For weeks, there was much talk in Baghdad about an impending campaign to liberate Mosul after months of ordeal under jihadi occupation.
Iraqi hopes of success in regaining control of the nation’s No. 3 city rose after Islamic State forces were partly driven out of Baiji, a strategic town on the main road to Mosul.
If the Iraqis consolidate their hold on the area, they can cut off the IS garrison in Tikrit, another major Sunni city still under its control.
That in turn would pave the way for liberating a number of other towns and villages, notably Samarra and Dujayl, that IS had planned to use as its launching pad for an attack on Baghdad.
This week, however, the on-the-way-to-Mosul chorus has been toned down somewhat. Officials no longer use such terms as “impending” or “imminent” to describe the liberation campaign.
According to Iraqi sources, the change in tone was prompted, at least in part, by conflicting signals from Washington.
The first signal, according to Iraqis, came when Washington refused to change the rules under which Iraqi forces can call for US airstrikes in support of a ground operation.
Under President Obama’s orders, such “calls” must be cleared with Washington — presumably with the White House itself.
The president has also rejected an Iraqi request to have US military technicians and logistical experts present in “theaters” where battles are under way.
Obama’s demand that the Congress give him three years to pursue an extremely limited campaign against IS reinforces that impression. One Iraqi commander tells me Obama’s approach amounts to “slow-motion warfare.”
The authorization he has demanded from Congress will guarantee IS at least three more years as a main player, while tying the hands of the next US president so that he or she can’t really go after the terrorist outfit.
Obama’s call for finding “ways to amplify the voices of peace and tolerance and inclusion” is a diversion at a time when what’s urgently needed is to defeat and destroy what is the most dangerous terrorist outfit in the world today.
The best way to “amplify the voices of peace and tolerance and inclusion” is to silence the guns of a caliphate that is casting itself as “the winning side” with the Koranic slogan: “Victory comes from Allah and Conquest is Imminent!”
A successful campaign to liberate Mosul needs three things, all dependent on the United States.
First, Washington must clearly dispel Arab Sunni fears that Obama’s strategic aim is to build Shiite Iran into the new regional hegemon.
To date, that fear has prevented Arab Sunni tribes from rallying behind the Iraqi plan for a concerted campaign against IS.
Next, only the United States can help coordinate efforts by the Iraqi army, the Kurdish peshmerga and the Arab Sunni tribes who worked with Gen. David Petraeus nearly a decade ago.
To perform that role, however, the US needs to demonstrate genuine commitment to defeating and destroying IS, not simply “containing and degrading” it, as Obama keeps repeating.
Finally, IS must be prevented from sending reinforcements from its heartland in the Syrian province of Raqqah.
That requires airstrikes to destroy roads and bridges that IS uses to ferry men and materiel from Turkey to Raqqah and thence to Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq.
A serious bombing campaign aimed at IS military targets could roll back the caliph’s army and turn the city of Raqqah into an island. But the Obama administration to date has refused to bomb the IS heartland.
While all signals from Obama himself have discouraged actual or potential US allies, some encouraging signals have come from his new defense secretary, Ash Carter.
After briefings from US generals in Kuwait, Carter described the aim of the campaign as the “ultimate defeat and destruction” of IS — which, he noted, is “not invincible.”
Carter enters the Pentagon after months of “slow-motion warfare” have produced no tangible results for the United States and its allies while IS has expanded its territory in Syria and Iraq, flexed its muscles on the borders of Jordan and Saudi Arabia and consolidated its deadly hold on almost 4 million people in an area the size of England.
It’s too early to decide whether Carter will do any better than his three predecessors, who all disagreed with Obama’s analyses of the various threats that the United States and allies face in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Still, Carter’s statements are encouraging: At least they show that not everyone in Washington shares Obama’s unwillingness to understand the nature of the challenge faced by the United States and its allies in the Middle East today.
