How To Defeat ISIL? The Governance Problem

Howard Bloom is, for lack of a better term, an original thinker. He penned “The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History,” “Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century,” and most recently, “The Mohammed Code.” Bloom wrote this op-ed for us in response to the question he asks at the beginning of the piece: how we do defeat ISIL. He calls for a “war of tiny nibbles, not giant bites.” Read on. The Editor. How do we defeat ISIL? The traditional forms of war we resorted to in Iraq and Afghanistan did almost as much harm to us as they did to our enemies. They busted our budgets and left the nations we’d invaded worse off — and more susceptible than ever to jihadism. So tens of thousands of boots on the ground is the wrong way to go. We cannot eradicate ISIL’s ideology — jihadism. It is part of the legacy of Mohammed’s life. Remember, Mohammed commanded 65 military campaigns, fought in 27 of them, and called himself nabiyyu ‘l-malhamah, “the prophet of war.” According to the Universal Sunnah Foundation in Pakistan, the Prophet conquered an average of 317 square miles of territory a day for eight years straight. That’s a difficult role model to overcome. But we can deliver the jihadists a steady string of defeats. John F. Kennedy said, “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” The research of social psychologists like Robert Cialdini agrees. Victories bring recruits. Unrelenting strings of defeats can send recruits packing. This means that ISIL has to be defeated by war. But a new kind of war. The kind of war that the jihadists have pioneered since the early days of Osama bin Laden — tech-empowered guerrilla war. A war of tiny nibbles, not giant bites. We must become ever more ingenious in evolving an approach that we’ve employed for years against al Qaeda and its allies in Yemen and Somalia — using the least to accomplish the most. We need to wait and watch for vulnerable moments. We need to use satellites, drones, and the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) sensors in our aircraft to spot moments of weakness and moments of opportunity. Then we need to use pinpoint air strikes and quick insertions of our tilt-rotor-enabled Marines to eliminate ISIL’s leadership, its strategic assets, and the symbols of its might—its equivalent of World Trade Centers. ISIL has one clear weak point. It attacks using technicals — pickup trucks with machine guns. The Islamic State glories in columns of these trucks. It uses these lines of pickups in victory parades and in assaults on towns and cities. Our challenge is to look for every parade of these vehicles and to eliminate it. ISIL may adapt by using ordinary cars. Our job will then be to spot the normal-looking autos on their way to an attack. ISIL may adapt even more by sending its cars out in a manner that looks like normal civilian traffic. Our job will be to pinpoint the vehicles carrying armed jihadists and to incinerate them. But our biggest problem is holding the territories in which we weaken ISIL’s grip. Why? Syria and Iraq have been ripened for ISIL’s rise by a war between Sunnis and Shiites. A puppet war. The so-called Syrian Civil War in which roughly 200,000 have died. In one corner of the Syrian conflict is Saudi Arabia, the champion of the Sunni faith. In the other is Iran, the champion of Shiism. Saudi Arabia has cultivated a proxy army that we call the “Syrian rebels.” Why? To stop the rise of Iran as a superpower. Iran is hell-bent on dominating not just the Middle East, but on leading the world’s 1.6 billion Moslems. That’s why Iran is working so hard on nuclear projects. It wants recognition as a global force on a par with Britain. And Iran has been making slow but steady progress toward this goal. Iran’s military strategy is highly unconventional. Iran does not invade. It works through proxies. Brigadier General Qasem Soleimani, the master of Iran’s proxy armies, says that his “portfolio” includes proxy armies—puppet forces–in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Gaza (Hamas and Islamic Jihad), and, most important, Iraq. In Iraq, Iran has two proxy armies: the Badr Brigade and Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army. After Saddam fell, much of the Badr Brigade melted into the Iraqi army and police force as a sleeper force. Meanwhile, Iran laid low for five years, from the American invasion in 2003 until 2008. It waited for America to grow war weary. Then Iran ordered its proxy armies in Iraq to lay down their arms so that we American’s could declare peace and go home. And so Iran could take over. Quietly. Invisibly. Through surrogates. To Saudi Arabia, Iran’s takeover of Iraq was glaringly obvious. Worse, it was an existential threat. Why? Remember, the war between Saudi and Iranian proxies in Syria is also a war between two forms of Islam—Sunni Islam and Shiite Islam. Since 1942, Syria and Iraq had been key partners in the most important Sunni alliance in the Middle East, an alliance that dominated the region for over 40 years and that dwarfed Shiite Iran. That alliance was the Arab League. Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia were the Arab League’s pillars. But in 1979 Syria left the Sunni fold and defected to the Shiite side. It allied itself with Iran. That’s why the Iranian acquisition of Iraq left Saudi Arabia hysterical. With both Syria and Iraq on the side of the Shiite enemy, the Saudis felt encircled by Iran. And some Saudis predicted the end of Islam, by which they meant the utter extermination of their form of Islam, Sunni Islam. Then, in 2011, another pillar of the Arab League — Egypt — left the Saudi side. Cairo was taken over by the Moslem Brotherhood. And Mohammed Morsi of the Moslem Brotherhood, president of Egypt on his first foreign trip went to the state that Saudi Arabia sees today as its arch enemy… Iran. Three years ago, Saudi Arabia fought back against its Iranian envelopment. How? It funded proxy armies in Syria, armies whose aim was to topple Bashar Assad and return Syria to the Sunni fold. Those Saudi puppet troops are what we call the Syrian opposition, the Syrian rebels. And the support for these rebels came from more than just the Saudis. It came from two other Sunni powers, Qatar and Turkey But the rebels were a contentious bunch. They fought things out among themselves. The jihadist rebels were far more ruthless and enthusiastic about killing than their “moderate” rivals. So the jihadists won. From that triumph arose ISIL, the Islamic State. Today when the Islamic State subjugates a new town, seizes another oil well, or snatches a strategic asset like a dam or an airport, Sunnis in places like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Lebanon secretly cheer. They see the success as a victory for the Sunni alliance over the forces of Iran. They see a Sunni triumph over Iran’s Shiism. For us, that’s a problem. A big one. If our strategy of degrading ISIL by nibbles, not bites succeeds, we will be thrown back on the next step—finding forces that can hold the territory we help gain. And, more important, supporting a government that can govern. To get a sense of the governance problem, look at the flaws in the way that Iran treated Iraq once it gained control of Baghdad. Under Tehran’s close friend, Iranian Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki, the Iranians did not treat Iraq with the dignity of an Iranian province. Iraqis say that Iran treated Iraq like a shabby, junk-strewn back yard. Among other things, al Maliki attempted to jail Sunni members of his government. His soldiers and police demanded bribes from the populace. And al Maliki proved incapable of stopping the almost daily bombings of markets and other crowded civilian spaces. In other words, an Iranian pawn utterly alienated Iraq’s Sunni population. ISIL has won many of those Sunnis over. It has brought peace, stability, and the end of bribes to the sixteen waliyehs—provinces—it rules. The real trick will be to offer an alternative regime that can outdo ISIL at delivering peace. No car bombings in market places. No mortar attacks from insurgents. No bribery to the police, soldiers, and government officials. And no persecution of either Shiites or Sunnis. The Moslem nation that is most likely to be able to offer these things is one we’ve refused to ally with—Syria—the Syria of Bashar Assad. This means that we have two tasks ahead of us. We’ve used our new technologies to invent new forms of asymmetric warfare, warfare enabled by drones, tilt-rotor empowered Marines, SEAL teams, Special Forces and advanced sensing and processing systems in aircraft. It’s time to use them. Task two? We have to make giant strides in aiding unstable nations in governance. We have to bring superior governance to Iraq and Syria.

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Howard Bloom

How To Defeat ISIL? The Governance Problem

Posted on October 6, 2014

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