WASHINGTON — With only 60 moderate Syrian rebels training under U.S. military advisers and a less than expected number of Iraqi soldiers prepared to fight, the Obama administration’s quest to destroy the Islamic State and its allure through political solutions and use of indigenous forces is in question.
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee alongside Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey on Monday, July 6, enumerated the administration’s nine-point plan to carry out the president’s pledge to “degrade and ultimately destroy ISIS.” The most critical of these efforts is the political strategy, Carter said, followed by building partnerships in Iraq and Syria.
“This line involves building more effective, inclusive and multi-sectarian governance in Iraq,” he said. “At the same time, the United States continues to work diplomatically to bring about a political transition from Bashar al-Assad to a more inclusive government with which we can also work to defeat ISIL.”
Having only 60 Syrian rebels in training is due to a lack of qualified volunteers. This is “much smaller” than the original goal of training as many as some 5,000 rebels per year, Carter said. He added that 7,000 more candidates are being vetted.
These vetting standards are stringent and include counterintelligence screenings and confirmation that the volunteers will follow the U.S. laws on armed conflict. This is necessary, in part, to make sure that the fighters don’t present a “green-on-blue threat” to their trainers.
“All of this is the legal, and I would say principled, and I’m not arguing with it, policies of the U.S. as far as those fighters are concerned,” Carter said. “That is why it was 60 of them that got out the other end of the process.” Carter expects this number to increase.
The Department of Defense, citing security concerns, did not answer an email inquiry asking how many of the 7,000 Syrian rebels it expects to pass the vetting process.
“For operational security reasons, specific details of future class sizes and their groups will not be provided,” a Defense Department spokesman said in an email. “For a variety of reasons related to the strict vetting process, many of the volunteers were turned away or were unable to attend the training program,” he added.
Other potential holdups include the U.S-imposed condition that the rebels target ISIS, not Syria President Bashar al-Assad, along with the U.S. hesitation to commit to defending the rebels from Assad’s barrel bombs.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., grilled Carter on the use of a political exit strategy for Bashar al-Assad, saying it is a nonstarter for the Turks, Egyptians and Saudis, among others, who want Assad to be part of the military target set.
“We went to Qatar, we went to Saudi Arabia, we went all over the Mideast,” Graham said, referencing a recent trip senators made to the region. “And they told us to a person that we would gladly join forces with you upon the condition that Assad is part of the target set.”
According to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who traveled with Graham, the administration’s failure to pledge to defend the rebels against Assad’s barrel bombs is part of the reason they won’t commit to the fight.
Carter, while acknowledging those countries differ in strategy from the U.S., affirmed that a politically motivated exit for Assad, not a militarily driven exit, is Obama’s approach. He argued that this method increases the opportunity for a peaceful transition of power in Syria.
Carter conceded that the recruitment and training of local forces needed to improve. Due to a lack of recruits, only 8,800 Iraqi soldiers and Peshmerga forces had been trained as of June 30. There are, however, another 4,000 troops in training, he said.
He was pleased that the Iraqi government armed 800 Sunni fighters and is training 500 more soldiers at Al Taqaddum – an air base used by the U.S. during the Iraq War. The hope is that these trainees will help reclaim Ramadi and other areas under Islamic State control in the Anbar province.
“I’ve told Iraqi leaders that while the United States is open to supporting Iraq more than we already are, we must see a greater commitment from all parts of the Iraqi government,” Carter said.
There is bipartisan concern on whether or not Iraq is a sufficiently willing partner.
“We spent multiple years, 10 years plus, trillion dollars, lost a lot of lives in Iraq and we had 100,000 troops there at one time trying to train and defend and get them motivated and that didn’t work,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., said at the hearing. “How do I go home and answer that we’re going to try this over again?”
David Tretler, dean of the National War College, said that the Middle East countries have such “multifarious deep-seated antagonisms” for each other that the administration’s plan to politically unite the Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq and politically oust Assad is extremely questionable.
He said that the U.S. Civil War, for example, was far less intense and visceral than the issues that plague the Middle East, and that conflict took four years and more than 500,000 lives to reconcile.
A fundamental problem for the success of Obama’s strategy is that Iraqis overwhelmingly think that they are entitled to a democracy, but they do not believe that their neighbors share this right, according to Tretler.
Ultimately, these conflicts may only be resolved naturally as they burn out over time, he said.
In the hearing, Dempsey predicted it would take at least another 24 months to return sovereignty to Iraq and even longer — at least 20 years, or one generation — to eradicate the allure of ISIS’s ideology and deliver stability to the Middle East.
Tretler agreed that the Obama strategy requires time.
“I don’t know if they will be able to establish a multi-sectarian government,” he said. “We have already been involved in Iraq since the first Gulf War.”
The president is carrying out this strategy to combat ISIS in Syria and elsewhere under the same authorized use of military force Congress granted Bush in 2001, along with his inherent powers as commander in chief. Members of both parties question the legality of such authority.
At the hearing, Graham asked Carter, “Do we have the legal authority to assist the free Syrian army that we train against Assad?”
“I’m not sure about the legalities of it,” Carter said.