The
War on ISIS: More Than One Battle
In the Vietnam War, saving Khe Sanh seemed
essential. Turned out it wasn’t.
By Max Boot in the
Wall Street Journal
On
Jan. 21, 1968, North Vietnamese troops attacked the U.S. Marine garrison at Khe
Sanh in South Vietnam near the border with Laos. A 77-day siege ensued, with
the U.S. pouring in ever more firepower. The U.S. would drop 100,000 tons of
bombs because Gen. William Westmoreland was determined that Khe Sanh not become
another defeat like Dien Bien Phu, which had effectively ended France’s
colonial presence in Vietnam 14 years earlier.
And
it didn’t. Eventually the siege was relieved and the attacking forces melted
away, having suffered more than 5,000 fatalities (while the defenders lost
about 350 men).
Today,
no one except some veterans and military historians remembers Khe Sanh because
in the end it had scant strategic significance: Even though the U.S. won the
battle, it lost the war. Not long after having “liberated” Khe Sanh, the U.S.
dismantled the base because it served little purpose.
This
history is worth mentioning because of the parallels, limited and inexact to be
sure, between Khe Sanh and Kobani, a Kurdish town in northern Syria. Jihadist
forces of Islamic State, also known as ISIS, have been besieging Kobani for
weeks, and the U.S. has been ramping up efforts to prevent the town from
falling. U.S. airstrikes have apparently taken a heavy toll, eliminating ISIS
fighters, artillery, armored vehicles and other heavy weapons. Airstrikes have
now been joined by airdrops of weapons and ammunition to the Kurdish defenders.
Turkey, which had hitherto not lifted a finger to save Kobani, announced Monday
that it would allow Iraqi Kurdish fighters to traverse Turkish territory to
join in defending the town.
Kobani
no longer looks to be in imminent danger of falling. It is even possible that
ISIS will give up the fight and pull out. If this happens, it will certainly be
good news. The remaining residents of Kobani would be saved from slaughter and
their relief would give a moral boost to anti-ISIS efforts. But any celebration
should be muted. Winning at Kobani will be no more devastating to ISIS than was
the American victory at Khe Sanh to North Vietnam.
The
problem is that ISIS can readily replace the fighters it loses in Kobani, and
heavy weapons are not essential to its guerrilla style of warfare. Even as ISIS
is losing a little ground at Kobani, it is gaining strength elsewhere.
Its
fighters are advancing in Anbar Province with little resistance. They are
poised on the outskirts of Baghdad; soon they may be within mortar range of
Baghdad International Airport, whose closure would be a disaster. On Monday
alone, its car bombs and suicide bombers in Baghdad and Karbala claimed at
least 33 lives, a day after a suicide bomber in Baghdad killed at least 28
people in a Shiite mosque. The pattern is reminiscent of the terrorist
atrocities perpetrated in 2006 by al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS’s predecessor, aimed
at rallying Sunnis to the terrorists’ side by provoking a civil war with
Shiites.
As
in those dark days, Sunni extremism is provoking an equally extreme response
from Iranian-backed Shiites. The replacement of Nouri al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime
minister with Haidar al-Abadi, an apparently less sectarian Shiite, was a small
step in the right direction for which the Obama administration deserves credit.
But there is little reason to think the Iranian hold over a substantial portion
of the Iraqi state has been broken.
The
Iraqi Parliament has approved ministers to run the two security
ministries—Interior and Defense. While the Defense pick is Sunni technocrat
Khalid al-Obedi, the Interior pick is far more worrisome: Mohammed Salem
al-Ghabban is a member of the Badr Organization, one of the chief
Iranian-backed Shiite militias that is further destabilizing Iraq with attacks
on Sunni neighborhoods. The likelihood is that Mr. Ghabban will take orders
from his ultimate sponsor, Gen. Qasem Suleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force.
This
means that the Interior Ministry, in charge of Iraq’s police forces, will
become, if it is not already, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Shiite militias
and their Iranian string-pullers. This happened in 2006 when the Iraqi police
became notorious for kidnapping and torturing Sunnis. This helped bring Iraq to
the brink of all-out civil war and will do so again if not checked.
The
only way to counteract the Iranian capture of the Interior Ministry is to
bolster the Iraqi army as an independent fighting force, but there is little
sign of this occurring. Shiite sectarians have also deeply penetrated the army
and the U.S. has little ability to counteract this insidious development
because President Obama will not send a large number of “embedded” advisers to
work alongside army units that remain more professional and less politicized.
Only
12 U.S. advisory teams have been deployed and only at the brigade level. The
other 14 Iraqi brigades identified by the U.S. as “reliable partners” have no
advisers at all. None of these advisers, moreover, is allowed to accompany
Iraqi troops into combat, where they can be most effective. The U.S. also is
not stepping in to offer direct assistance and training to the Sunnis of Anbar
Province to allow them to fight back against ISIS, as they did against al Qaeda
in Iraq in 2007-08.
In
Syria the U.S. is also doing little to oppose the Assad dictatorship, leaving
it free to continue attacks on areas held by moderate militias affiliated with
the Free Syrian Army. This, too, is feeding the radicalization of Syria and
Iraq by convincing many Sunnis, rightly or wrongly, that the U.S. is
acquiescing to Iranian regional domination—and that ISIS is the only reliable
defender that Sunnis have. That impression will be strengthened if the Obama
administration reaches a deal with Iran next month that will allow Tehran to
maintain its capacity to develop a nuclear weapon.
Through
the limited application of air power—a mere handful of daily strikes—the U.S.
may achieve tactical progress to blunt ISIS’s momentum. But Khe Sanh showed the
limits of tactical military victories if they are not married to larger
strategic gains—and those are elusive in Iraq and Syria today.
Mr. Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations,
is the author of “Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from
Ancient Time to Today” ( Norton, 2013).
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