The West isn't the solution in Iraq. It's the problem

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[/audioplayer]To hawkish right-wingers, but also to many militant liberals, the antidote to the problem of Isis is clear: the application of military power to defeat the jihadists and lay the foundation for a humane and stable political order, beginning in Iraq but eventually extending across the Islamic world.

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Gareth Roberts

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There are several problems with this analysis. For starters, it glosses over the fact that military power in the form of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion created the opening for the jihadists in the first place. Where there had been stability, US and British forces sowed the seeds of anarchy. The so-called ‘Islamic State’ whose forces in recent weeks have spread havoc across Iraq represents the most recent manifestation of this phenomenon. In short, as far as violent Islamic radicalism was concerned, the putative American solution has exacerbated rather than reduced the problem.

When he ascended to the presidency, Barack Obama seemed to get that. Yet even as he fulfilled his promise to withdraw US forces from Iraq, his efforts to devise a policy toward the Islamic world based on something other than invasion and occupation came up short.

Obama’s failure stemmed from myriad causes, not least of them developments in the region that his administration did not anticipate and could not control. In Syria, Libya, Egypt, and now in Iraq itself, events and their consequences have time and again caught Washington by surprise.

So now Obama is back for another bite at the Iraqi apple. Twenty-three years after Operation Desert Storm laid the basis for George H.W. Bush’s ‘new world order’ and 11 years after George W. Bush went his father one better by capturing Baghdad itself — ‘Mission Accomplished’ — the Iraq war has resumed in the form of a small-scale but apparently open-ended air campaign.