Conflict without borders

Why “war on terror” will never end

Let’s begin with a programming note. Tomorrow morning I’ll be a guest on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal from 9:15 to 10 o’clock. We’re going to talk about my podcast and take calls from viewers. Based on experience, I expect to hear questions and comments from people across the political spectrum – a testament to the diversity of C-SPAN’s audience. Tune in! Call in! 

Still at war in Iraq

As I said at the top of Tuesday’s episode with Renad Mansour, the U.S. airstrikes against Iraqi militias in early February made headlines for a few days before being swallowed up by the hurricane of news coming from the Middle East. The U.S. military fired 125 missiles at seven sites in Iraq and Syria at a total of 85 targets. The Pentagon claimed 80 of the targets were destroyed.

In a period of relative calm, such an action would have been bigger news. But since the U.S. has been at war for close to a quarter century, stories about missiles and drones vaporizing our enemies – or killing civilians instead – are ordinary now. I sense that most Americans had no idea who was targeted beyond the vague description of “Iran-backed Iraqi militias.” Or maybe some asked why U.S. troops are still there. 

President Biden was authorized to order the bombing under legislation approved by Congress in 2001 and 2002, just as his predecessors were on many occasions over the past two decades. Some Congress members objected. Attempts to repeal the post-9/11 use-of-force authorizations have repeatedly fallen short of the necessary votes. Thus, the U.S. is in a state of permanent war against each new enemy that emerges from the quagmire. The president may order another round of missile strikes tomorrow morning if he deems it necessary to defend U.S. interests or personnel in the Greater Middle East.  

The February airstrikes were retaliation for scores of attacks by Iraqi militias on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, as the war in Gaza has inspired groups across the region to attack Israel’s most powerful backer. In January, three U.S. service members were killed by a drone strike at a small outpost in Jordan.

As Mansour explains in a must-read essay (no paywall) for Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the armed groups who are fighting an on-and-off war with the U.S. once fought alongside American forces against ISIS. Now they are pointing their guns in the wrong direction, provoking retaliatory bombing from Washington. But the retaliation is counterproductive, writes Mansour. “Killing senior leaders has at times disrupted the chain of command, leading to an increase in freewheeling, undisciplined groups willing to strike without the consent of the PMF leadership or its Iranian allies.” PMF is short for Popular Mobilization Forces, the armed groups who fought ISIS after the Iraqi army crumbled rather than battle the militants a decade ago.

Think of it this way: the U.S. military continues to kick a beehive, only to watch the wasps scatter for a moment and then sting again. And the armed U.S. presence in Iraq and Syria is a catalyst for violence, rather than a deterrent. As long as the United States maintains troops in a region where it has caused incalculable damage since 2003, it will be attacked. I asked Mansour, an expert on Iraq at Chatham House, if he agreed.

“It’s a tricky scenario the U.S. and its allies have gotten themselves into, partly as a consequence of U.S. actions and its history in the region,” said Mansour, who said bombing and sanctions fail to produce the necessary reforms that would lead to a coherent Iraqi state. Instead, these armed groups – some aligned with Iran, some more focused on Iraqi autonomy – have become interconnected with the state politically, militarily, and economically. They can’t be bombed away.

“Every U.S. president since George W. Bush famously declared ‘mission accomplished’ five or six weeks after the invasion in 2003, has had some kind of victory in Iraq, and yet it’s not a complete victory. And because of that, Washington feels that every few years it gets pulled back in. So these armed groups aren’t necessarily the problem in and of themselves. They are a symptom of a problem in Iraq. The state is incoherent. Power is diffused… and the political system set up in 2003 is unable to govern,” Mansour explained.

What’s the end game here? There is none. Yes, U.S. and Iraqi leaders have been negotiating the terms of an eventual withdrawal of the last 2,500 American troops. Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammad al-Sudani will visit Washington for the first time on April 15. He has protested U.S. airstrikes as a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty. But a “war on terror” – enabled by 2001/2002 legislation Congress refuses to repeal – has no end. Each time the U.S. seems to “solve” one problem, another emerges. Toppling Saddam Hussein led to civil war, which led to the emergence of al-Qaeda in Iraq. After it was defeated, its survivors soon regrouped as the Islamic State. Even though ISIS has been territorially defeated, U.S. officials still are reluctant to exit. But each day U.S. forces remain in Iraq and Syria, they can be targeted by the militias – former allies against ISIS – who hold significant influence in Baghdad. You can file all of this under the law of unintended consequences. By toppling the secular, Sunni counter-balance to Iran (Saddam), the U.S. opened the door to Shia influence from Tehran.

“Especially across the south of Iraq and the Shia heartland, there’s been a growing movement that sees Iran as the occupier now,” Mansour said. “Iran is so influential [in Iraq], but the government of Iraq is unable to provide basic services. People lack electricity. They don’t have good medicine. They don’t have clean water. Many people are still struggling, so who do they blame? They blame the government,” that is heavily influenced by Iran. A generation after “liberation,” Iraq is not a free country.

As Mansour said in our conversation, the armed groups aren’t going anywhere. They are part of the state. And in his most trenchant observation, he explained why the U.S. cannot bomb its way to a stable Iraq.

“It is very hard to confine a conflict to the boundaries of a country, these artificial boundaries that were created in the Middle East for countries like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon. Conflict is not confined to these borders,” said Mansour, who illustrates the transnational nature of today’s crisis in this paper for Chatham House about the tiny Sinjar district in northern Iraq.

I also promised to include a link in this newsletter to Brown University’s Costs of War Project about how much money the war in Iraq continues to cost the U.S. Treasury.

On March 19, 2003, President Bush calmly told Americans in a televised address from the Oval Office that U.S. forces were invading Iraq to “free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

“Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force. And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half measures, and we will accept no outcome but victory,” Bush intoned. A generation later, victory cannot be defined and the conflict will not end.

Who is ISIS-K?

One reason the U.S. is fighting a “forever war” is because groups like ISIS in Iraq created offshoots in other countries. One of them, ISIS-Khorasan, is responsible for several spectacular acts of terrorism targeting civilians. It was behind the massacres at the Kabul airport in August 2021 where 13 U.S service members and 170 Afghan civilians were killed; the memorial service for General Qasem Soleimani in Iran this January; and the Moscow concert hall where more than 140 people were gunned down in March.

In Thursday’s episode, Peter Bergen talks about ISIS-K’s origins, motivations, and aims, and how radical jihadist groups have morphed since 2001. Bergen is a national security analyst at CNN and vice president at New America. He has written several must-read books about radical Islam, terrorism, and U.S. foreign policy, including “The Longest War'' and “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” In 2021 I interviewed the author about his bin Laden biography. Listen here.

As if he isn’t busy enough, Bergen hosts an excellent podcast, “In the Room with Peter Bergen.” I recommend listening to his new interview with Christine Abizaid, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

In our conversation for History As It Happens, Bergen traced ISIS-K’s origins to Syria because that is where the Islamic State was born.

“The pre-history of all this is al-Qaeda in Iraq, obviously born in Iraq. It went through multiple changes of names, and was basically defeated by the U.S. military in 2010. It then migrated into Syria, which it had a long relationship with because [its] foreign fighters came through Syria with the connivance or amber light of the Syrian government because the Syrian government isn’t a fan of the U.S. presence in Iraq,” said Bergen.

After Syria’s civil war erupted in 2011, the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq formed the Islamic State group as Syria disintegrated. These fighters then migrated back into Iraq around 2014 and proceeded to capture an enormous amount of territory, including Mosul.

Bergen was somewhat surprised that ISIS-Khorasan was able to pull off the Moscow concert hall massacre since it is 2000 miles from its “home base” in Afghanistan. There is no doubt now, however, that this terrorist organization has the desire and capability to spill blood in other countries as it continues to oppose the Taliban in Afghanistan. 

This Reuters article about ISIS-K’s 29-year-old leader, Sanaullah Ghafari is also worth reading. 

And this essay in Foreign Affairs by Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson explains why U.S. influence in the region is weak.

What’s next?

Catholic University historian Julia Young will return to the podcast to discuss the origins of the border crisis. I just reviewed Jonathan Blitzer’s book about the causes of migration from Central America to the United States from around 1980, when the U.S. began backing repressive regimes for Cold War reasons.