The Fall of Baghdad

This post is, in part, a brief response to the current movements of ISIS/ISIL in eastern Anbar province and, in part, a reflection on a documentary that I watched about a month ago on, of all things, the 1975 fall of Saigon.  There are a very limited set of points that I mean to get across here. 

First, I downplay the potential for ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State (IS) to take Baghdad, notwithstanding the existing weaknesses of the Iraqi Army/ex-Badr Brigades as a defensive fighting force.  We need to clarify exactly what we mean in discussing the fall of Baghdad to the IS.  To me, such a concept must imply being in control of central areas of the city including, obviously, the "Green Zone" along the Tigris River.  Assuming such areas could be temporarily overrun by IS forces, would they be able to stabilize their control over the areas in the way that they apparently have in Mosul?  Provided IS forces can seize control over areas of the city on the west bank of the Tigris, driving central governmental forces and representatives of the international community out of the city (not to mention sending a stream of civilian refugees pouring out the city to the north, south, and east), what would this mean for the state of the Iraqi central government and Iraqi military?  Would the government be able to consolidate itself in new quarters outside of the Green Zone and prosecute the reconquest of central Baghdad?  What about areas of the east bank of the Tigris and, especially, Sadr City?  What about the international airport in the city's southwest? 

All of these speculations on the capacity of Iraqi forces to hold Baghdad against the IS turn on the capacity of Iraqi forces, together with Mahdi irregulars and supported by U.S. and allied air power, to limit territorial gains by IS forces in the vicinity of Abu Gharib and hold key avenues of approach from Abu Gharib into western Baghdad.  It also depends on what the cumulative tactical objectives of IS commanders might be in approaching from the area of Abu Gharib.  Will these forces swing southward and attempt immediately to move against the international airport (a likely target if the IS is trying to isolate the city from air logistical support)?  Will they advance straight eastward along the most developed avenues of approach from Abu Gharib into central Baghdad?  What tactical obstacles and potential choke points might be available to slow their advance and render them especially vulnerable to air bombardment?  Can they be effectively lured into urban warfare scenarios that might put Mahdi irregulars to best use?  That is to say, if an IS assault through densely developed neighborhoods like al-Khadra can be converted into a house-to-house bloodbath, it might favor minimally trained and sufficiently fanatical irregular forces, using topography to their best advantage.  Lastly, we need to consider the differential ground warfare technologies available to each side and the particular advantages and disadvantages of each in a struggle for both outlying quasi-rural areas and fully developed urban areas.  Do IS forces possess advantages in artillery and variously equipped armored vehicles relative to governmental defenders?  It goes without saying that Shi'a irregular forces reside at the low end on the technological scale and would probably be next to useless in defending against IS forces approaching objectives on the outlying perimeters of the city with armored vehicles and support from indirect fire absent substantial assistance from Iraqi professional(!) military units and/or substantial allied air support. 

An assault by well armed IS forces into the western neighborhoods of Baghdad would, at least within my imagination, look like something akin to the 1942 German assault into central Stalingrad or, perhaps, the late 2004 U.S. operation to clear al Qaeda-linked Salafist insurgents from Falluja - a building-to-building quagmire partly supported on both sides by armored vehicles, rendered vulnerable by the nature of the terrain, the built environment, and the capacity of both sides to employ improvised explosive devices at key intersections and places where the use of heavy explosives could enable irregulars in concealed locations to manage an ambush along constricted avenues of advance.  American and allied air power, in such conditions, will be nearly useless, assuming that the Iraqi government does not want us to bomb IS forces in densely crowded urban spaces.  The only thing that we can really be certain of, in these circumstances, is that casualties will be high among any remaining civilians and that western neighborhoods in the city will suffer catastrophic damage to building and urban infrastructure that the Iraqi government will eventually have to address once peace is restored (assuming, someday, Baghdad will actually know peace!). 

Having briefly considered the tactical aspects of an IS attack on Baghdad, if we do allow (key areas at the center of) Baghdad to fall into the hands of the IS, then it will only remain in their hands for an extraordinarily short period, punctuated by extreme acts of pillaging, destruction of buildings and infrastructure, and mass murder of Shi'a prisoners from the military and civilians who are unable to flee the onslaught of an IS assault.  Thus, when the smoke from both the IS assault and the Iraqi government's eventual and certain counteroffensive have cleared, perhaps, the world might definitively know and understand the extent to which Iraq is engaged in a struggle against outright barbarism!  Then again, will we be able to differentiate, definitively, the murder victims executed by IS Salafists from those executed by Shi'a Mahdi liberators?   

If the Iraqi government and military forces are successfully driven from central areas of Baghdad, even temporarily, we have to consider the possibility that Tehran will actively and explicitly intervene militarily in Iraq to bolster government forces and Shi'a militias.  At this point, the U.S. and our Sunni Arab allies in the Gulf monarchies would be faced with an unpleasant choice.  Having signed onto the project of degrading and/or destroying the IS with the explicit exclusion of its strongest (in terms of available ground forces) and most logical regional enemy, Iran, the coalition currently prosecuting the air war against the IS would have to decide whether to continue its actions if Iran has unilaterally intervened on behalf of the Iraqi central government.  As such, it would be a critical juncture in the evolving Sunni versus Shi'a struggle in the Arab world.  If, in this respect, the Saudis do not want to allow a Salafist Caliphate to emerge in Iraq and Syria as a threat to its rule and its foreign policy engagement with the West, then they will have to balance this uncertain possibility against the reality that its revolutionary Shi'a enemy would be actively engaged in preserving a satellite Shi'a-dominated state on its northern border and a contiguous geographical linkage with the Assad regime in Syria.  For the U.S., by contrast, continued involvement in an air campaign against the IS, in support of the Iraqi government would imply explicit collaboration with Iran military forces, something that neither the Obama administration nor Congress would be able to countenance.  Assuming the U.S. would continue to operate an air campaign against the IS in Syria and against IS forces engaged against Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga in defense of a Kurdish regime that would be more inclined than ever to abandon the Iraqi central government and go its own way, we would, likewise, be compelled to withdraw our support (and our military advisers) from the Iraqi regime or face the consequences of direct involvement within a broader regional Sunni-Shi'a civil war.

With all of this mind, the current offensive progress of the IS is a reminder of how poorly suited the U.S. remains at the task of managing hegemony against the imperative of securing domestic democratic support for global military engagement on the behalf of long term strategic objectives.  This is, of course, not merely the story when it comes to the lingering U.S. engagement in Iraq.  It also characterizes American and NATO involvement in the evolving struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Moreover, it reflects back onto the long history of post-World War II U.S. military hegemony in which the hands-on professionalism of American military forces in prosecuting global strategic policy seldom found a satisfactory resolution in the struggle to maintain public support for long term military engagements, costly in terms of tax dollars and the lives of American service men and women.  In these terms, the current fight for Baghdad against the IS hearkens back to the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army and stands as a harbinger for the coming fall of Kabul to a reinvigorated Taliban, spared the inconvenience of U.S. and NATO involvement in Afghanistan.  The lesson here is certainly not that we should entirely henceforth forego military intervention in the struggle to defeat groups that commit brutal and even genocidal violence.  Rather, our actions need to transcend the limited framework of American strategic self-interests to articulate and defend an international moral consensus in the interest of preserving peace and respect for basic human dignity.  And those who would make the case to other countries that we need to intervene in the interests of common humanity need to further make the case to the American polity that our values rest in the security and peace of an interconnected world in which we cannot stick our heads in the sand and pretent that the evil has disappeared.  The ubitiquous presence of sectarian fissures evident in the current fight for Iraq and our awkward efforts to negotiate them makes it clear to me that our involvement in this struggle needs to respect a broader vision than we have heretofore advanced in our struggle against the IS.