President Obama’s request for authorization to fight ISIS, The Islamic State, with military tools is a less than rational counter to the new and completely unanticipated threat to world order from media savvy terrorists. In our rich web environment ISIS has drawn a rock star following among the disenfranchised and blood thirsty to recruit and fund the takeover of stateless regions of Syria and Iraq. Its success is drawing out copy cats in Nigeria and Libya trying to convert gangs of thugs into regional conquerors using similar publicity techniques. The challenge for the world of the well governed is to develop a counter to these stateless regions which now through media have the possibility of metastasizing into threats that demand more than local attention. Military air power, the usual available extension of force, unfortunately exacerbates rather than resolves by glamorizing the terrorist’s cause and not displacing them. Something other than this overused, and possibly one which has developed a resistance, counter must be found. Since statelessness by definition is a lack of government then the logical answer to pacify these regions is to field minor league teams of prosperous political unions (Dare we call it nation building?) to fill the voids.
A characteristic of a country with stateless regions is overreach of the central government’s capacity to govern. Assad in Syria does not govern the entire country as he and his father had previously managed because a drought stressed its fragile agro economy. Resources were held back from those not favored by the regime and great swaths of the country were let go into poverty and despair, natural conditions for rebellion. Nigeria on the other hand is a geographically large country with a concentrated petro industry and a neglected region where the terrorist group Boko Haram came about. Libya is a tribal nation banded together by artificially drawn boundaries and the need for a despot to organize the petro dollars. These regions and others require a diplomatic mindset that considers the breakup of nations into smaller political units to eliminate the overreach.
The recent re-taking of Kobani in North Eastern Syria by the Kurdish militia has gotten little publicity yet it is a showcase event of a committed political union defeating ISIS. The Kurdish people of Turkey and Iraq in their common desire for a self governed nation has a motivated militia in the pesh merga of Iraq’s Kurdistan province which brought a ferocious fight to the re-conquest. It was personal commitment, not impersonal airpower, that won this fight. When Sunni ISIS invaded Kobani, a Kurdish city, they had no ethnic welcome and could not muster the imperial resources necessary to hold a people completely at odds with their will. ISIS is tactically capable of a blitzkrieg invasion but for their strategic vision of a caliphate they overreached; lacking the manpower and government structure required to dominate a hostile population, particularly one with a capable political union to the east, Kurdistan in Iraq, willing and able to rescue them.
Keeping the Kurds well funded and protected is a high value allied tactic to pacify the region. Our supposed ally Turkey, considers the Kurdish PKK a terrorist group and is so vehemently anti Kurd that many recent Turkish actions were meant to aid ISIS so as to subdue the Kurds. Placating Turkey on this issue is contrary to a grand strategy of relieving seismic regional tensions by letting the natural ethnic divisions prevail. The Kurdish province of Kurdistan in Iraq is destined to become a nation in its own right because its political union is more capable than that of the central government of Iraq. The Kurds expansion of their national aspiration into parts of Turkey and Syria would pacify parts of the region with a moderate functioning government worthy of Allied support.
American policy in Iraq today is in denial by believing there is a chance of forming an army motivated in its desire for a united Iraq. Current talk of an imminent retaking of Mosul is eerily like before Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs catastrophe in Cuba. Sunnis will not join Iraq’s army after so many past betrayals. Shias that join are fearful of ISIS and the terror they publicize. Shia militias on the other hand seek vengeance making a reconquest of Mosul into a blood bath. These disparate factions will not unite into a force that re-conquers and then, mostly importantly, govern and police the city with anything less than tyranny. It was Saddam Hussein’s tyranny that kept order among Iraq’s factions within borders drawn up by the British in the years after World War II. Rather than support a country that requires such tyranny to hold it together the administration should give Iraq the diplomatic push to split itself into its three political unions, Shia, Sunni and Kurdish and force each region to look inward and serve its people.
Syria has the same need of splitting into various political unions from the artificially drawn boundaries of the post Ottoman empire. Principally its Sunni and Shia sects must find their way separately. Because Syria does not have a prosperous, and therefore moderate, Sunni political union it requires that the allies build one from scratch before thinking of funding rebel groups to counter ISIS and Assad. The U.N. Syrian refugee hunger aid program is a non partisan vehicle of distribution of funds with a debit card process that lets families decide for themselves what goods and services to buy. Allied policy should be to make the Syrian refugee camps in Northwestern Jordan attractive to those desirous of peace and prosperity so that they gravitate to South Syria. Providing this sanctuary also alleviates the desperate migration of Syrians to Europe and other countries. The benefit of direct distribution of funds to consumers is its moderating effect which forms a market economy within the camps so they self organize governing bodies that secures the people and adjudicates fairly. Camps could organize along ethnic lines of the various sects of Islam and Christianity which eventually federalize into a moderate political union. Generous aid to Jordan creates an infrastructure to service the refugees and eventually construct city states across the border in the South of Syria; cities protected from Assad’s helicopters with American and Jordanian air power, by the way a much better use of Jordan’s air power where Sunni’s are supported rather than innocents killed as in its current lashing out in reprisal to ISIS’s immolation of a Jordanian pilot. The Syrian city states swell as they accept more and more refugees so as to expand northward. The disaffected Sunnis of Damascus vacate and force Assad to retreat with his Alawite Shia tribe to Syria’s western shore. Over time moderate governance would expand northward displacing ISIS’s from hollowed out cities in Syria and possibly in Iraq as well. Generous aid sounds as if it would be costly but it is certain to be one tenth the cost of funding the carrier fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean for example, and with a much more productive result in pacifying the region.
Cash as a tool for peace requires an explanation of the Nobel Laureate Economist Milton Friedman’s quadrant regarding spending efficiency. On the upper left you have a purchase made with the purchaser’s own funds. This is considered the most efficient purchase where maximum value is received for minimum expenditure. A less efficient quadrant is the upper right where where the purchaser is using his own funds to purchase for someone else, a gift for example. The purchase is less than optimal because it is difficult to know exactly what is wanted by the receiver. The bottom quadrants are grossly less efficient with the left being that of a purchase made with someone elses money. This is where the Rolls Royce is purchased when the Volkswagen would do. And then of course the grotesque fourth on the lower right where purchasing for someone else with someone else’s money. This is where the thousand dollar hammer in a defense contract comes to mind. The beauty of the U. N. method of distributing aid funds to Syrian refugees is that it concentrates the aid in the efficient upper left quadrant where refugees are given cash to spend in the manner which they choose. Its an economic efficiency that encourages moderate governance through prosperity. Aid delivered under the usual fourth quadrant manner is so grossly inefficient that it is counterproductive by causing corruption, poverty and ill will. Currently there are signs that the U.N. debit card aid is beginning to have a free market forming and politically moderating effect, but much more is needed. Attempts to micromanage and steer the end result to a satisfactory secular end will introduce fourth quadrant inefficiency which must be avoided at all costs to the point that of not bothering with making the cash outlays if it is to be micromanaged. The fight against statelessness can not win against corruption that diverts funds so that statelessness is the result.
One only has to understand that prosperity is a moderating force while poverty is a radicalizing one to believe the good result of first quadrant spending. The current debate about Radical Islam as a theology that motivates terrorism misses the point, which is that ISIS uses the most hateful precepts of Islam as a money raising and recruiting tool. Its success has its military officers formerly of Saddam Hussein's Baathist Party laughing at their success over bottles of Johnnie Walker Black. The developed well governed world should not take seriously Radical Islam as a theology but as a tool for organizing a dictatorship with terror. Islam in a prosperous setting is not necessarily radical though its less enlightened followers may have vengeful beliefs, but so do Jews and Christians. First quadrant prosperity is moderating because life is worth living while poverty can make the afterlife the reward and radicalism possible. Fighting Radical Islam with military operations is a fighting fire with fire proposition that it begets more radicalism. President Obama’s current campaign of airstrikes with some military advisers on the ground is keeping ISIS under cover and degrades their oil revenues but this is just a stopgap measure. Funding and arming independent rebels is not a solution because they lack a political union and make ISIS’s governance look good in comparison. The Kurdish re-conquest of Kobani proves that a strong unified politic motivating its militia is the only counter to ISIS and their like.
The President needs to focus on eradicating statelessness, not terrorism. Instead of asking for military authority to fight ISIS he should change our policy of supporting untenable boundaries that need breaking up, starting first with our misplaced support of a unified Iraq. Our military might should focus on Eastern Europe where our weaponry is a more suited to counter Russian hegemony rather than mindless firing of cannons at mosquitos in the Middle East. Finally we must support nation building techniques and use the United Nations as a conduit to create pacifying agents to displace the malignancy in the badly governed regions of the world.
