With George W. Bush’s popularity back on the rise these days and the Middle East deteriorating under current US leadership, it’s no surprise that people seek him out to discuss American policy, especially against ISIS. The Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom interviewed the former president on a wide range of topics, but The Hill noticed his response to the current disintegration in Iraq. The only way to defeat ISIS, Bush said, was to have boots on the ground — and implied that what has happened in the past year has vindicated his own “surge” strategy in 2007-8:
Q: Is the war on terror currently being waged in the proper way?
“I made a decision, as you know, not to criticize my successors, with an s. I am going to be around a little bit longer — there is going to be more than one successor. The temptation is to try to rewrite history or to make yourself look good by criticizing someone else. I think that is a mistake. I don’t think that is what leadership is all about. I know how hard the job is. I didn’t like it when former leaders criticized me when I was president. Some did, so I decided not to do the same.”
Q: You mentioned ISIS, you spoke about defeating terror. Is it possible to defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq without boots on the ground?
“The president will have to make that determination. My position was that you need to have boots on the ground. As you know, I made a very difficult decision. A fair number of people in our country were saying that it was impossible to defeat al-Qaida — which is ISIS as far as I am concerned. They said I must get out of Iraq. But I chose the opposite — I sent 30,000 more troops as opposed to 30,000 fewer. I think history will show that al-Qaida in Iraq was defeated. And so I chose the path of boots on the ground. We will see whether or not our government adjusts to the realities on the ground.”
Two points are worth noting in this passage. One, although Bush insisted that he didn’t want to criticize his successors (plural, he emphasized), there really isn’t any other way to take this other than a criticism of current policy. Bush takes care to frame this initially as “my position” as a way of allowing that there may be more than one potentially successful strategy, but at the end Bush makes his implication clear that the Obama administration has not responded to “the realities on the ground.”
Before we get to the second point, Eugene Robinson agrees with Bush on the first, at least somewhat. The liberal columnist for the Washington Post ripped Barack Obama for not knowing what he’s doing in Iraq, and confusing tactics and logistics for coherent strategy:
Don’t feel bad if you’re confused about what the United States is trying to accomplish in Iraq. President Obama doesn’t seem to know, either — or else he won’t say.
Days after admitting that “we don’t yet have a complete strategy” for training Iraqi government forces — which are supposed to ultimately defeat the Islamic State — Obama is sending an additional 450 troops to execute this unstrategized mission. That will raise the number of U.S. military personnel in Iraq to about 3,500. But what, realistically, is their goal? And how are they supposed to achieve it?
It is understandable that the president might feel pressed to do something in response to the Islamic State’s recent battlefield gains — including the rout of disorganized Iraqi forces in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. But Obama imposed such tight restrictions on the activities of U.S. soldiers that only the sunniest optimist would believe this increase can make a military difference.
Let me clarify the last argument for Robinson. Literally no one thinks the addition of 450 more troops as training advisers will make the slightest military difference in Iraq. It might make a political difference, but not the one Obama imagines — it will tie him closer to the fight without having the slightest intention of fighting it properly. It will anger the Shi’ite radicals in Iraq without providing anywhere near the strength to boost Shi’ite moderates, Sunnis, and Kurds in their attempt to find unity. Robinson calls this a “baby step … in a direction Obama obviously doesn’t want to go,” but it’s not even that significant. It’s a momentary action designed to distract from the fact that Obama pledged to “destroy ISIS” but has no plans that could possibly result in that outcome, and clearly no desire to implement those that might.
That brings us back to Bush’s other point. The only way to fight an entrenched army holding large swaths of territory with significant civilian populations is to field an army against them. Carpet-bombing creates too many collateral casualties, and anything less won’t dislodge entrenched ground fighters, especially those with armor. Note, though, that Bush did not specify American boots on the ground. If the Sunni nations around Anbar — Saudi Arabia and Jordan — put together a large ground force, then the US and its coalition allies could gain space in Anbar and force the Shi’ite majority in Iraq to deal with the Sunni tribes for power sharing. That, however, might force Iran into taking the field directly, especially if those forces combine to go after Bashar al-Assad in Syria, a fight they’d clearly prefer.
Without that kind of force, though, it will either be left to the US to put a large army back in Iraq, or concede the entire area to ISIS. That’s the reality, one that could have been prevented had we remained in Iraq and continued to guarantee Sunni access to power in Baghdad and cultivated Kurdish influence over the Iraqi government. Obama set that disaster in motion in 2011, and still has not “adjust[ed] to the realities on the ground.” George W. Bush probably isn’t holding his breath for that to happen soon, either.
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