It was right to oppose Israeli brutality in Gaza, but now it's right to support the use of force by the US in Northern Iraq.
The problem of ISIS won’t simply go away if we close our eyes to it
Overnight US President Barack Obama has ordered air strikes on Islamist militants in Iraq:
“Today I authorized two operations in Iraq — targeted airstrikes to protect our American personnel, and a humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain without food and water and facing almost certain death.”
Meanwhile this morning PM David Cameron has made a statement in support of the action but has ruled out British military involvement in Iraq:
“…I fully agree with the President that we should stand up for the values we believe in – the right to freedom and dignity, whatever your religious beliefs.”
However a Downing Street spokeswoman added that the UK was “not planning a military intervention”.
The plight of the Yazidi community in Iraq is finally being taken seriously. More importantly, ISIS, the Islamist rabble that have taken over swathes of Syria and Iraq, are at last being seen for the civilisational threat that they are.
The left must in this instance put aside its reflex opposition to US military action (as a majority did over Rwanda and Kosovo) and try to ensure that Iraqis and Kurds are not left high and dry by Western governments out of sheer electoral expediency.
As seems quite clear, there is very little public appetite, both in the US as well as in the UK, for military involvement overseas. As such President Obama has ruled out the use of ground force against ISIS using the insular argument that ISIS are a problem for the Iraqis to sort out by themselves.
Yet the plight of the Yazidi should draw attention to the fact that, over the past 20 years, ‘keeping out’ has had consequences no less egregious than ‘going in’. For every Iraq and Afghanistan there has been a Srebrenica, a Rwanda and, more recently, a Ghouta.
Indeed, as many warned last year when the US and UK governments decided not to intervene militarily in Syria, there may come a point when an overspill of the Syrian civil war makes minding our own business impossible, just as the 9/11 attacks made a confrontation with the Taliban inevitable.
ISIS are probably best described as clerical fascists, and as the old left-wing slogan used to have it, fascism is war. In other words, and just as with European fascism during the previous century, there is no sitting on the fence on this one: when fascistic ideology is involved the war will invariably come to you.
The situation is such that the West either now helps the Kurds to hold ISIS (at the very least) or acquiesces in genocide – something that would offend any concept of international human rights.
As Sofia Patel has documented, there are around 500,000 Yazidisin living in northern Iraq along the Syrian border. The recent collapse of the Peshmerga defense (Kurdish defense forces) on Sunday means that both areas are now under IS control. 500 Yazidis have already been killed and ISIS forces are calling for the entire Yezidi people to be wiped out.
This is why President Obama has authorised air strikes as well as humanitarian assistance to those Yazidis currently stranded without food or water on Mount Sinjar, where they have fled to escape rampaging ISIS fighters.
Instead of dwelling on the rights or wrongs (mostly wrongs) of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, those who are usually so keen to ‘prove’ that ISIS are somehow a result of Western policy need now to decide how they want to deal with ISIS.
This means doing one of two things: either passively accepting what looks to be an imminent genocide and papering over any discomfort with unworldy pacifist slogans; or it means accepting the necessity of air strikes and persuading a reluctant electorate that international solidarity (in the form of decisive military force) is not simply another empty slogan.
We may live in another ‘low dishonest decade’, as W.H Auden called the 1930s, but if human rights are to mean anything there can be no sitting on the fence when it comes to the protection of the Yazidis in Northern Iraq. The question is not, ‘Will we end up in a quagmire/spend too much money aiding the Kurds and Yazidis?’ The question is, ‘do we put so little value on human life that we are willing to frivolously sit back and watch fascist forces exterminate it?’
Anti-fascism isn’t a purely negative idea that you can be vaguely ‘for’ without being in favour of any definite policy. If you say you are opposed to fascism then at some point you have to be prepared to fight it, rather than relying on other people in other parts of the world to do the fighting for you. Kurdish forces in Northern Iraq are being pushed back; now they need Western help.
It was right to oppose Israeli brutality in Gaza, but now it’s right to support the use of force by the US in Northern Iraq – even if you do find yourself on the same side as David Cameron. But then, if you really think that is the most important issue here you probably ought to reassess your priorities.
The challenge for progressives isn’t to ‘stop the war’ in Iraq – the war is happening whether we like it or not. The challenge is to make sure that war-weary electorates do not turn their backs on the people of Iraq as they have largely done with the people of Syria. The problem of ISIS won’t simply go away if we close our eyes to it.
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56 Responses to “Why US air strikes on ISIS are right, and why the left should support them”
Terry Jirovsky
Kick their ass…..keep going. They are evil and need to be stopped and the U.S. is the only one that will do it.
Bret
Yes there would… In this region if you help topple one regime and leave quickly like in Iraq and after the exit of the USSR from Afghanistan… al Qaeda or the likes of ISIS will show up.
Bret
The UN does nothing without the major costs and action being carried out by the U.S…. Period!
Wazoo2u2
Oh America, the world’s most hated and envied state, will once again roll up its sleeves and take action while the rest of the world watches (and saves their treasure). Mark my words, we will be despised by the very people we save within a generation. This is sectarian conflict, as is and has been Syria. It’s two versions of the “religion of peace” that have been at each other’s throats for centuries- usually with swords. We are being played like a ping pong ball here. Does anyone else notice none of the Arab ‘brothers in Islam” countries help at all?
organic cheeseboard
Al-Nusra – who more or less ‘gave birth’ to ISIS – have been around in Syria almost as long as the FSA have been a coherent organisation, and Al-Nusra are currently fighting an an alliance with the FSA.
Al-Nusra are also a bunch of serious hardline, sectarian Islamists. If we’d given the FSA as much ‘support’ in terms of equipment, as the interventionists wanted us to, it’d be in the hands of al-Nusra now; and if we’d actually intervened, either with bombings or boots on the ground, we’d have pretty easily toppled Assad but our allies would have been sectarians with an axe to grind. So either we’d have left them to fight over the spoils, like we did in Libya (and Iraq, in truth, where we just installed the ethnic majority in power, with the consequences you’re seeing today), or we’d have become embroiled in a horrific sectarian bloodbath where again Islamists would have flourished. And that’s forgetting the fact that the FSA are obviously sectarian and probably Islamist too, they’re just a bit nicer than the real baddies and have decent PR, largely provided by right-wing American hawks like Michael Weiss.
not having a go at you here, but it’s really tiresome when people like James Bloodworth pretend that somehow their beloved fictional interventions would have solved the problems that exist today. Iraq and Libya have shown us that it’s incredibly difficult for interventions to actually work in the long run – the failure rate of interventions is far too high for people like James Bloodworth to say ‘told you so’ in this manner.
It’s also far, far too easy for interventionists to bemoan a lack of post-intervention support, as Bloodworth has done re: Libya. If we don’t literally occupy a country, we can’t enforce order in the manner necessary to avoid splintering like has happened in Libya (and even if we do occupy it hardly means that order will ensue – see Afghanistan).
For interventionists to get the world they claim to want, we’d need to literally occupy at least 2/3 of the Middle East. I’m not sure interventionists actually want this – but then again most of that movement only really seem interested in playing ‘what if’ games like the above, and beamoning others for being insufficiently human.