The War in Iraq: Tactical Success, Strategic Ambiguity

With the recent fall of Raqqa, Dair ez-Zor and now al-Qaim, the military defeat of Islamic State (IS) is at hand. For strategists, it is thus timely to question whether the three years of war against this adversary have yielded strategic victory—and the answer is vague indeed.

In the process of liberating Mosul, coalition airpower delivered more than 5,075 weapons in support of ISF over the month of August 2017 alone. That’s an average of one aerially delivered weapon every 10 minutes. A total of 98,532 weapons have been delivered in Operation Inherent Resolve, in Syria and Iraq. For a force estimated to consist of around 30,000 fighters in 2015, that is both frighteningly inefficient and has devastated Iraq’s Sunni and Turkomen populations.

The current short-term focus on the military defeat of IS belies the reality that Iraq will retain fragile governance, making it vulnerable to violent extremism. In 2035, the median age in Iraq will be 21.9 years. That median is today’s infants and children, who will grow up in a war-scarred environment, likely to lack schooling, adequate health care, and employment opportunities. There are indications that the government of Iraq will fail to be capable of providing such opportunities to its Sunni population, more than a million and a half of whom are now resident in Iraqi refugee camps.

It must be expected that the elections of 2018 and the military defeat of IS will bring a political imperative for the Iraqi government to constrain coalition freedom of action. Concurrently, the government seems limited in its abilities to constrain the actions of the PMF, which in recent months has seized three of the four major border-crossing points into Syria. A land bridge stretching from Tehran to Beirut is thus a reality. Iran is well positioned to sustain its support to Lebanese Hezbollah as a proxy force against Israel or the Free Syrian Army. Iran is likewise well postured to sustain its support to the PMF groups Kata’ib Hizbollah (a foreign terrorist organisation), Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (an IRGC-QF proxy) and the Badr Organisation (a Shiite militia that is unabashedly pro-Iranian), currently conducting what might be viewed as counter-insurgency operations across Ninewa and Anbar provinces in Iraq.

When Western nations finally leave Iraq, it might be reasonable to ask whether it was they or the Iranian regime that benefited most from the campaign against IS. As Bernard Fall cautioned over half a century ago in Street Without Joy, ‘liberation’ is a subjective term:

To a village which has been occupied by a VC platoon against its will and whose only suffering at the hands of the Communists was the murder of a rather unpopular village chief, ‘liberation’ through massive napalming and attendant losses of innocent inhabitants (not to speak of all property, stored rice, and even farm animals) will be a hollow joke, indeed.

The combination of battle damage, disaffected youth, and the potential for sectarian and political misrepresentation suggests that the seeds have been sown for the next war in Iraq. This ‘not quite war’ had no obvious end point, and required a nuanced strategy beyond that of ‘placing warheads on foreheads’. Iran has seemingly recognised this subtlety; it is ambiguous as to whether the coalition will do so as well.

Andrew Maher is a major in the Australian Army and will be an ADF Military Fellow in 2018. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of the Australian Army, the Australian Department of Defence or the Australian Government.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).