The Obama doctrine is ravaging the Middle East

Everyone seems to have a theory on how to obliterate Daesh. However, two points are rarely raised: the origins of the group and whether there are genuine intentions to defeat it, in the first place.

We must boldly address the first to unravel the enigma behind the rise and growth of Daesh — otherwise, how else can the group be dismantled.

We must contend with the second point before engaging in superfluous discussions about the most appropriate war strategy — that if war is, at all, the answer.

The questions are quite urgent, yet, somehow, they are frequently overlooked, glossed over through some disingenuous logic or the blame is always placed somewhere else.

Now that the Americans have launched yet another aerial war against Libya, purportedly to target Daesh positions there, the discussion is being carefully geared towards how far the US must go to defeat the militant group.

In fact, “can air strikes alone win a war without ‘boots on the ground’?” has morphed, somehow, to become the crux of the matter that has engaged a large number of intellectuals on both sides of the debate.

US media gurus, split between two equally warmongering parties, love to jump at such opportunities to discredit one another, as if waging wars in other countries is an exclusively American affair.

Days are long gone when the US laboured to establish coalitions to wage war, as it did in Kuwait and Iraq in 1990-91 and, to a lesser extent, again, in Iraq in 2003.

Now wars are carried out as a matter of course. Many Americans seem to be unaware of the fact that their country is actually fighting wars on several fronts, and is circuitously involved in others.

With multiple war fronts and conflicts fermenting all around, many are becoming desensitised. 

Americans, particularly, have, sadly, swallowed the serum of perpetual war, to the extent that they rarely mobilise in any serious way against it.

In other words, a state of war has become the status quo.

Although the US administration of President Barack Obama killed thousands, the majority civilians, there is no uproar nor mass protests.

Aside from the fact that the Obama brand was fashioned to appear as the peaceable contrast to warmongering George W. Bush, there has been no serious change in US foreign policy in the Middle East in any way that could suggest that one president is “better” than the other.

Obama has simply continued the legacy of his predecessor, unhindered.

The primary change that occurred is tactical: instead of resorting to massive troops build-up on the ground with an assignment to topple governments, Obama used air strikes to target whoever is perceived to be the enemy, while investing in whoever he deemed “moderate” enough to finish the job.

Like Bush’s preemptive “war on terror”, Obama’s doctrine has been disastrous.

Obama’s wars were designed to produce little or no American casualties, since they were almost entirely conducted from the air and via unmanned drones operated by remote control, sometimes thousands of kilometres way.

That approach proved less taxing politically. 

However, it worsened the situation on the ground and instead of ending war, it expanded it.

While Bush’s invasion of Iraq revived Al Qaeda and brought it to the heart of the region, Obama’s aerial wars forced Al Qaeda to regroup, employing a different strategy.

It rebranded itself from militant cells to a “state”, sought swift territorial expansion, used guerrilla warfare when facing an organised army or is bombed from the sky, and carried out suicide bombings throughout the world to break the morale of its enemies and to serve its propaganda efforts aimed at keeping the recruits coming.

Considering that the enemies of Daesh are enemies of one another, the group is assured that its existence, at least for the foreseeable future, is tenable.

The truth is that Daesh thrives on military intervention because it was born from previous military interventions.

It is expanding because its enemies are not in unison, as each is serving agendas that are rarely concerned with ending war, but rather see war as an opportunity to realise political gains.

With this logic in mind, one cannot expect the US “Operation Odyssey Lightning”, which officially began on August 1 in Libya, to achieve any results that could end up in stabilising the country.

Bringing about such “stability” would not have needed if the US and other NATO members’ war on Libya in 2011 had not largely dismembered a once rich and relatively stable Arab country. 

Indeed, it was the vacuum left by subsequent conflicts that invited Daesh to Sirte and other areas. 

Now, the US — and other Western powers, led by the French — are applying unwinnable war tactics to stave off a messy crisis they created themselves through their earlier war.

Even if Daesh is driven out of Sirte, it will find some other unstable environment where it will spawn and wreak havoc.

Sirte, in turn, will, likely, fall back into a state of bedlam where various militias, many of whom were armed by NATO in the first place, turn their guns against each other.

Without a whole new approach to the problem, the conflicts will certainly keep multiplying. 

According to airwars.org, which keeps track of the war on Daesh, 14,405 coalition air strikes against the group have been carried out in Iraq and Syria during 735 days of a relentless campaign. 

An estimated 52,300 bombs and missiles were dropped, although the number must be much higher, since there are numerous strikes that are never claimed by any party, thus are not officially recorded.

This, of course, does not take into account Russia’s aerial bombardment or that of any other party that is not officially part of the Western coalition. 

But what good did this do, aside from killing many civilians, destroying massive infrastructure and pushing Daesh farther into other vulnerable Middle East and North African spots?

There are few voices in the US media and government that seem serious about changing completely the perspective of the Bush-Obama war on terror. 

Sensible calls by the likes of Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, that the root causes of terror must be addressed to end terrorism, rarely register in the halls of US government and Congress.

In January, the cost of the war on Daesh, as estimated by the US Defence Department, had jumped by $2 million a day to a total of $11 million.

“The air war has cost the US about $5.5 billion total since it began in August 2014,” Business Insider reported. 

The escalation in Libya is likely to produce new, more staggering numbers soon.

Expectedly, this is a great time for business for those who benefit from war. Concurrently, the cycle of war and violence is feeding on itself with no end in sight.

“Hope in aerial bombardment as the prophylactic for peace is absurd,” Vijay Prashad, the professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, recently wrote about the futility of air strike wars.

“It has given us instability and chaos. Other roads have to be opened. Other paths ceded.” 

One could not agree more.

The writer, www.ramzybaroud.net, has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally syndicated columnist, a media consultant, author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include “Searching Jenin”, “The Second Palestinian Intifada” and “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story”. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.