Christian leaders plea for troops in Iraq
CHRISTIAN leaders in Iraq say their faith will be obliterated in communities as old as the church itself unless international troops and more airstrikes drive the Islamic State from the country.
Catholics and Anglicans said yesterday they had lost confidence in the Iraqi government to afford them any protection after tens of thousands of Christians were forced to flee their homes on the Nineveh plains in the face of an Islamic militant advance.
Thousands of Yazidis, members of an ancient sect, have also fled their homes around the Sinjar mountains in northern Iraq after Islamic State gave them an ultimatum: convert to Islam or die.
“No one wants another country’s soldiers to enter their own country, but we live in very bad times,” said Father Messayr Behnam, of St George’s Chaldean Church, Baghdad.
“We want international forces to protect the villages in Ninevah because the government doesn’t care about us.”
US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron have insisted they will not to be dragged into another Iraq war, but they have already faced allegations of mission creep for supporting Kurdish and Iraqi troops battling to retake the strategic Mosul dam.
Sins of the Father notwithstanding. Iraq in 2014 is not the Iraq of 2003, nor is the proposed mission the same. The argument that Saddam had kept Iraq stable – albeit while carrying out the mass slaughter of Kurds and Shi’ite Marsh Arabs – doesn’t hold to the present situation regarding the Islamic State (IS), who currently occupy territory – the size of the United Kingdom – and resources hitherto unseen in organisations of its kind; the most competent terrorist organisation in the world.
The sort of limited action we’ve seen so far against IS are unlikely to contain them, let alone begin to roll them back from the vast advances they’ve made recently. There is room for the West to substantially boost their presence in Iraq beyond the simple notion of “battalions on the ground”. In the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Byman notes the path ahead: political reform in Baghdad, a limited use of U.S. military force, and building local Iraqi resilience. Such force could entail a sustained bombing campaign against IS, an organisation with no airforce or navy, and special operations to kill their leadership, and capture mid-ranking commanders.
Let us not forget that AQI were roundly trounced by the West and Iraqis during the 2007-8 “surge”. What was initially a tactical victory failed to develop into a strategic one for Iraq. As the Henry Jackson Society’s Robin Simcox said in Foreign Affairs, “in the absence of sustained attention and military force, terrorist networks tend to regenerate.”
The role that Australia can play in this – pace our superb and world-respected special forces – is, I fear, almost entirely symbolic. People have come to recognise that the only dog with any teeth in these fights is the United States.
However, as we all know, the West has become fatigued; war-weary. Whether it was Julia Gillard heralding the end of the “9/11 decade”, Kevin Rudd declaring the “mission over” in Iraq in 2008, or President Obama’s clear, if premature, assertion that “a decade of war is ending”, most people recognise that the international desire to intervene in Mesopotamia and the Levant is non-existent. An unprecedented number of the American people, too, think that the United States should “mind its own business internationally”.
Some may rejoice over the vacuum left by the recent absence of American power over the past few years. We’ll see how long their joy lasts.
The Spectator