Last weekend, the New York Times reported on a meeting President Obama had with a group of foreign policy experts and pundits to talk about combatting ISIL, among other topics. "Asked by one of the columnists what he would do if his strategy did not work and he had to escalate further," reporter Peter Baker wrote, "Mr. Obama rejected the premise. 'I'm not going to anticipate failure at this point,' he said." Now of course, this meeting wasn't about soliciting ideas so much as it was about convincing important opinion leaders that the administration is on the right track, so there was naturally going to be some spinning. But now that this military campaign has begun in earnest, there are few more important questions than this one: Is the administration anticipating failure? And what are they doing about it?
We've been through this once before. In 2002 and 2003, the Bush administration and its supporters told us that the Iraq War would be a piece of cake. We'd storm into Baghdad, be "greeted as liberators," there would be no sectarian conflict because "Iraq's always been very secular," and a glorious tide of peace and democracy would flow across the Middle East. As we later found out, there were people within the administration trying to think about what to do if everything didn't go so swimmingly, but their warnings were ignored by the people at the top. And so we got a war that lasted eight years, cost the lives of 4,000 American troops (not to mention a couple of hundred thousand Iraqis) and continues to haunt us to this day.
I'm not a national security reporter, so I don't know what kind of preparations and analyses are being undertaken deep within the Pentagon and the State Department.
Perhaps there's some very serious, comprehensive thinking going on right now about what to do if this operation doesn't go exactly as planned
and ISIL doesn't disintegrate and blow away in the wind. But this is a good time to take stock of what might go wrong, the dangers both large and small. Here are just a few of the possibilities:
- Our air strikes could leave ISIL damaged but still strong, leading to pressure for the deployment of ground troops. All of President Obama's pledges notwithstanding, if the goal of the whole project is unfulfilled with only air power, that pressure could build.
- The Iraqi army could prove incapable of pushing ISIL out of the areas it controls. Needless to say, their performance until now has not inspired much confidence, and everyone agrees that no matter how much we batter ISIL from the air, someone has to be able to take and hold territory on the ground.
- The new Iraqi government, on which we're attaching a great deal of hope, could be unable to unify the country, leaving the sectarian hostility that enabled ISIL's rise intact.
- We could drive ISIL out of Iraq, but be unable to affect their position in Syria.
- The training and arming of Syrian rebels could fail to produce a force that can overcome ISIL in Syria. All kinds of things could go wrong with that training, from the simple failure to create an effective fighting force to "green on blue" attacks during the training.
- By injecting ourselves into a staggeringly complex civil war in Syria, we could contribute to an even greater breakdown that exacerbates the greatest humanitarian catastrophe the world has seen in years.
- We could solidify Bashar al-Assad's position by damaging one of his enemies without sufficiently strengthening the "moderate" rebels we're trying to help, leading to an indefinite extension of his brutal rule.
- We could enable the victory in Syria of a force that would be even more repressive than Assad.
- ISIL could be transformed into something equally dangerous that we can't yet foresee, perhaps a force like al-Qaeda with franchises in many different countries.
- We could largely eliminate ISIL, only to see another similar extremist group rise in its place.
- The image of America trampling on helpless people in Muslim countries could be renewed. As we've learned before, our good intentions aren't enough to persuade everyone that America is not trying to subject the world to our domination.
- The Muslim countries we need to lend legitimacy to the operation could fail to provide adequate support, or the support could be so limited that no one anywhere sees this as anything but an American enterprise.
- ISIL itself, or people motivated by America's war against it, could launch successful terrorist attacks within the United States.
- American personnel could fall into ISIL's hands, then be executed. If and when this happens, ISIL will use it to maximum propaganda effect.
- We could kill large numbers of civilians, which would be a problem both in simple moral terms and in its long-term effects. Particularly in the cities ISIL controls, it's almost inevitable that significant numbers of innocent people are going to be killed, no matter how careful we and our allies will try to be.
- It could take a lot longer than we're prepared for. While President Obama has repeated that this will be a lengthy project, if it's still going on a year or two from now, the public won't be pleased.
This is only a start; I'm sure people who know more about the region than I do could come up with dozens of other possibilities, and there are no doubt some so catastrophic we can barely imagine them.
Barack Obama surely appreciates all this. He is not blessed with that alarming combination of ignorance and certainty that characterized his predecessor (and continues to characterize so many Republicans). But there has been widespread skepticism from both his friends and opponents about whether the plan he put forward will be sufficient to "degrade and ultimately destroy" ISIL, as he put it. Indeed, other than the President himself, it's hard to find anyone who thinks it will. But the operation being insufficiently robust is just one danger, and not the most frightening one.
In public, Obama doesn't talk about the potential for screw-ups, unmet expectations, and unintended consequences. That's not surprising; no president is going to come out and say, "Here's what we'll be trying to do, but let me tell you all the ways this could turn into a disaster." But let's hope that he, and the people who work for him, have at least some idea of what they'll do if things go wrong.
