Iraq & Syria Could Be Permanently Broken Up As Failed States

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Next month’s peace talks in Geneva to resolve the Syrian conflict could fail because the U.S. has no coherent policy in putting back together the broken nation’s of Iraq and Syria.

Voice of America reports:

One major problem, according to current and former intelligence and military officials, is that U.S. policy has simply not adjusted to the complex realities on the ground.

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“I haven’t seen any indication that the U.S. has a coherent plan for dealing with failed states,” former CIA Director James Woolsey told VOA. “I don’t think the Obama administration has developed one.”

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Woolsey and others point to a growing list of so-called failed states in the Middle East and elsewhere, where critical institutions have collapsed and the power vacuum is being filled by various groups with different agendas.

“There is no Syria or Iraq,” said Kurdistan Regional Government Intelligence Director Lahur Talabani, who argued in an interview with VOA that the emergence of the Islamic State terror group, or IS, delivered the decisive blow to both nations. “With the arrival of ISIS in the region, they removed the borders that were put in place,” he said, using another acronym for IS.

Pending collapses

Like Talabani, others see the collapse of Syria and Iraq as a done deal.

“The Middle East we have known is over. I doubt that it will come back,” French intelligence director Bernard Bajolet told a CIA-sponsored panel discussion in October.

Still, critics say U.S. policy has focused largely on treating — or at least trying to preserve — Syria and Iraq as whole and viable states.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest has talked about U.S. efforts to help “solve the political chaos inside of Syria.”

In describing the next steps in that process, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke this month about the eventual creation of a “unity entity, this transitional body, that is going to have full executive authority.”

Multiple partitions

Some current and former officials question how successful that can be when fighting on the ground has already effectively partitioned Syria, with the Assad regime, the Kurds and various Sunni groups all controlling or trying to control their own core areas.

These officials argue that even the considerable help being offered to the central governments of Syria and Iraq is unlikely to help.

“The national armies have failed,” said Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation, a global policy research institution.

“To the extent that the external forces assist the government in Iraq, which is overwhelmingly Shia, or the government in Damascus, whose forces on the ground are primarily Alawite, or Saudi Arabia and others assisting rebels who are primarily Sunni, or the United States increasing the effectiveness of Kurdish fighters, this has the cumulative effect of digging those divisions deeper,” he said.

Other former officials and analysts agree there are few good options and say many of them will be costly, in terms of time, money and possibly U.S. lives.

“We either need to stay committed to that original premise that we’re going to fix the nation-state system and rebuild those nation-states into friendly democracies or we have to come up with a new strategy that reflects the reality that the nation-state system in Syria is broken,” said Christopher Harmer, a former U.S. Navy commander who is now a senior naval analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.

“In Iraq it’s more or less broken, and we don’t see any way that that’s going to be rebuilt anytime soon,” he said.

For now, the administration of President Barack Obama seems to be caught in the middle.