones, and NATO’s role in the 2011 intervention in Libya can serve as a precedent for European leadership. Of course, the Europeans will not take on the challenge if they are not convinced that the United States intends to do its part to quell the Middle East’s civil wars, further underscoring the importance of a coherent, properly resourced U.S. strategy. To aid Europe’s fight in Libya, Washington will undoubtedly have to commit assistance related to logistics, command and control, and intelligence, and possibly even combat advisers.

In Yemen, the Gulf states’ air campaign has achieved little, but the intervention by a small ground force led by the United Arab Emirates has set back the rebel coalition, creating a real opportunity to negotiate an end to the conflict. Unfortunately, the Gulf states seem unwilling to offer Yemen’s opposition terms that would equitably divide political power and economic benefits, and they seem equally unwilling to offer security guarantees. To draw the conflict to a close, the United States and its allies will have to encourage their partners in the Gulf to make meaningful concessions. If that doesn’t work, then the most useful thing they can do is try to convince the Gulf states to minimize their involvement in Yemen before the strain of intervention threatens their own internal cohesion.

If the next U.S. president is unwilling to commit to stepping up to stabilize the Middle East, the only real alternative is to step back.

After ending the current civil wars, the next priority of a stepped-up U.S. strategy in the Middle East will be to shore up the states in the greatest danger of sliding into future civil wars: Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Turkey. It is state failure—not external attack by ISIS, al-Qaida, or Iranian proxies—that represents the true source of the conflicts roiling the Middle East today. These four at-risk countries are all badly in need of economic assistance and infrastructure development. But above all, they need political reform to avoid state failure. Consequently, the United States and its allies should offer a range of trade benefits, financial incentives, and economic aid in return for gradual but concrete steps toward political reform. Here, the aim need not be democratization per se (although Tunisia should be strongly encouraged to continue down that path), but it should be good governance, in the form of justice and the rule of law, transparency, and a fair distribution of public goods and services.

The final piece of the puzzle is to press for reform more broadly across the Middle East—economic, social, and political. Even if the United States and its allies succeed in resolving today’s civil wars, unless a new state system takes the place of the failed postwar one, the same old problems will recur. Reform will be a hard sell for the region’s leaders, who have long resisted it out of a fear that it would strip them of their power and positions. Paradoxically, however, the civil wars may furnish a solution to this conundrum. All the states of the region are terrified of the spillover from these conflicts, and they are desperate for U.S. help in eliminating the threat. In particular, many of the United States’ Arab allies have grown frustrated by the gains that Iran has made by exploiting power vacuums. Just as the United States and its allies should offer the region’s fragile states economic assistance in return for reform, so they should condition their efforts to end the civil wars on the willingness of the region’s stronger states to embrace similar reforms.

Stepping back

If the next U.S. president is unwilling to commit to stepping up to stabilize the Middle East, the only real alternative is to step back from it. Because civil wars do not lend themselves to anything but the right strategy with the right resources, trying the wrong one means throwing U.S. resources away on a lost cause. It probably also means making the situation worse, not better. Under a policy of real disengagement, the United States would abstain from involvement in the civil wars altogether. It would instead try to contain their spillover, difficult as that is, and if that were to fail, it would fall back on defending only core U.S. interests in the Middle East.

The Obama administration has done a creditable job of bolstering Jordan against chaos from Iraq and Syria so far, and stepping back from the region could still entail beefing up U.S. support to Jordan and other at-risk neighbors of the civil wars, such as Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Turkey. All these countries want and need Western economic, diplomatic, technical, and military assistance. But because spillover has historically proved so difficult to contain, there is a high risk that one or more of them could still slide into civil war themselves, generating yet more spillover.

For that reason, stepping back would also require Washington to make a ruthless assessment of what is the least the United States can do to secure its vital interests in the Middle East. And although it may be a gross exaggeration to say so, in large part, U.S. interests in the region do ultimately come down to Israel, terrorism, and oil.

As poll after poll has found, a majority of Americans continue to see the safety of Israel as important to them and to the United States. Yet Israel today is as safe as the United States can make it. Israeli forces can defeat any conventional foe and deter any deterrable unconventional threat. The United States has defended Israel diplomatically and militarily countless times, including implicitly threatening the Soviet Union with nuclear war during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The United States has even taken an Iranian nuclear threat off the table for at least the next decade, thanks to the deal it brokered last year. The only threat the United States cannot save Israel from is its own chronic civil war with the Palestinians, but the best solution to that conflict is a peace settlement that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have demonstrated much interest in. In short, there is little more that Israel needs from the United States for its own direct security, and what it does need (such as arms sales) the United States could easily provide even if it stepped back from the Middle East.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of a reduced U.S. presence in the Middle East is that it should mitigate the threat from terrorism. Terrorists from the region attack Americans largely because they feel aggrieved by U.S. policies, just as they attack France and the United Kingdom because those countries are staunch U.S. allies (and former colonial powers) and have started to attack Russia because it has intervened in Syria. The less the United States is involved in the Middle East, the less its people are likely to be attacked by terrorists from the region. It is no accident that Switzerland does not suffer from Middle Eastern terrorism.

Of course, even if Washington disengaged from the region as much as possible, Americans would not be entirely immune from Middle Eastern terrorism. The region’s conspiracy-mongers endlessly blame the United States for things it didn’t do, as well as for what it did, and so terrorists could still find reasons to target Americans. Besides, even under this minimalist approach, the United States would maintain its support for Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of which a range of terrorist groups detest.

If U.S. interests concerning Israel and terrorism would largely take care of themselves in the event that Washington further diminished its role in the Middle East, the same cannot be said for the flow of oil. The idea that fracking has granted the United States energy independence is a myth; as long as the global economy relies on fossil fuels, the United States will be vulnerable to major disruptions in the supply of oil, regardless of how much it produces. Since neither global dependence on oil nor the Middle East’s contribution to the share of global production is expected to abate over the next 25 years, the United States will continue to have a critical interest in keeping Middle Eastern oil flowing.

Yet the United States need not defend every last barrel of oil in the region. The question is, how much is enough? This is where things get complicated. Many countries possess strategic reserves of oil that can mitigate a sudden, unexpected drop in production. And some, particularly Saudi Arabia, have enough excess capacity to pump and export more oil if need be. Fracking, likewise, allows North American producers of shale oil to partly compensate for shortfalls. Even though oil production in Libya has dropped by over 80 percent since 2011 as a result of its civil war, other producers have been able to make up for the loss.

Saudi Arabia, however, is in a category of its own. The country produces over ten percent of all the oil used in the world and contains the vast majority of excess capacity; even if every country emptied its strategic oil reserves and fracked like crazy, that would still not compensate for the loss of Saudi oil production. Thus, the United States will have to continue to protect its Saudi allies. But against what? No Middle Eastern state (even Iran) has the capacity to conquer Saudi Arabia, and the modest U.S. air and naval force currently in the Persian Gulf is more than adequate to defeat an Iranian attack on the country’s oil infrastructure.

The kingdom’s principal threats are internal. Although no one has ever made money betting against the House of Saud, the monarchy rules over a quintessentially dysfunctional postwar Arab state, one that faces daunting political, economic, and social stresses. The Shiites who make up the majority of Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province have rioted and resisted government oppression for decades, and their unhappiness has grown with the widening Shiite-Sunni rift across the region. The kingdom skated through the Arab Spring primarily thanks to the far-reaching (if gradual) reform program of King Abdullah, coupled with massive cash payoffs to the people. But Abdullah died in January 2015, and his successor, King Salman, has yet to demonstrate a similar commitment to reform. Even as oil prices remain low, Salman is spending profligately at home and abroad (including on the expensive intervention in Yemen), burning through the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund at $12–$14 billion per month. At that rate, the fund will be empty in about four years, but the king will probably face domestic challenges long before then.

How can the United States protect Saudi Arabia from itself? It is impossible to imagine any U.S. president deploying troops there to suppress a popular revolution or to hold together a failing monarchy. Moreover, the longer that civil wars burn on Saudi Arabia’s northern border, in Iraq, and southern border, in Yemen, the more likely these conflicts will destabilize the kingdom—to say nothing of the possibility of a Jordanian civil war. But a strategy of stepping back from the region means the United States will not try to shut down the nearby civil wars, and Washington has little leverage it can use to convince the Saudis to reform. It would have especially little leverage if it swore off the only thing that the Saudis truly want: greater U.S. involvement to end the civil wars and prevent Iran from exploiting them. In these circumstances, the United States would have virtually no ability to save Saudi Arabia from itself if its rulers were to insist on following a ruinous path. Yet in the context of greater U.S. disengagement, that is the most likely course the Saudis would take.

No exit

Ultimately, the greatest challenge for the United States if it steps back from the Middle East is this: figuring out how to defend U.S. interests when they are threatened by problems the United States is ill equipped to solve. Because containing the spillover from civil wars is so difficult, stepping back means risking the near-term collapse of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Turkey. Although none of these countries produces much oil itself, their instability could spread to the oil producers, too, over the longer term. The world might be able to survive the loss of Iranian, Iraqi, Kuwaiti, or Algerian oil production, but at a certain point, the instability would affect Saudi Arabia. And even if it never does, it is not clear that the world can afford to lose several lesser oil producers, either.

Stepping back from the Middle East means risking the near-term collapse of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Turkey.

The great benefit of a policy of stepping back is that it would drastically reduce the burden that the United States would have to bear to stabilize the Middle East. The great danger, however, is that it would entail enormous risks. Once the United States started writing off countries—shortening the list of those it would defend against threats—it is unclear where it would be able to stop, and retreat could turn into rout. If Jordan or Kuwait slid into civil war, would the United States deploy 100,000 troops to occupy and stabilize either country to protect Saudi Arabia (and in the case of civil war in Jordan, to protect Israel)? Could the United States do so in time to prevent the spillover from destabilizing the kingdom? If not, are there other ways to keep the kingdom itself from falling? Given all these uncertainties, the most prudent course is for Americans to steel themselves against the costs and step up to stabilize the region.

That said, what the United States should certainly not do is refuse to choose between stepping up and stepping back and instead waffle somewhere in the middle, committing enough resources to enlarge its burden without increasing the likelihood that its moves will make anything better. Civil wars do not lend themselves to half measures. An outside power has to do the right thing and pay the attendant costs, or else its intervention will only make the situation worse for everyone involved, including itself. The tragedy is that given the U.S. political system’s tendency to avoid decisive moves, the next administration will almost inevitably opt to muddle through. Given the extent of the chaos in the Middle East today, refusing to choose would likely prove to be the worst choice of all.

Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack


Publication: Foreign Affairs


             

Fear and loathing in Saudi Arabia

Editors' Note: What does Saudi Arabia's execution of Nimr al-Nimr say about the country's domestic politics and foreign policy? As Ken Pollack explains, the leadership in Riyadh sees a Middle East spiraling out of control—that, combined with concerns about a general mobilization of the region's Shiites, difficulties in controlling international oil markets, and other dynamics, has caused the Saudis to overreact in different circumstances. This piece originally appeared on Foreign Policy .

The true surprise about the Saudi-Iranian contretemps over the execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr is that it caught so many people off guard in the first place. Anyone paying attention to Saudi Arabia knew that something like this was a long time coming. Unfortunately, not enough people were paying attention until it was too late.

It’s impossible to understand the current situation without delving into Saudi politics and foreign policy. But it’s equally important to be honest about the limits of our knowledge. Very much like the Islamic Republic of Iran, it’s very difficult for anyone outside the highest reaches of government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to really understand its fears and strategies. As my friend Greg Gause regularly warns, with Saudi politics, “those who know don’t speak, and those who speak don’t know.” It’s an important warning.

So with that caveat as our guide, what can we say about the dramatic shifts in Saudi policy.

First, I think it’s clear that Saudi policy has to be understood as an interweaving of Saudi internal and external interests, and right now those interests are overwhelmingly about fear. The external threats it seems to see are easier for Americans to recognize than the internal ones. But what we often miss is how the Saudis see external issues affecting their internal circumstances and creating domestic threats they find far more frightening than the external threat on its own.

At the broadest level, when the Saudis in Riyadh look at the Middle East around them, they see a region spiraling out of control. Since 2011, they have witnessed a massive increase in general instability across the region, with “the people” increasingly willing to protest or even overthrow their rulers. The complacency and popular “inertness” that categorized the Arab populations for decades is gone. That clearly worries the Sauds, the kingdom’s ruling royal family, who have always preferred a docile populace.

Civil wars are raging in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya, spilling refugees, terrorists, armed militants, and powerful, radical ideas over onto their neighbors. Already, spillover from these civil wars has created nascent civil wars in Egypt and Turkey. It is eroding the stability of Lebanon, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, and even Kuwait. It has also created vast new opportunities for Iran to destabilize and rearrange the region to suit its own interests.

Indeed, both the civil wars and the spillover they generate have also produced a general mobilization of the Middle East’s Shiites, instigated and led by Iran. And that includes the Shiites in the Saudi kingdom. Officials in private and press reports occasionally note that hundreds of Saudi security service personnel have been killed and wounded in operations in the Eastern Province, the home to the vast majority of the kingdom’s Shiites. Americans tend not to pay attention to these operations because we see them as proof that the Saudis have things well in hand; but another way to look at it is that the Saudis are fighting pitched battles with someone in the cities of the Eastern Province. In other words, there seems to be a much higher degree of mobilization and violent confrontation among the Saudi Shiites than most realize.

Then there are Saudi fears about the oil market. Everyone seems to believe that the Saudis are purposely not cutting back production to kill off North American shale producers. But that is absolutely not what the Saudis are saying, either in private or public. Instead, they are saying that they can no longer control the oil market because there are too many other sources and all of the OPEC countries cheat like crazy whenever Riyadh tries to orchestrate a production cut. This has happened to them repeatedly over the past 20 to 30 years. They try to cut production to prevent oil prices from dropping, and the rest of OPEC takes advantage of it to pump as much as they can, contrary to what they promised and agreed to. The result is that there is no overall supply curtailment and the Saudis lose market share. This time around, they have stated that they cannot realistically control the OPEC oil supply, so they are not going to try to do so. Instead, they are going to fight for market share. But doing so means having to win a race to the bottom, with the result that their oil revenues are plummeting.

So that is another element of fear for them: They can no longer control the oil market the way they once did, and the low price of oil is obviously killing them. It has become so bad that they are now talking about real economic austerity, including repealing subsidies on gasoline and other fuel that average Saudis now see as part of their rights as citizens. Repealing subsidies and other austerity measures is always a very unpopular move and can easily cause widespread popular unrest — one need only remember events in Greece last year. The fact that the Saudi government now feels forced to take this route speaks to how desperate its financial situation is—and, given how it conjures the threat of popular mobilization that makes it so uneasy, it can only make the Saudis that much more apprehensive.

Meanwhile, the region’s civil wars have the Saudis so frightened that they have intervened in unprecedented ways. They have poured tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars into Syria and Yemen and to a lesser extent Iraq and Libya. They are pouring tens of billions more into Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, and Bahrain to shore up their governments, prevent state collapse under the strain of the spillover from neighboring civil wars, and thus prevent more civil wars on their own borders. But these increased foreign-policy costs coupled with reduced oil revenues have forced the Saudis to draw from their sovereign wealth fund at a rate of $12 to 14 billion per month—a pace that will wipe out those reserves in less than three years, but is likely to cause severe domestic political problems (including dissension within the royal family) long before.

And there sits Iran, at the intersection of all of these problems, from the Saudi perspective. The Saudis think the Iranians are to blame for the civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and (to a lesser extent) Iraq by mobilizing Shiites to destabilize the kingdom and its Sunni Arab allies. (They also blame the United States for the Iraqi civil war, appropriately, I might add.) They see the Iranians as threatening to pump new oil out onto the market to fight the Saudis for market share regardless of how low the price goes; Iranian officials openly crow that all of the money that will finally be released to them after the nuclear sanctions are lifted will be used to enable them to take market share away from Riyadh. In addition, the Iranians are waging proxy wars against the Saudis in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen and aiding subversive elements in Bahrain, Kuwait, and the kingdom itself. So, as the Saudis see it, Tehran contributes to Riyadh’s financial problems by driving down Saudi revenues and jacking up expenditures, both of which threaten the kingdom’s internal stability.

And while we may believe that the Saudis exaggerate both Iranian capabilities and intentions, the Saudis have a number of good points when it comes to Iran. The Iranians do seek to overturn the regional order, and they have repeatedly attempted to overthrow Arab governments (including Saudi Arabia’s, albeit several decades ago). The Iranians do tend to back Shiite populations, whether they are in power or out, majority or minority. And they do often incite them to violence and provide them with the wherewithal to do so. As a result, the Iranians have become deeply embroiled in the civil wars of the region. I would argue their involvement in both Iraq and Syria is primarily defensive (seeking to preserve the control over the state by their allies), but in Yemen it has unquestionably been offensive. There is no other explanation for Iran’s involvement in Yemen other than to annoy, weaken, or even undermine the Saudis—as strategic leverage or a genuine bid at regime change. And the Iranians do not make matters any better by arrogantly dismissing Arab fear and interests and placing themselves on a higher level than their neighbors across the Persian Gulf.

Finally, the Saudis feel frustrated and abandoned by the United States. Many Saudis and other Gulf Arabs consider President Barack Obama deeply ignorant, if not outright foolish, about the world and the Middle East. They evince out-and-out contempt for him and his policies. From their perspective, the United States has turned its back on its traditional allies in the Middle East. Washington is doing the least it can in Iraq, and effectively nothing in Libya and Syria, with the result that none of those conflicts is getting better. If anything, they are actually getting worse. Moreover, Saudi Arabia seems to differ over whether Obama is using the new nuclear deal with Tehran to deliberately try to shift the United States from the Saudi side to the Iranian side in the grand, regional struggle or if he is allowing it to happen unintentionally. The more charitable Saudi position is the former, because that suggests that Obama at least understands what he is doing, even if they think it a mistake and a betrayal. The latter view, for Saudis, sees him as a virtual imbecile who is destroying the Middle East without any understanding or recognition.

The depth of Saudi anger and contempt for the current American leadership is important to understand because it is another critical element of their worldview and policies, as best we can understand them. With the Middle East coming apart at the seams (in Saudi Arabia’s view), the United States—the traditional regional hegemon—is doing nothing to stop it and even encouraging Iran to widen the fissures. Since the United States can’t or won’t do anything, someone else has to, and that someone can only be Saudi Arabia. The dramatic increase in Riyadh’s willingness to intervene abroad, with both financial and military power, has been driven by its sense that dramatic action is required to prevent the region from melting down altogether and taking the kingdom down with it.

That is why the Saudis have been consistently overreacting to events in Washington’s eyes. We look at Bahrain and see an oppressed Shiite majority looking for some degree of political participation and economic benefit from the minority Sunni regime. The Saudis see an Iranian-backed mass uprising that could spread to the kingdom if it were to succeed—which is why the Iranians are helping it do so. We look at the Yemeni civil war and see a quagmire with only a minor Iranian role and little likelihood of destabilizing Saudi Arabia. The Saudis see an Iranian bid to stealthily undermine the kingdom. We see a popular Saudi Shiite cleric who would become a martyr if he is executed. The Saudis see an Iranian-backed firebrand stoking revolution in their country’s oil-producing regions. In the Syrian peace talks, we see a need to bring the Iranians in because of their critical support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The Saudis see the United States legitimizing both a Shiite/Persian/Iranian influence in a majority Sunni Arab state and the murderous, minority Shiite regime. The list goes on.

And in none of these situations is the United States, the power that Riyadh traditionally counted on to help fix its problems, doing much. And where we are, we are just as often favoring Iran or even opposing it.

And though many have always assumed that the Saudis look to free-ride and will bandwagon with whoever is the strongest power in the region, history is quite the opposite. Instead, the Saudis have traditionally fought back against any major power they didn’t like—from the Soviet Union to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—and Iran is now obviously at the top of that list.

So, the Saudis are scared of the rising tide of popular mobilization and Shiite mobilization; they are scared by their loss of control over the oil market and what that is forcing them to do domestically; they are scared by the spillover from the region’s civil wars and the costs that they are being forced to bear to try to prevent that spillover from affecting them; and they are scared that we are abandoning them for Iran. The Saudis’ world, in other words, is pretty scary. And their modus operandi today is the same as it always has been: to lash out to try to beat back the threats that they see and regain control of their circumstances. Hence their stunning intervention in Yemen, their constant escalation in Syria, and now this latest flare-up with Iran.

It’s also why America’s constant appeals to them to just calm down will have no impact except to infuriate them further. Unless we want to take up some of these burdens for the Saudis (their first choice, as always), then we have nothing that they want. It only adds insult to injury when Washington refuses to recognize the threats that they see, does nothing to help them with those threats, and then tries to keep them from doing what they think they need to do to deal with those threats themselves.

It’s also why we should expect to see other crises like this one in future. The Saudis are going to keep taking whatever actions they feel necessary to deter or defeat what they see as Iranian efforts to undermine their external power and their internal stability. In the unstable Middle East of the early 21st century, that aggressiveness is going to have very unpredictable effects. But what looks chaotic to Washington will continue to seem entirely logical from the perspective of Saudi Arabia.

Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack


Publication: Foreign Policy


             

Perils of prediction: Why it’s so hard to guess the fallout of the Saudi-Iran split

I want to sound a note of warning about recent developments between Iran and Saudi Arabia. It is the typical analytic tendency to predict that tomorrow will be essentially the same as yesterday and today. That’s because it is correct in the vast majority of cases.

But that is also why it is often difficult for even the best analysts to recognize—let alone predict—discontinuous change. Major events often catch the finest experts by surprise. I fear that the Middle East has entered a period where major, discontinuous change has become far more possible, even probable.

I see this week’s events in Saudi Arabia and Iran as evidence of just that. Five years ago, the Saudis might not have felt the need to execute Nimr al-Nimr because they did not feel as threatened by a wider Shiite threat (both internal and external), exaggerated though we may believe it to be. Five years ago, the Iranians would probably have settled with a perfunctory verbal condemnation and left it at that. And five years ago, the Saudis probably would have brushed aside any Iranian criticism. The last few days have demonstrated that today is not five years ago. 

A fearful new Middle East

The problem is that the context has changed dramatically. Today there are all-out civil wars burning in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, and would-be civil wars simmering in Egypt, Turkey, Mali, Somalia, and South Sudan. Bahrain, Lebanon, Jordan, and Tunisia all face dangerous internal discord. Iran and Saudi Arabia now lead rival coalitions waging proxy wars—figuratively across the region, and literally across Syria, Yemen, and (to a lesser extent) Iraq. 

The civil wars generate their usual destabilizing spillover in the form of refugees, terrorism, economic problems, secessionism, and radicalization. They both destabilize neighboring states and suck them into their vortices. Fear of further state failure, radicalization from civil wars, and a deepening sectarian divide that is now increasingly an ordering principal in the region have conjured a wider Sunni-Shiite rift. When King Abdullah II of Jordan first warned of this 12 years ago, it seemed highly unlikely. Today, the perception that it is a reality is widespread, and that perception is making it a reality as various countries take actions based on the perception. 

Meanwhile, the plunge in oil prices has undermined the economic foundations of many of the most important countries of the Middle East. They mix with longstanding frustrations over the deficiencies in education, endemic corruption, and misgovernance of the Muslim Middle East. As a result, many regional states that once seemed hopelessly strong, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, now seem dangerously fragile. 

And rightly or wrongly, many of the states of the region feel abandoned by the United States, their traditional protector and mediator.

Up the escalator

I look at this context and worry that the conditions in the Middle East are such that the unlikely and the unexpected seem far more likely. This is not to suggest that we should expect the worst from every situation, but that we should be more careful about predicting that events will occur as they typically would have in a different, more peaceful and stable set of circumstances. 

Do I think that Saudi Arabia and Iran will come to direct blows over this incident? Almost certainly not, at least not yet. But I absolutely see this is part of a dangerous spiral of escalation between them. The Saudis are frightened of American disengagement and ascribe most of the problems of the region (including many of the civil wars) to deliberate Iranian subversion. 

[W]e should be more careful about predicting that events will occur as they typically would have in a different, more peaceful and stable set of circumstances.

As always, their modus operandi in such circumstances is to confront Iran, only they are doing so far more aggressively and boldly than they ever have in the past—something I also attribute to their sense that the region is spinning out of control and therefore they need to assert themselves more than they ever have before to stabilize it. But their actions are highly provocative to Iran, which in turn arrogantly ignores how its own activities (and it has been part of the problems of the region, including the civil wars, even if not to the extent the Saudis believe) frighten and anger the Sunni states. They similarly overlook how their reactions drive the Saudis and their Sunni allies into further paroxysms of frustration and fear.

Consequently, I suspect that there will be subsequent actions on both of their parts, either as a further escalation of this incident, or as the next incident in what has become an increasingly reckless and regular tit-for-tat. 

Some of my most insightful colleagues have suggested that these will play out in the civil wars themselves—in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. That is certainly possible, but in some ways, that might actually be a good response. There are so many bad things happening in those places already that Saudi and Iranian reprisals might seem less provocative in that context. Perhaps the worst they can do (and almost certainly will) is to further dig in their heels against negotiating an end to those conflicts on terms acceptable to the other. However, there is already so little likelihood that either would be willing to make meaningful concessions to the other any time soon that again this might not be much of an escalation.

That is why I worry that the Saudis and/or Iranians will act next somewhere else. Somewhere where their action will stand out and so cannot be missed as a riposte to the other. I don’t know where that might be or in what circumstances, but the region and their rivalry strikes me as having entered that phase. And if they do so, that will push them and the region further into the vicious cycle it seems to have already entered.

Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack



             

What Brookings experts had to say about the biggest Middle East stories of 2015

It’s been another tumultuous year in the Middle East, marked by historic breakthroughs and bouts of brutal violence. Here’s what Brookings experts had to say about the biggest regional stories of 2015:

Deal or no deal: The JCPOA, its regional effects, and the U.S. response

A week before the signing of a historic nuclear accord with Iran, : the timeline for nuclear “breakout,” easing economic sanctions, regional implications, Iran’s evolution, and the effects on U.S. domestic politics. Even after the deal was signed and as “Implementation Day” approaches, these issues remain flashpoints for the debate over U.S. policy toward Tehran. 

After the deal was signed, . Washington’s need to garner support for the agreement meant that it was less effective in supporting solutions to conflicts in Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere. Amid calls from some corners to abandon the deal, , encouraging efforts to strengthen the deal instead. He offered an array of steps that the United States and its allies could undertake to address many of the critics’ concerns.

The deal’s implications cascaded well beyond Iran itself. won’t stabilize the Middle East and that Iran’s regional troublemaking will likely increase. She challenged Arab states to focus their response on helping to end the region’s civil wars and strengthening their own societies, as these efforts would limit Iranian meddling. Broadening the scope, Tanvi Madan wrote that , the deal will likely for engagement over isolation in dealing with Iran. 

[image error] to capitalize on the “Nobel moment” by resisting crackdowns and reminding the world of Tunisia’s relevance and continued need for support, respectively. 

For a run-down of some of the major foreign policy developments elsewhere in the world, . To a more peaceful new year!

Authors

Emma Borden



             

What the liberation of Ramadi means for Iraq, Iran, and the U.S.

This week’s liberation of Ramadi was a victory for Iraq and the United States, but a modest one. Both of those facts are key to understanding what the fall of Ramadi might mean for the future of Iraq and the course of the U.S. campaign there.

Not exactly the D-Day landings

The liberation of Ramadi took seven months to engineer despite enormous advantages on the part of the Iraqi security forces (ISF). For months, Ramadi had been held by no more than 1,000 Da’esh fighters—and probably really only a few hundred, especially during the past month or more. Against this, the ISF had concentrated roughly 10,000 troops with armor and heavy artillery. That’s a 10:1 or even 20:1 force-to-force ratio, which should produce a decisive defeat even against a heavily-entrenched adversary defending an urban-rubble position. 

And while Da’esh fighters have shown themselves to be highly motivated, they have typically proven only modestly more capable than their Arab and Kurdish counterparts. Moreover, the ISF was backed by American air power and supported by American intelligence and advisers. Indeed, a number of the brigades that participated in the operation had been trained and equipped by the U.S.-led coalition (the so-called “Mosul Counterattack Brigades”), and these did perform notably better than Iraqi Army brigades that hadn’t.

[T]he 7-month siege was a product of the ongoing dysfunctions of the Iraqi military command and control structure, and Iraqi politics more generally.

Ultimately, the 7-month siege was a product of the ongoing dysfunctions of the Iraqi military command and control structure, and Iraqi politics more generally. Although Nouri al-Maliki is long gone as Iraq’s commander-in-chief, his politicization of the military lingers. Some incompetent, political hacks have been removed from senior Iraqi command positions but others remain. Moreover, the complex command relationships that Maliki established (in imitation of Saddam and other Arab dictators) to centralize decision-making in his office persists. Throughout the siege of Ramadi, different units participating in the battle reported to different commanders—some of whom refused to cooperate with one another, or even to release their forces to the control of another—paralyzing ISF operations for weeks at a time. 

Complicated friendships

Then there were the problems with the Sunnis. Despite an extremely cooperative governor of Anbar province, it took a very long time to train the hundreds of Sunni tribesmen who participated in the operation. 

It was essential to put a Sunni face on the retaking of an overwhelmingly Sunni town, as well as have security personnel whom the Sunni populace would accept and trust. Iraqis haven’t forgotten the human rights abuses that Shiite militiamen committed after the fall of Tikrit, an event known (and embellished) throughout the Sunni community and that had created real frictions over who would retake and secure Ramadi. These delays are essentially all attributable to the near-total absence of any meaningful process of national reconciliation between the Sunni and Shiite leaders, despite a widespread desire for such among most of the key leaders on both sides.

The last piece of the frozen puzzle was Iran, or more properly, the Iranian-backed Shiite militia leaders. Both the Sunni leaders and the United States made clear to the Iraqi government that neither would support the retaking of Ramadi if Iranian-backed formations of the Shiite militias (the Hashd ash-Shaabi) participated because of the potential for massacres and other actions that would further alienate Iraq’s Sunni community from the central government. Not surprisingly, that did not sit well with many of the leaders of the Hashd, particularly those most-closely tied to Iran such as Hady al-Ameri, Qais al-Ghazali and Abu Mahdi al-Mohandis. It probably also irked Tehran, although Iranian interests are more complex than those of their allies in Iraq. 

In any event, the Iranian-allied Hashd leaders worked hard to prevent the liberation of Ramadi without them. In particular, they threatened Iraqi generals with physical harm—to them or their families—bribed others, and impeded the movement of their forces however they could. Again, there are reports that the Iranians themselves took a hand in this, wanting to ensure at the very least that there was no military success in Iraq for which they could not claim credit.

The American linchpin

Given this array of impediments, how is it that Ramadi was liberated? To be blunt, the United States made it happen. 

For months, the United States had been hammering on the Iraqis to try to get them to retake the city. And when the Iraqis did nothing, we would just demand again, slower and louder than the last time. Naturally, it did not work.

Iraq needs a lot more than just American haranguing. Endlessly pointing out to the Iraqis that doing something is in their best interests (as we see them) is fruitless. The United States created a power vacuum in 2003 and then recreated it in 2011. That, coupled with Iraq’s pernicious political culture, means that individual Iraqis will not take collective action—no matter how beneficial it would be for them to do so—unless each one can be assured of his or her security and benefits from doing so. 

Iraq needs a lot more than just American haranguing.

That is why the role of the United States is so crucial. The United States can serve as mediator, buffer, and disburser of benefits among the different Iraqi factions, as it did from 2007 to 2009 and again briefly in 2014. That is the critical missing part to get the Iraqi political machine clunking into action. It is difficult and time-consuming, and it is never pretty—even when it works—but it can work and typically does. 

Thus, what changed in Iraq in the past 2 to 3 months was that the United States not only kept the pressure on Iraq to move against Ramadi, but also provided the resources to do so. The United States increased its air and intelligence assets (modestly, but noticeably in certain categories) and provided new training and equipment (particularly in combat breaching operations). That made all the difference. It not only gave some Iraqi units the confidence to take bolder action, of far greater importance, the commitment of additional U.S. resources gave various Iraqi political and military leaders the confidence to take bolder action in the face of the obstacles created by Iraq’s twisted politics and the deliberate obstructionism of Iran’s principal Iraqi allies.. 

So what Ramadi demonstrates yet again is that the Iraqis are capable of doing what we want and need them to (and which most of them want to do as well). But they simply cannot do so without American assistance, and that assistance has to include effort and resources, not just nagging. 

Enter: Iran

Just as Ramadi was a modest victory for the United States, so it was a modest defeat for Iran. 

That said, however, I don’t want to reinforce the common narrative that the struggle for Iraq is a zero sum game between Washington and Tehran. There is a struggle for influence between them. And it is often the case that what is good for Iran is bad for the United States, and vice versa. However, it is not the case that anything that is bad for Iran is good for the United States and vice versa. The two countries have both interests in common and interests that are diametrically opposed. That’s what makes it so complex, but also creates the potential for progress and even resolution of the Iraqi civil war.

In the case of Ramadi, the fact that the Iranian-backed Hashd were largely kept out of the (eventually) successful operation was a modest victory for the United States and a modest defeat for Iran for three reasons. 

Most directly, it reinforced the narrative that began at Tikrit that the ISF, backed by the United States, were adequate on their own to liberate Sunni cities. So far, the Iranian-backed Hashd has shown a capability to “liberate” ethnically mixed terrain from Da’esh, notably Jurf ash-Shukhur southwest of Baghdad, and Diyala province northeast of it. (And both were only “liberated” through vicious campaigns of ethnic cleansing to eliminate the Sunni components of the population). They have also demonstrated a capacity to defend territory against Da’esh assaults (with the fall of Ramadi in May calling into question whether the American-backed ISF could say the same).
It bolstered the standing of the pro-American leaders of the ISF and the Iraqi government, most notably including Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. In the Iraqi political arena, being “pro-American” simply means being willing to accept help from the United States (in addition to help from other countries, most notably Iran). 
The other side of the coin was also true, that the liberation of Ramadi has slightly weakened the position of Iran’s staunchest and most militant allies in Iraq, men like al-Ameri, al-Mohandis, and al-Ghazali. That too helps the United States and hurts Iran.

However, Ramadi should not be taken as evidence that progress in Iraq requires the United States to marginalize, exclude or even “defeat” Iran there, as if that were even possible.

Iran has always had a very broad and deep set of interests in Iraq. While Iran does not share all of America’s interests in Iraq, it does share some. Tehran has its dreams and wishes on the one hand, and its minimum necessities on the other. Over time, we have seen the Iranians shift among these priorities based on what they believed possible given their capabilities and circumstances in Iraq at the time. At various points, the Iranians have done things that were very much in our interests because they were also in Iran’s, contradicting the perspective that the two have diametrically opposed interests and their competition is zero-sum. Both Iran and the United States urged Iraqi Shiites to participate in the U.S.-engineered democratic process in Iraq between 2003 and 2005. Both urged Maliki to stop provoking and alienating the Sunnis in 2012 and 2013 for fear that he was driving the country to civil war. Today, both would like to see Iraq (or at least Arab Iraq) remain united under a democratic government in Baghdad (which would invariably be dominated by the Shiites) and both would like to see Da’esh obliterated.

Ramadi should not be taken as evidence that progress in Iraq requires the United States to marginalize, exclude or even “defeat” Iran there, as if that were even possible.

It is also the case that Iran’s interests are not identical to those of its closest allies in Iraq. At the most basic level, Iran would like to see a stable, unified, Shiite-dominated Iraq. Its closest allies—again, men like al-Ameri, al-Ghazali, and al-Muhandis—want to dominate Iraq, and that will be very difficult if Iraq is stable or unified (a core interest of Tehran’s). The vast majority of Iraqis, including critical Shiite powerbrokers like Ayatollah Sistani, Ammar al-Hakim of ISCI, and Muqtada as-Sadr dislike these men and would try to neuter them once the security threat that justifies their influence is gone. Likewise, Former Prime Minister Maliki—often seen as an important Iranian ally, despite his repeated defiance of Iran while he was prime minister—is in a similar position: he probably cannot regain executive power if Iraq’s civil war ends, Da’esh is evicted, and the Sunnis brought back into government. At the very least, the Sunnis would never accept him as prime minister again. The best evidence is that Iran uses all of these Iraqis to advance its interests: as leverage when things are going well, as “Plan Bs” if things are going badly. 

Overlapping endgames?

That brings us back to Ramadi. Ramadi was unquestionably a defeat for the likes of al-Ameri, al-Ghazali, al-Muhandis and probably even Maliki. It was a defeat for Iran too, but a lesser defeat and in different ways. For Iran’s Iraqi allies, Ramadi represents an alternative path forward for Iraq, one in which their services—as the defenders of a militant Shiite populace against a ravening Sunni threat—are no longer needed because the ISF with American-backing can do the job. For Iran, that may smart in the near term, but it may also be perfectly acceptable as Tehran takes the longer view. 

If the ISF and the Americans reunify Iraq, bring the Sunnis back into the fold, stabilize the country and drive Da’esh out of Iraq, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing for Iran. It’s mostly a good thing. Yes, it would mean much greater American influence in Iraq than in 2014, but Iran would still retain enormous sway there. And Iran isn’t going anywhere, whereas the United States would eventually draw down its involvement in Iraq. In return, Iran would get an end to the Iraqi civil war, which was creating tremendous problems for Iran and Iranian society. It would also get the resurrection of a unified, Shiite-dominated government likely to have at least decent, if not close, ties to Iran. 

[T]he lesson of Ramadi is that that future will never come to be without a lot more American help.

That’s a scenario that ought to be acceptable to the United States, too. It meets virtually all of our needs and interests. Ideally, the Iraqi government would lean more toward Washington than Tehran, but that’s a struggle—the struggle for political influence in Iraq—worth having, and one infinitely better than the situation in Iraq today. 

But the lesson of Ramadi is that that future will never come to be without a lot more American help. President Obama’s refrain that “Americans shouldn’t do for Iraqis what Iraqis should do for themselves,” is at best a tautology, and therefore no guide for policy. The truth is that, as the liberation of Ramadi demonstrated, there are things that we need the Iraqis to do, that they want to do, and that they can do, but only—only—with our assistance.

Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack