Obama’s approach in confronting Islamic State overlooks Syria

Despite two weeks of U.S. airstrikes in northern Iraq, the Islamic State retains its bloody grip on roughly half of the country and is rolling up new conquests in Syria, piling pressure on President Obama to develop a comprehensive, cross-border strategy to crush the group.

The lack of such a response to the Islamic State’s use of Syria as a springboard for attacking Iraq is the most glaring omission of Obama’s approach to the current crisis. Hitting the group in Syria carries huge risks, not the least being aiding the Assad regime in its war with the Islamic State and other insurgents. Yet not quickly eradicating what senior U.S. officials concede is a terrorist threat without precedent means the danger to international security likely will metastasize.

“There is no policy,” said a senior U.S. defense official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The absence of a comprehensive approach that includes Syria reflects the White House’s desire to extricate the United States from 14 years of foreign wars. It also underscores the administration’s tardy response to numerous U.S. intelligence warnings about the Islamic State, dismissed by Obama as recently as January as a “J.V. team.”

Yet Obama’s top military advisers implicitly acknowledged this week that trying to hold the line against the Islamic State in Iraq won’t work, and that only by eliminating the group’s Syrian strongholds can it be eliminated.

“They can be contained, not in perpetuity,” Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday. “Can they be defeated without addressing that part of their organization which resides in Syria? The answer is no.”

Following the gruesome slaying by the Islamic State of American journalist James Foley, the White House opened the door to targeted airstrikes – possibly using missile-firing drones – against the group in Syria.

“We’re actively considering what’s going to be necessary to deal with that threat, and we’re not going to be restricted by borders,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Friday.

At the same time, Rhodes said, the Pentagon hasn’t given Obama “specific military options.”

For now, the administration’s military plans don’t go beyond giving air support and advice to Iraq’s problem-plagued army and the militia of the autonomous Kurdish region as they fight to blunt the offensive that has swept the al-Qaida spinoff from the northern city of Mosul to the suburbs of Baghdad.

Instead, Obama appears to be gambling that Iraq’s incoming prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, can rebuild the mostly defunct Iraqi military, reconcile with the aggrieved Sunni Muslim and Kurdish minorities, and convince Sunni tribal leaders to drive the Islamic State from their territories.

That would be a tall order for a brand new premier, who comes from the same Shiite Muslim party as his unpopular predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki, and enjoys little, if any, support among ordinary Sunnis. And such efforts aren’t a quick fix: It took years for the U.S. military to enlist the Sunni tribes to turn against the Islamic State’s forerunner, al-Qaida in Iraq.

Under Obama’s approach, once al-Abadi formed a more inclusive government, the United States would organize a broader response to the Islamic State threat by Iraq’s Arab neighbors and U.S. allies.

Even Obama seems to lack confidence in his own approach. Asked at an Aug. 18 news conference about how he planned to deal with the Islamic State, he replied, “A lot of that depends on how effectively the Iraqi government comes together.”

Obama, many experts said, must develop a multifaceted, long-term plan supported by Middle Eastern partners if he wants to make good on his vow this week to “extract this cancer.”

And any approach, they said, means that the cautious Obama will have to agree to deeper U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war pitting the regime of President Bashar Assad, who’s supported by Iran and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shiite militia movement, against the Islamic State and a potpourri of weaker rebel factions.

“The notion that the Iraq war can be separated from the Syrian civil war is pure fantasy,” said Shadi Hamid, an expert on Islamist groups at the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy institute. “This is what’s so worrying about the Obama administration’s approach. There is no plan. There is no vision on that front. There is no effort to talk about Syria in a different way.”

This story was originally published August 22, 2014 at 9:01 PM with the headline "Obama’s approach in confronting Islamic State overlooks Syria."