Al-Baghdadi Is Dead. The Story Doesn’t End Here.
President Trump boasts of defeating the Islamic State.
He's only showing how ignorant he is.
The killing of the founder and leader
of the Islamic State by United States commandos operating in Syria should
certainly further weaken the most vile and deadly Islamist movement to emerge
in the Middle East in the modern era.
The world is certainly a better place
with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dead and a measure of justice meted out on behalf of
all the women ISIS raped, all the journalists ISIS beheaded and the tens of
thousands of Syrians and Iraqis it abused. Good for President Trump for
ordering it, for the intelligence agents who set it up, for the allies who
aided in it and for the Special Forces who executed it.
But this story is far from over, and it
could have many unexpected implications. Let’s start at home.
President
Trump was effusive in his praise for the U.S. intelligence agencies who found
and tracked al-Baghdadi to the lair in Syria where he blew himself up to avoid
being captured. In his news conference, Trump went on and on about just how
good the men and women in our intelligence agencies are.
Well, Mr. President, those are the same
intelligence agencies who told you that Russia intervened in our last election
in an effort to tip the vote to you and against Hillary Clinton (and are still
intervening). When our intel agencies exposed that reality, you impugned their
integrity and quality.
And the same intelligence agencies who
tracked down al-Baghdadi are the same ones who produced two whistle-blowers
high up in your White House — who complained that you, Mr. Trump, abused the
power of your office to get Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, touching off this
impeachment inquiry.
And those same intelligence agencies
whom you hailed as heroes for tracking down al-Baghdadi, Mr. Trump, are the
same “deep state,” the same agencies and whistle-blowers whom your White House
press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, just smeared as “radical unelected
bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution.’’
So thank you, Mr. Trump, for clearing
up this confusion. We now know that the same intelligence services who have
been heroic in protecting us from those who want to attack our constitutional
democracy from abroad are the same heroes who have stepped up to protect our
constitutional democracy from within. Unlike you, Mr. Trump, they took
seriously their oath to do both.
As
for the future of the Middle East, let’s not forget that ISIS was the Sunni
Muslim jihadist organization that emerged after President Barack Obama’s
administration eliminated the previous holder of the worst-person-in-the-world
title, Osama bin Laden. But al-Baghdadi’s death — a very good thing in and of
itself — is not the end of our troubles in and from the Middle East.
Trump’s effort to play down the
significance of President Obama’s killing of bin Laden — while playing up his
killing of al-Baghdadi as the key to creating the peace to end all peace — only
shows how ignorant he is about the region.
ISIS emerged in 2014 as the product of
three loose factions or movements, as I pointed out in a column back in 2015.
One faction comprised the foreign
volunteers. Some were hardened jihadists, but many were losers, misfits,
adventure seekers and young men who had never held power, a job or a girl’s
hand and
they joined ISIS to get all three. ISIS offered a paycheck, power and sexual
release to men and women coming from closed societies or cultures where none of
that was available.
ISIS’s second faction — its brains and
military backbone — was composed of former Sunni Baathist army officers and
local Iraqi Sunnis and tribes, who gave ISIS passive support. Iraqi Sunnis
constitute about a third of Iraq’s population. They had ruled Iraq for
generations, and many Sunnis in the Iraqi military were enraged, humiliated and
frustrated by how the U.S. invasion of Iraq had overturned that order and put
the Iraqi Shiite majority in charge.
ISIS also derived a lot of passive
support from just average Iraqi Sunnis after Iran and pro-Iranian Shiites in
power in Baghdad, led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki — whom the Bush
administration tragically installed — used their power to further abuse Iraqi
Sunnis and keep them from jobs and out of the military.
For many Iraqi Sunni villagers under
ISIS control, ISIS was just less bad than the brutality and discrimination they
experienced under Iraq’s pro-Iranian Shiite-led government back then. Google
“Iraqi Shiite militias and power drills” and you’ll see that ISIS didn’t invent
torture in Iraq.
Fortunately,
we and the Iraqis finally figured that out, and Iraq has a much better
government today. But the U.S. keeps repeating the same mistake in the Middle
East: overestimating the power of religious ideology and underappreciating the
impact of bad governance.
As Sarah Chayes, who long worked in
Afghanistan and has written an important book — “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security”
— puts it: “Nothing feeds extremism more than the in-your-face corruption and
injustice” that some of America’s closest Middle East allies administer daily
to their people.
The third ISIS faction was composed of
the true religious ideologues, led by al-Baghdadi. They have their own
apocalyptic version of Islam. But it would not have resonated so far and wide
were it not for the first two factors listed above.
And that leads us back to Trump and his
foreign policy. Trump has never met a dictator he did not like. He is blind to
the fact that the next al-Baghdadi is being incubated today in some prison in
Egypt, where President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, whom Trump once actually
called “my favorite dictator,’’ is not only rounding up violent Jihadists but
liberal nonviolent journalists, activists and politicians. Their only crime is
that they want to have a say in their country’s future and help to create an
environment where they can realize their full potential — so they will not have
to look for dignity, power, a job or a girl’s hand from extremist groups like
ISIS.
When Trump praises Baghdadi as his
favorite victim and el-Sisi as his favorite dictator, all he is doing is
walking in place. We’re actually getting nowhere.
And that brings me back to Syria.
Syrian Sunnis supported ISIS for the same reason Iraqi Sunnis did. Iran, the
pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia, the Shiite-Alawite Syrian regime of Bashar Assad
and Russia have all collaborated to create a pro-Iranian Shiite minority
government in Damascus. Of course they gave Trump a free pass to kill Baghdadi!
His death just makes it that much easier for them to rule Syria without sharing
power with the Sunnis. As long as that’s the case, there will be no stability
there.
Finally, Trump kept going on and on in
his news conference about how he, in his infinite wisdom, was keeping U.S.
troops in Syria to protect the oil fields there so maybe U.S. oil companies
could exploit them. He even boasted that while he was against the Iraq war, we
should have taken over all of Iraq’s oil fields to pay for it.
This
is disgusting talk, and again, a prescription for trouble in the future. If
America has any role in the Middle East today, it is not to protect the oil
wells, but to protect and enhance what I call the “islands of decency.”
These are places like Iraqi and Syrian
Kurdistan, Jordan, the U.A.E., Oman, Lebanon and the frail democracies in
Tunisia and Baghdad. None of these are developed democracies; Oman, Jordan and
the U.A.E. are monarchies. But perfect is not on the menu in the Middle East
right now. And these countries do promote more moderate versions of Islam and
religious tolerance, they do empower their women and they do encourage modern
education.
These are the necessary but not
sufficient antidotes to ISIS. They are worth preserving and enhancing in hopes
that they can develop one day into something better for all their peoples. Just
look at the democracy protests in Lebanon. You can see where the young people
want to go.
Only Trump would boast of defeating
ISIS and thinking that all that needs to be done now is to protect the Middle
East’s oil wells and America’s favorite dictators — and not its wells of
decency.
No comments:
Post a Comment