The unmaking of the Middle East

[Valin]

The Weekly Standard:

Obama’s historic misunderstanding

MARY HABECK and THOMAS DONNELLY

Jan 20, 2014

 

Far beyond the question of al Qaeda participation in the September 11, 2012, attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and others, David Kirkpatrick’s notorious New York Times article—claiming no international terror group had a role in the assault—is evidence that, 12 years after 9/11, we still don’t understand the enemy. More fatally, even after seven decades of direct engagement and involvement in the greater Middle East, we do not understand the nature of the war.

 

The al Qaeda war—whether George Bush’s “global war on terror” or Barack Obama’s “overseas contingency operations”—is best understood as a component campaign in a larger contest for power across the Muslim world. The al Qaeda network is a unique and uniquely lethal participant in this contest, but most of the other local contestants, that is, the states of the region, are just as important to the outcome. Al Qaeda may be, for the moment, a “non-state” actor (though the “emirate” in western Iraq and eastern Syria walks and quacks like a state), but looking at al Qaeda in isolation distorts our view. An even bigger failure has been an inability to establish our enduring interests and a definition of victory. Thus, President Obama is attempting to turn the Middle East war into something alien to its nature: a war from which the United States can easily withdraw.

 

(Snip)

 

The next president will have an opportunity, though perhaps a rapidly shrinking one, to rebuild a Middle East that we and the rest of the world can more easily live with. To do so will demand, alas, the use of military force—it won’t be a job for diplomacy or “soft power” alone. That president will have to go to war with the force that he inherits, and it will be a smaller, less trained force.

 

But that president will only succeed if he begins with a “far-reaching act of judgment” to grasp the nature of the war, rightly understanding the al Qaeda network, solving the shifting puzzle of Middle Eastern states, and setting a course guided by American interests and principles. The entire region—states and nonstate actors, ethnic and sectarian groups, militants of all stripes, and the ordinary people on the street—is engaged in a two-fold contest for power: over who will control the future of the region and who will control the future of Islam. We can pretend that the contest does not affect us, but if the enemy wins, he has promised to bring the war home to us again. We may have lost interest in the Middle East, but the Middle East has not lost interest in us.