What happens if the war on ISIL works?
It is not beyond the realm of possibility that around this time next year, we will be able to look back on 2016 and congratulate ourselves in the defeat of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Stranger things have happened. ISIL’s self-declared caliphate didn’t even exist until 18 months ago, and its demise could come in several ways.
Maybe it will be French Mirage and Rafale jets, striking a Raqqa conclave of ISIL godfather Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi in session with the network of former Baathist intelligence commanders who have so efficiently solidified the terror regime.
Or maybe the U. S.- led coalition will carry out exceptionally heavy and extraordinarily effective airstrikes along the ISIL-held corridor between Hasaka and Mosul, prompting emboldened Kurdish forces to mount an all-or-nothing advance from the north, while Free Syrian Army militias roar out of the west. If, by some miracle everything comes together, ISIL defences could crumble and the nightmare might collapse in mutiny and mayhem.
But we might be careful about what we wish for.
In any such unlikely event as ISIL’s demolition, the loudest boasts should be expected to come from the catastrophically inept foreign- policy coterie around U.S. President Barack Obama.
Credit where it’s due, though. The Obama administration has proved adept at persuading a vast body of American public opinion that even the most meagre breadcrumbs of a geostrategic deliverable — Washington’s creaking concordat with Tehran over its nuclear program is just one example — constitute a whole loaf.
That same public-opinion cohort has been similarly persuaded ISIL and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad are bitter enemies. As a consequence, an ISIL defeat could be spun to lend an air of decency to Obama’s unseemly collaborations with Moscow that anticipate the persistence of Assad’s brutal regime in Damascus.
ISIL is only the most recent and most obscene eruption of barbarism to be visited on the Arabs of Syria and Iraq. It was incubated and more or less conjured into existence by the Assad regime so Assad could present the revolution against him as jihadist, and himself as ISIL’s sworn enemy and an indispensable ally in the global war on jihadist terrorism.
The removal of ISIL as a battlefield force would certainly strengthen the hand of the revolutionary Syrian forces arrayed against him and that would be a good thing. But there’s a catch. The Syrian opposition is nearly friendless in NATO capitals. With ISIL gone, it would likely be much more difficult for them to secure the win they need to get out from under Assad’s war against Syrian civilians
Among otherwise secular young revolutionaries who have given up hope of help from the United States or any other democracy, Jabhat Al-Nusra, al- Qaida’s proxy in Syria, has built a reputation as a serious and disciplined fighting force, squaring off against ISIL and Assad. With any defeat of ISIL, particularly a crushing, final defeat, what you would hear from al-Qaida and Jabhat Al-Nusra would run along the lines: of “See? We told you so.”
In this way, owing in no small part to American indifference and the myopic“anti interventionist” calamities of White House policy, even the crushing defeat of ISIL could lead us all right back to the horror from which Barack Obama, the antithesis of George W. Bush, promised to extricate us all: al- Qaida, in strength, rooted in vast Islamist badlands, unrepentant and ascendant.