Will the U.S. Draw the Right Lessons From Today’s Middle East Conflicts?

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/18767/will-the-u-s-draw-the-right-lessons-from-today-s-middle-east-conflicts

Steven Metz Friday, May 13, 2016

There has been a distinct pattern to America’s time as a global power: Whenever the United States becomes involved in a conflict, it quickly draws lessons that set the trajectory for the next conflict or problem. American strategy truly is iterative, with the recent past paving the way for future action. This means that getting the lessons right, or at least as right as possible, is a vital part of strategy-making.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, the lessons of Vietnam haunted policymakers and framed public debate over America’s role in the world. This led the U.S. military to reject counterinsurgency and focus on preparing for short, morally unambiguous conventional wars against aggressor nations. The 1991 war with Iraq validated this approach. Then involvement in the Balkans taught American policymakers that allies still needed active U.S. involvement to deal with major security problems, and that a U.S. military optimized for short, conventional wars could adapt to missions like peacekeeping if ordered to do so. An important lesson was that the armed forces did not need special units for what was then called “operations other than war”—regular combat formations could figure out how to do it. 

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, America’s conflict with transnational Islamic extremism soon produced new, preliminary lessons. One was that destroying autocratic regimes in the Islamic world—the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Moammar Gadhafi in Libya—without building stable and functioning states afterward may be worse than tolerating them, since it gives extremists operating space. A result of this has been the Obama administration’s hesitance to push out Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. 

Another lesson of the conflict with Islamic extremism has been that the United States is bad at building stable and functioning states in cultures it does not understand, and no other nation or international organization is going to step up and do it for the United States. The Bush administration’s belief in 2003 that the United Nations or Arab peacekeepers were going to put Iraq back together now seems tragically naive. A third lesson is that today’s extremists have what national security experts call a “power-projection capability”: the ability to undertake or inspire international terrorism.

Today, though, these lessons remain preliminary. Americans quickly reach a working consensus on outcomes seen as successful, like the 1991 war with Iraq or the intervention in the Balkans, but drawing lessons from failure takes longer and is more contentious. Thus it is not clear what the ultimate lessons of the ongoing conflict with transnational Islamic extremism will be.

The United States cannot re-engineer the Islamic world, but it can limit the damage to U.S. interests by supporting tolerable governments, while applying limited amounts of U.S. military power.Depending on how things turn out in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Libya, Americans might conclude that the Islamic world’s problems are unresolvable or, at least, that the United States is not suited to deal with them given its inability to sustain a fine-grain local understanding of radically different cultures. As James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said about the region, “The U.S. can’t fix it. The fundamental issues they have—the large population bulge of disaffected young males, ungoverned spaces, economic challenges and the availability of weapons—won’t go away for a long time.”

If Americans accept this pessimistic assessment, further disengagement from the Islamic world is the only viable option. All the United States can do is help address the humanitarian costs of conflict and prevent it from inflaming other regions through massive refugee flows or terrorism. While the word “containment” now seems to draw derision and scorn in the United States, that’s clearly the appropriate strategy if the United States writes off addressing the root causes of conflict by helping to build just, effective and sustainable political systems. 

The Obama administration’s strategy is based on a very different assessment of the past 15 years: Although the United States cannot re-engineer the Islamic world, it can limit the damage to U.S. interests by supporting tolerable governments and political movements, while applying limited amounts of U.S. military power and engaging in multifaceted offensive actions against extremist groups involved in terrorism. Unfortunately, this approach also requires tolerating large-scale human suffering. According to this strategy, the United States simply must modulate its expectations to align them with the strategic costs that Americans are willing to bear to avoid, in President Barack Obama’s words, doing anything “stupid.”

The big question is which of these two very different lessons will take root? Will it be that the problems of the Islamic world are incomprehensible and unresolvable, so the United States should wash its hands of the place? Or will it be that modest applications of American power—despite not resulting in decisive outcomes, clear victories or the political and economic re-engineering of the Islamic world—can still stave off the most undesirable outcomes? 

The answer depends on how events in the Islamic world play out. If no major nation like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Turkey collapses; if the Islamic State fails to create a new caliphate; and if there are not more terrorist attacks like 9/11 or worse; then the Obama approach may be validated and codified into a new lesson that shapes future U.S. engagement in the Islamic world and other places. 

Unfortunately, though, the United States is paralyzed today by what might be called the “crisis, disaster and defeat” narrative. Opinion-shapers and political leaders have found that frantically warning that the United States is facing catastrophe gets more attention than telling the more-balanced story: that, despite the many problems and threats that could have been handled better, the United States is relatively secure and safe. 

This suggests that whatever the actual outcome of the Islamic world’s epochal internal conflict, Americans may conclude that they unnecessarily frittered away influence and wasted the opportunity to make things turn out differently. If that leads to disengagement with the region, it might very well turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Steven Metz is the author of “Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy.” His weekly WPR column, Strategic Horizons, appears every Friday. You can follow him on Twitter @steven_metz.