Lessons of the Past Hint at Hurdles in Fight to Stop ISIS
In 2006, Israel, wielding the region’s most powerful military and solid American support, leveled whole city blocks and village centers along with Hezbollah bunkers and offices. But Hezbollah remained standing, and soon it accumulated more political and military power than ever.
.. The region, and indeed the world, is littered with evidence that in asymmetrical conflicts, even the most powerful military responses can end up stoking the violence and opposition they seek to quell, especially without solutions to underlying conflicts.
If overwhelming firepower alone could guarantee success, the United States would have won the Vietnam War and emerged victorious from Afghanistan and Iraq. And 14 years after 9/11, the threat from Al Qaeda might have disappeared, rather than persisting, morphing and re-emerging as the Islamic State.
.. Mr. Bacevich says “the lessons of these failures” are too rapidly forgotten as many Americans succumb to what he calls a form of militarism, “clinging to the illusion that because we have a splendid military, putting it to work will make things come out all right in the end.”
.. With the group claiming to defend Sunnis, even though they make up the majority of its victims, the campaigns by predominantly Christian and Shiite powers “may strengthen ISIS rather than the contrary,” said Imad Salamey, an associate professor of political science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.
.. Militarily denying territory to the Islamic State — deflating its claims to build a so-called caliphate — is a precondition for progress against it, he said.
But real inroads against the group, Professor Salamey said, will require a comprehensive political solution with “a satisfactory regional Sunni share of power.”
That, he said, would allay the insecurity among both Sunni leaders and populations, which have festered with the deposing of Saddam Hussein and the rise of a Shiite-dominated Iran, and with the crushing of popular uprisings in Sunni-majority countries.