The Guardian view on President Obama’s plan to contain Isis

The president offers a plan couched in terms of defending America and degrading Isis but he needs to add to it a diplomatic effort to help settle the Shia-Sunni conflict

- Editorial
- The Guardian, Thursday 11 September 2014 13.13 EDT
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US President Barack outlines to the American people his strategy to target Islamic State. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

A great region is in turmoil, with hundreds of thousands of people killed and millions displaced. State authority has crumbled in at least two countries, and is threatened in others. An old religious rift, quiescent for centuries, has cracked wide open, and a sectarian civil war is being waged with increasing viciousness in the heartland of Islam. Rival armies, militias and bandit groups range across the hills and valleys, violently bursting into cities and towns, some operating without any regard for the rules that normally curb excess.

Outside powers, set on victory over each other, fund and direct the carnage. Economic activity shrinks, sustained only by smuggling and predation, education is disrupted, normal life just barely survives in pockets here and there, brutalised young men become the dominant class in many areas. It is a hellish scene, reminiscent of the thirty years war in the 17th century. Indeed the conflict in the Middle East is potentially as damaging to the region as that earlier struggle was to Europe.

What to do in the face of such horrors and dangers? That is the fundamental issue that the international community must face, in spite of all the differences and the allegiances which tie nations to one side or the other in the cockpit of war. So when President Obama went before his country on Wednesday, this is the context in which what he had to say about his plans should be considered. This should not be about the murder of western journalists and not even about the rise of Islamic State (Isis), nor even about repairing the failed state of Iraq, but about the whole world’s responsibility to bring this region back from the edge.

The huge scale of the problem is expressed by that bald statement. It may be beyond human ingenuity to achieve such an aim, or to approach it, but is it right not to try? Is doing nothing really an option? Western countries have averted their eyes in the past. Let it just burn out, said the critics of intervention in former Yugoslavia. We should have paid more heed, said the critics of inaction in Rwanda.

Why us, Americans in particular may ask, in the case now of Iraq and Syria? The answer is surely that it is right to try, and that for a variety of reasons, notably that the local powers are so much at odds with each other, the United States will find itself pushed into the lead, in spite of its record in Iraq.

President Obama’s plan involves the use of air power in both Iraq and Syria; some American troops, although not regular combat units, on the ground in Iraq; the training and arming of “moderate” Syrian rebels to fight Isis; and the formation of a coalition of allies.

It raises a lot of questions, both for Americans who now see themselves committed to another war, albeit a very different one than in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for allies like Britain, who must decided whether to follow suit. A just-formed unity government in Baghdad which has yet to prove itself, and a non-jihadist rebel force in Syria which was judged until yesterday to have almost disappeared, are weak pillars for an ambitious policy.

The coalition idea is vaguely conceived, and the Iranians are not the only ones to note its “serious ambiguities”. Bombing is in itself not decisive and can also be hugely counter-productive. The president’s references to Yemen and Somalia are not reassuring: the last thing we want is another endless drone war. Military action can only be defended as a means of blunting the jihadist momentum, but any such slowing down will mean nothing if unaccompanied by efforts to nudge the regional powers, above all Saudi Arabia and Iran, towards the realisation that neither can win and both have much to lose.

Is America, which is after all also one of the outside powers seeking to influence the conflict’s outcome, an ideal arbiter? Hardly, but it is the only one available. President Obama said nothing about broader diplomacy in his speech. It is too tangled an issue, and he had to couch his speech in the familiar vocabulary of defending America. But it is to be hoped he has such ultimate objectives very much in mind.