By Norman Friedman*
THE rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is vivid proof that Al Qaeda, which began the ‘long war’ even before that terrible day in September 2001, is still vigorously pursuing its goals. The Islamic State is officially separate from Al Qaeda (which has denounced it as too vicious), but for all practical purposes the two are part of the same threat.
Our strategy of destroying Al Qaeda leaders has had some effect, but it has not yet been decisive. We may be tired of fighting in the Middle East, but it now seems clear that we cannot leave.
Although Al Qaeda and its offspring were and are much more interested in dominating the Muslim world, they see attacking us as, at the least, a way of gaining adherents. The United States, more than any other country, symbolizes the modern world they hate, and would like to escape. What the USA actually does has little consequence; the hatred goes far beyond any actions taken in the Middle East. America’s existence inspires those Al Qaeda sees as anathema. Attacking the US is a way of proving the organization’s value within the Muslim world. The immediate point of the 9/11 attacks was not to bring down the United States, but rather to inspire Muslims in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia to tear down their own governments and to substitute Al Qaeda. That things did not turn out that way seems not to have discouraged the spiritual heirs of Osama bin Laden.
The current spasm in Iraq and in Syria is connected to a fundamental fault line in the Muslim world. About 1300 years ago Sunnis and Shi’ites split. Sunnis murdered Hussein, Mohammed’s direct heir. The Shi’ites trace their split from other forms of Islam from this murder, and its commemoration is one of their main religious holidays. For their part, the Sunnis regard Shi’ites as heretics. Apparently some of the dominant Wahhabi clergy of Saudi Arabia have gone much further: they have declared a religious justification for killing these Shi’ites heretics.
If this sort of mass murder seems bizarre to us, it is probably largely because Westerners have forgotten the horrific religious warfare which killed much of the population of Central Europe during the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century. Similar religious (or religiously-justified) warfare tore up the Low Countries as the Netherlands fought for independence from Spain (an 80-year war). This type of religious hatred flares up periodically in the Third World, for example between Hindus and Muslims in India.
We tend to think in terms of nation-states. The Islamic State declares, in effect, that national borders are meaningless when compared to religious ones. Its ambition is to conquer first the Muslim world and then the whole world. It may be relevant to remember that when the Thirty Years War broke out in Europe, many Europeans had similar views. Their land might nominally belong to one noble or another, but that was of little moment (particularly since nobles could and did frequently trade land and population). The war ended with a declaration, in effect, that individuals had to identify with their rulers, hence with particular countries. This Peace of Westphalia (1648) is often cited as the beginning of the modern world. In effect the Islamic State denies that any such allocation is legitimate.
The Islamic State harks back to the time when a single Caliph (in theory) ruled all Muslims. The last such was the Turkish Ottoman Sultan, who was forced to give up his pretensions in 1924. Even before that, it was obvious that the Caliph had only limited power. He never had any power over Shi’ite Iran (Persia). In 1914 the Germans saw an alliance with Turkey (and the Caliph) as a way of gaining traction among the hundreds of millions of Muslims in the British Empire – which then had the largest Muslim population in the world. In the event, even though the Caliph was willing to proclaim a jihad against the British, little happened.
To some extent the Islamic State is being realistic in rejecting national borders. Many Middle Eastern governments really are weak. Even so, to some extent their people do identify with their states and with their governments. Egypt and Saudi Arabia probably have particularly strong national identities.
Iraq, which was created only in 1920, may be a particularly weak state in this sense. When the United States invaded in 2003, critics of the operation argued that the country was really three or more countries (Kurds, Shi’ites, Sunnis) and that with the defeat of Saddam Hussein it would fall apart. It seems likely that in 1991 the Saudis counselled against destroying Saddam on exactly that ground, for fear that the existence of a new Shi’ite state would inspire Shi’ites in their own country to rebel. In 2003 the US view was that most Iraqis thought of themselves as Iraqis, that the shock of invasion would not destroy the country. Events since US forces left suggest that this was gross over-optimism. Iraq may develop into a unified country, but only if it is held together for a good deal longer.
Iraq is unusual in being majority Shi’ite; the Sunni are the great majority of all Muslims. Saudi Arabia has long competed with Egypt for leadership of the Sunni world, the Saudis espousing a much more severe form of Sunni Islam. It also competes with Iran for leadership of the larger Muslim world. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the split is exacerbated because Shi’ites are the majority in key oil areas. Last year the Saudi government went so far as to send troops to crush majority Shi’ites protesting the Sunni government of Qatar.
Conversely, one reason Iran is allied to the Syrian government is that the Alawite sect which ruled Syria was Shi’ite. Iran is the leading Shi’ite state. Although it has not proclaimed itself the protector of Shi’ites outside Iran, the more radical expressions of Iranian theology suggest a desire for an apocalypse which would leave Shi’ite Islam triumphant (over Sunnis in particular). Shi’ism generally represents itself as an oppressed faith.
When Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, his Sunni ethnic group oppressed the Shi’ite majority in the south. When Saddam lost the 1991 war, the Shi’ites rebelled, but Saddam’s troops put down the rebellion and killed many Shi’ites. Conversely, when Saddam fell, Sunnis rallied to resistance forces at least partly because they expected the majority Shi’ites to extract revenge. After US forces withdrew, Iraqi president Karzai strongly favored the majority Shi’ites. Right now Iraqi Sunnis feel that they are living in a Shi’ite state which threatens them, just as in the past the Sunnis running Iraq oppressed the country’s Shi’ites. Sunnis in the Iraqi army felt they had no remaining stake in the country. It is not very surprising that they melted away when the Sunni Islamic State forces turned up, or that numerous Shi’ite army personnel were murdered in the aftermath.
From the outset, Al Qaeda saw itself as a mechanism to cleanse Saudi Arabia and then the rest of the Muslim world of impure practices – of which tolerating Shi’ites was one of the more prominent. Of the thousands Al Qaeda has killed over the years, Shi’ites have been by far the majority. Al Qaeda and its offshoots, such as the current Islamic State operation in Iraq and in Syria, clearly do not represent much of the Muslim population in the places they operate. They win by being extraordinarily vicious. Many of those who join their cause do so not because of some deep religious belief but because they get to share in the loot the movement collects, which includes both money and women. In this sense the Islamic State blurs any line between government and criminal action, as Al Qaeda did before it. In Syria the Islamic State has exploited the collapse of government in many areas. In Iraq they have exploited the Sunni-Shi’ite split.
The Islamic State is a direct threat to the United States. It is a vastly metastasized version of Al Qaeda. If it was bad for Al Qaeda to take root in a failed state (because that gave it a base for attacking America), it is much worse for an even wilder version to take root in a quasi-state, with substantial financial and other resources. It is not merely that the Islamic State is daily enforcing barbaric rules on its unfortunate population, or that it is murdering Americans who fall into its hands. There are other horrible governments in the world, and we cannot clean them all up. The threat to America is that the Islamic State and its ilk see attacks against us, at home, as a way of gaining traction. Think 9/11 on steroids – perhaps not now, or next year, but not very far away.
Moreover, it is not enough to kill the leaders, because the prize – local and then much greater dominion – is so attractive that replacements readily come forward. The troops have to be destroyed, and that unfortunately requires ground operations, at least by Special Forces.
Unfortunately, too, the coalition we have formed is unlikely to be enough. It currently consists largely of Sunni Muslim states. It might be argued that it is time for Sunnis to clean up their own problem, but it is difficult to see why Shi’ites being murdered by fanatical Sunnis would believe that Sunnis were their salvation. It is therefore difficult to see how the problem can be resolved without involving Iran, which sees itself as the protector of Shi’ites (and has involved itself deeply in Iraq). The current excuse is that the Saudis, who are essential to any coalition, will not countenance discussions with the Iranians. It seems unlikely that the Saudi government, which sees itself as the leader of Sunnis (many probably would disagree), would cheerfully ally itself with the arch-heretical Iranians.
That leaves the United States and other Western powers as, in effect, the only neutral parties capable of defusing the situation. In theory all involved should welcome us, but in fact all see us as the problem – we are the barrier between them and those they might like to kill. Our self-interest is to short-circuit a Muslim version of the Thirty-Year War, both because it can and will generate a lot more terrorist attacks on us, and because at least for now we still want access to Middle Eastern resources, particularly oil and gas. That is not to mention the horrific consequences of Islamic State rule on the people it conquers.
We would very much like to push the Middle East towards its own version of the Peace of Westphalia and towards increased national identity and less vicious religious fervor. Nation-states are better than anarchy (as in the Islamic State) because their governments stand responsible for what they do; they can be deterred, and they can be bargained with. It is just possible that a war against the Islamic State will have some of that effect, but only if it includes all of the interested parties. And almost certainly only if there are US troops on the ground.
*Norman Friedman is author of The Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapon Systems. His column is published with kind permission of the US Naval Institute.
