General David Petraeus knows a thing or two about devising grand plans to defeat enemies on the battlefield. It was on his watch that there was the Iraq “surge” of 2007-2008, a strategy that was seen as largely successful at the time and included an increase in US troop numbers, moving them out of giant bases into smaller outposts around the country and “contracting” with more than 100,000 Sunni fighters to help in the fight against Al Qaeda.
This is why when this retired general speaks, it is probably worth paying attention. In an interview with the BBC, Gen Petraeus notes that the “industrial-strength” ISIL extremists cannot be defeated “just with force of arms”. Describing ISIL as a conventional army that has traces of an insurgency along with “significant terrorist elements”, Gen Petraeus has called for a new grand plan for Iraq that will marry political and military strategy to root out the ISIL threat. The Iraqi military, which Gen Petraeus refers to in glowing terms, forms a core component of his plan.
Much of this makes sense, though Gen Petraeus appears to have left out a core point – the regional geography of the ISIL threat. The extremist group doesn’t operate in an Iraqi vacuum. If you want to defeat ISIL, you have to turn your attention to solving the Syrian crisis and then expand your view, right the way across the region. Therefore, any cohesive plan to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL has to run through Damascus.
As Hussein Ibish noted on these pages after the fall of Ramadi, American attempts to beat ISIL in Iraq appear to hinge on efforts to push the extremist group back to its stronghold in Syria. While it might pay some dividends in the short term, this containment strategy will not get even remotely close to addressing the core problems that ISIL presents for the region as a whole. A piecemeal approach misreads the nature of ISIL’s aims, how it operates and the realities on the ground.
The borders of Syria and Iraq are in a state of constant flux and this sober reality illustrates the failure of the containment strategy. Gen Petraeus’s plan for Iraq can only be one part of a multifaceted strategy for defeating ISIL. There can be no grand plan for Iraq without formulating a grander one for the region as a whole.
