Horowitz: Getting al-Bhaghdadi is Great; But No Substitute for a Coherent Policy

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Rob Horowitz, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi PHOTO: U.S. Army/Wikipedia

Even President Trump’s decidedly un-presidential performance, riddled with falsehoods, boasts, and demonstrated ignorance of the key issues at stake, could not detract too much from his announcement that our special forces had killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a daring and well-executed operation that on-the-ground intelligence from the Syrian Kurds made possible. The president deserves credit for ordering the operation and for keeping a focus on taking out the ISIS leader.

That is no substitute, however, for the fact that our current strategy--if one can even call it that-- in Syria specifically and the Middle East as a whole is neither effective nor coherent. As Richard Haas, the president of the US Council of Foreign Relations told David Sanger of The New York Times, “The irony of the successful operation against al-Baghdadi is that it could not have happened without US forces on the ground that have been pulled out, help from Syrian Kurds who have been betrayed and support of a US intelligence community that has been disparaged. ,

Haas and other foreign policy experts pointed out that the president’s ill-advised, sudden and reckless withdrawal of our troops from Syria and our betrayal of the Kurds in the process, means it will be difficult if not impossible to duplicate this past weekend’s successful operation against other terrorist targets in Syria. In fact, David Sanger’s reporting revealed that Trump’s giving Turkey what for all intents and purposes was a greenlight to come over the border, made the operation risker and arguably put its success in jeopardy, according to military and intelligence sources.

Most importantly, the underlying policy is incoherent and still provides ISIS with an opportunity to take back some territory, which will give them a base upon which to launch more terror attacks. On the one hand, our sudden withdrawal without a plan for ensuring that the ten thousand or so ISIS fighters that were being guarded by the Kurds would continue to stay in captivity has already led to the all too predictable escape of an significant number of fighters. These escapes combined with the weakening of the Kurds give ISIS a major opportunity to reconstitute. On the other hand, we launch a risky operation to kill al-Baghdadi. While this loss of the leader, sets ISIS back a bit, the net result is still the potential for a reconstituted and re-empowered ISIS under new leadership.

The obvious sensible strategic choice for our national security was to keep our small footprint in Syria and take out al-Baghdadi. That is a strategically coherent approach that would have yielded major and long-lasting benefits--not only regionally--but to our safety here at home.

Similarly, the president’s sudden withdrawal from Syria further strengthened Iran. Since Trump continues to be unwilling to do anything militarily to either deter or combat Iranian expansionism, it makes his decision to withdraw from the Iranian Nuclear Deal and impose tough economic sanctions, despite the fact that Iran was adhering to the deal and that the rest of the signers, China, Russia, France, United Kingdom, and Germany all strongly opposed our decision and stayed in, look all the more foolish. The only prospect-and it has always been a slim one-of fundamentally changing Iranian behavior through economic sanctions was coupling it with a credible threat of force. The end result here so far of, Trump’s muddled Iranian policy is inadvertently giving Iran the high ground to proceed once again with its nuclear weapons program, rather than continuing to prevent nuclear weapons development until at least 2030 as was the case under the nuclear agreement.

President Trump’s reckless, impulsive, and incoherent foreign policy decisions, seemingly the result of a broken policy process, continue to mount up, making the United States and the rest of the world, less safe. The taking out of al-Baghdadi is important, but the broader picture, unfortunately, is growing more troubling by the day.

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.