On Thursday it was the plight of 40K people trapped on top of a mountain and facing annihilation that captured the attention of the American public, including me. Many of them are still up there. Since the US has been dropping supplies some of the Yazidi have had sufficient food and water to be able to escape off the north face of the mountain and make a 12 miles desert hike to the Syrian border where they have been assisted by Syrian Kurds. There appear to still be a substantial number of people remaining on the mountain. There is still a relief mission to be performed.
However, President Obama is already making longer term plans for a heightened level of US participation in the conflicts in Iraq.
Obama pledges long-term campaign to fight Iraq's spreading jihadist crisis US president admits there is no 'quick fix', as minorities flee Isis onslaught in northern Iraq and British aircraft join relief efforts
Barack Obama has committed the US to long-term involvement in Iraq, warning that the rapidly evolving crisis in the north would not be solved quickly.
Conceding that the advance of the Islamic State (formerly Isis) forces had been swifter than anticipated – details emerged on Saturday of the jihadists opening another front as they crossed into Lebanon from Syria – the president accepted there was no quick fix. His warning came as the archbishop of Irbil's Chaldean Catholics told the Observer fewer than 40 Christians remained in north-western Iraq after a jihadist rampage that has forced thousands to flee from Mosul and the Nineveh plains into Irbil in the Kurdish north.
After taking in up to 1.2 million refugees since mid-June, the Kurds of northern Iraq are urging Obama not to let up in air strikes against Isis, which on Friday was only 50km from Irbil and advancing east towards the Kurdish capital. At least four US air strikes appear to have slowed the momentum of the jihadists, Kurdish peshmerga forces said on Saturday. Officials in Irbil, including Iraq's former foreign minister Hoshyer Zebari, a Kurd who quit his national post in June, urged Obama to continue the strikes. He described the attacks as "a critical decision for Kurdistan, Iraq, and the entire region ... intended to degrade the terrorists' capabilities and achieve strategic gains that have been very effective".
Obama admitted that rebuilding the Iraqi military, fostering trust among Sunnis and negating the threat from jihadists would be a long-term project. He added: "I don't think we're going to solve this problem in weeks. This is going to take some time."
I would certainly agree with Obama's statement that there is no quick fix for the problems in Iraq. He is the fourth successive president to drop bombs on the place in the name of fixing the problems. The question is what is he going to do now that is going to somehow be magically different from all that has been done before.
In addition to the mission to assist in the refugee crisis, Obama's other stated aim is the protection of Americans in Iraq. On the face of it, that is something that the American public is usually inclined to support. The only Americans that get mentioned in his news briefings are diplomatic personnel and the few hundred military advisers. However, there are other Americans there who work for various US corporations with interests in Iraq, many of them being oil companies. They would seem to also be included in the list of Americans needing protection. If the ISIS forces are not checked in their advance, many of these people would likely be in danger if they remain in Iraq.
So where is all this leading us? Obama is insistent that his intention is to support the Iraqi army and the various Kurdish forces in reasserting control over the country without putting anymore American boots on the ground. Well that sounds nice, but can we count on things working out that way? Here is an analysis of the present situation with the Iraqi army and the Kurdish forces that I find convincing.
ISIS beating Iraqis Kurds lack Heart Ammo
The Islamic militia ISIS has been able to roll back both the Iraqi army and the Kurdish peshmerga force because one lacks the "heart" for a fight while the other lacks the firepower, according to Americans familiar with both forces.
ISIS has easily swept the Iraqi army from Anbar province in the southwest of Iraq as well as much of northern Iraq and then blunted attempts by the Iraqi government to retake cities.
The Kurdish peshmerga was expected to be a more formidable force, but they have also lost ground to ISIS, including the vital Mosul dam, in recent days.
"It is not clear whether either the peshmerga or the ISF (Iraq Security Force) can prevent ISIS from seizing villages and outlying infrastructure that ISIS desires to control,” said Jessica Lewis, the research director at the Institute of the Study of War.
On paper, ISIS should be no match for the Iraqi and Kurdish forces. The ISF had more than 270,000 troops and about 340 tanks, while a conservative estimate of the peshmerga force is 80,000.
"ISIS is strategically dividing the military forces of the ISF and the peshmerga in order to compromise their defenses and prevent them from mounting effective offensive campaigns,” Lewis told ABC News.
But the problems go deeper than coordination, particularly with the Iraqi army.
"They are very weak and if it’s left up to them, it’s over," a source who served in the U.S. Army in Iraq and has continued to work there as a contractor told ABC News.
He said that he has found the Iraqi people to be more dedicated to their ancestral ties as opposed to their national identity, saying they "are loyal to their tribes, not their country.”
The discussion about the problems of a nation perpetually engulfed by long standing ethnic conflicts ever being able to turn itself into a self sufficient functional society has been going on for over a decade now. Since the US pulled out the last of its military forces two years ago, the government of Iraq has been a continuous squabble. It is clear that the Kurds would like to be a separate country and the powers in Baghdad are reluctant to give them the resources that might enable to pull that off. Military advisers and air support aren't going to fix this problem.
As I see it, the real problem for the US is that in the course of the US occupation American economic interest became entrenched there. Many felt that was in fact a major purpose of the occupation. There doesn't seem to be any interest in breaking off those ties. As long as the ramshackle Iraqi government chugged along they could keep their operations going with lots of contractors. ISIS poses a real threat to that. Can Obama find a way to remove that threat and let things go back to chugging along? With the perpetual volatility of the region, that really doesn't seem plausible. The long term campaign could get very long and very messy.