Three Ideas to Consider in Defeating ISIS

After a 30 day review, the Department of Defense has delivered to the White House a preliminary plan to defeat ISIS.  While this is an admirable goal, defeating ISIS will only be a short-term fix to the problem of Islamic terrorism, just as defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) only saw it reconstituted and return with a vengeance as ISIS.  Here are a few considerations based on what worked in the development of the 2006 Anbar Awakening—the Sunni Sheik led alliance with Coalition forces that fostered the defeat of AQI, first in Anbar province, then across Shia and Sunni parts of Iraq.

First, sign a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Government of Iraq both to protect the rights of American troops serving in Iraq, and more importantly, laying the groundwork for the broader security arrangement between the United States and Iraq for the decades to come.  The inability to obtain a SOFA agreement with the Iraqi government contributed to the security situation in Iraq immediately beginning to unravel following the ill-advised pull out of U.S. forces at the end of 2011. Then-Prime Minister Nori Maliki accused his Sunni Vice President of terrorism, forcing Tariq al-Hashimi to flee the country.  Maliki gave in to his party’s demands and purged the government of Sunnis. He then sent the Iraqi Army in to Anbar province over the coming months to root out terrorists.  The Sunnis, who had served for years in a coalition government with Maliki’s Shia Dawa party since the forming of the Anbar Awakening, found themselves in the zero-sum situation that prevents consensual government in the Mideast.  Forced to choose between a government that was persecuting them and the religious extremist they rejected six years earlier, they returned to the latter.  While many tribal fighters stayed loyal to the Awakening movement, others turned to the Sunni-supremacist ISIS—the rebranded Al Qaeda in Iraq.  Without a SOFA, the U.S. will return to a similar situation in a few years; without any leverage to influence an Iraqi government on which we spent billions of dollars and thousands of lives to stabilize, only to leave and have those gains reversed.