In the absence of this kind of strategic thinking, our current de facto strategy is to be Iran’s air force. We strike from the air to suppress the enemies of Iran’s satellite, the Assad regime in Syria, while Iran also takes advantage of our absence on the ground in Iraq to organize its own Shiite militias and make a bid to take over the Iraqi army. Unless we change this strategic context, proposals to send in ground troops—however hawkish they might seem—amount to a strategy of being Iran’s air force and its special forces.
We do have to act against the Islamic State, which has quickly become a bigger, more successful, more brazen version of al-Qaeda. But doing so requires diving back into all the messy, long-term engagement that we are trying to avoid. It means insisting that we are the ones to train, equip, and fight alongside the Iraqi government—and not the Iranians. It involves taking an active role in Iraq’s internal politics, trying to once again broker and protect a political accommodation between Iraq’s Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish factions. Most of all, it requires that we declare our intention to take down the Assad regime, because our failure to do so is what weakened and demoralized the moderate opposition to the regime and paved the way for an ISIS takeover. No moderate opposition is going to volunteer to be our allies on the ground fighting against the Islamic State, and preventing it from coming back once again, unless we guarantee that we will provided them with decisive support against Assad. This is also the only way to ensure that the beneficiary of our action against ISIS is not an Iranian satellite.
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