Washington: This coalition building is a devilish business. As US President Barack Obama launched missile strikes against the so-called Islamic State from air and sea in the early hours of Tuesday, five of his usually skittish Arab allies were at his wing tips – but none of his allies from Europe and elsewhere.
The Saudis, the Jordanians, the Bahrainis and the Emiratis, all Sunni, actually dropped ordnance on their fellow Sunnis in the IS ranks. But the Qataris apparently just went along for a look-see. Still, speaking to the region in particular, Obama was able to say in the hours after the attacks: "The strength of this coalition makes clear to the world that this is not just America's fight alone."
But it remains to be seen if the President's Arab allies will have the stomach to put their military boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria when, as will surely happen, the generals go to the White House with a demand for capable troops to be deployed in Iraq and Syria to capitalise on the aerial campaign now under way.
Beyond the region, there remains a deep reluctance to step into the Syrian cauldron. The French have been up front, saying they'd happily bomb Iraq – but not Syria. The Germans and the Turks excused themselves weeks earlier. And calls by members of the British opposition for a UN Security Council motion dovetailed with similar calls from Moscow – and the likelihood that Russia would act on behalf of its ally, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, and use its UN veto to block any vote to approve air strikes.
As much as Obama hates to admit it, aloft with him on Tuesday, if only figuratively, were two members of Washington's regional bad guy list – the dictator Assad, who had killed more of his people than IS has in both Syria and Iraq; and the ruling mullahs of Tehran, who are providing vital help for Baghdad's ground forces to get their act together. And though Washington is keeping Tehran and Damascus at arm's length, its ally Baghdad is in deep cahoots with both – consulting and conferring on the progress, or lack thereof, in this war.
We always knew that Assad would be delighted to have the US lead the charge against IS. After all, the Syrian leader had been yelling for many months that the jihadis were terrorists – but for Washington to observe the diplomatic nicety of formally advising Assad's regime that the bombing runs were imminent was as curious a civil gesture as the subsequent claim by Damascus that it supports "any international effort to fight terrorism".
And in a region steeped in scepticism, with good reason, the words of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, while attending the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, will be cheered by many: "Is it not paradoxical that a country says it wants to fight a terrorist group in Syria, but on the other hand creates armed terrorist groups to fight [that same country's] central government?"
Others are posing similar questions that go to the clarity of Obama's campaign narrative and the extent to which Western meddling in the region is coming back to bite the West on the proverbial – that aftershock effect which, after the Afghan war of the 1980s, was called blow back.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, formerly director of policy planning at the State Department, argues that Assad and IS must be taken out at the same time, and that the justification for going after Assad and his military machine is the international responsibility to protect his people – just as the US moved to protect the Yezidis in Iraq from the IS onslaught.
Slaughter writes: "Contrary to Obama's claim, the brutality of the Islamic State is not 'unique'. Assad killed more than 200,000 people, mostly civilians, in a conflict that started with his government's torture of children."
Encapsulating the history of the region, former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten goes through the Western carve-up of the Middle East to serve its own interests in the aftermath of World War I before segueing to the present.
"Western countries have been reluctant to face up to the regions' underlying realities … and the more dictatorial politics in the region became, the more young men – denied both jobs and freedom of expression – turned to extremist and violent Islamism, the perversion of a great faith."
In chiding the American Neocons for their advocacy of more war as a solution to the region's ills, Patten, now chancellor of Oxford University, excuses Condoleezza Rice for being less misguided than her confreres because she had argued "rightly" that the US for too long had pursued "stability at the expense of democracy" and as a result, it had "achieved neither".
Writing in July, former US senior diplomat Christopher Hill argued that a Western construct created almost 100 years ago cannot sustain itself.
"States in the Middle East are becoming weaker than ever, as traditional authorities, whether ageing monarchs or secular authoritarians, seem increasingly incapable of taking care of their restive publics.
"What does it mean today to be Iraqi, Syrian, Yemeni, or Lebanese? Any meaningful identification seems to require a compound name – Sunni Iraqi, Alawite Syrian and so forth … political identity has shifted to something less civil and more primordial."
Like Hill, Patten and Slaughter, whose papers can be found at Project Syndicate, former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans probes the lack of definition in what Obama stands for in the region.
"It is obvious that Western-led military operations cannot by themselves re-establish the territorial integrity of Iraq and Syria, or restore wider regional stability," Evans writes.
"Military intervention may help to hold the line against Iraq's further disintegration and the spread if the [IS] cancer into countries, like Jordan.
"But if 150,000 US troops could not stabilise Iraq in the absence of an inclusive and competent government, the limited measures on offer now simply will not suffice. And we should know by now that any Western military intervention with overtly political, rather than clearly humanitarian, objectives runs a real risk of inflaming sectarian sentiment."
A more credible humanitarian response to the current crisis and a more sustained campaign on behalf of the people of the region, and less so the regimes of the region, might make Obama more believable in the region.
Evans, now chancellor of Australian National University, sets out the humanitarian rationale that might have underpinned Obama – protecting populations at risk of genocide, ethnic cleansing and other major crimes against humanity and war crimes. But that might be a hard sell in a region in which the locals know that 200,000 Syrians died and Obama did little, then leapt to the ramparts on the death of two Americans.
And as he did, the region's leaders circled their wagons in a bid to protect their rickety status quo.
After going out on a limb to chaperone the Muslim Brotherhood as it emerged into the daylight of the Arab Spring, Qatar has done a reverse – after giving the Muslim Brotherhood's Egyptian leadership shelter it now has expelled them and, reportedly, has promised to stop criticising the Egyptian generals on its Al Jazeera news service.
The Saudis and Iranians, the regional bulls, are possibly inching towards a rapprochement – this week their foreign ministers met for the first time in a year and the Iranian Mohammad Javad Zarif was quoted: "[we] believe that this meeting will be the first page of a new chapter in our two countries' relations."
Right now the people the US president most needs to believe him, the Sunni tribes of Iraq, continue to sit on their hands, or worse –to fight with or to welcome the IS forces into their lands.
Just as the Iraqi Sunnis are biding their time, the Syrian rebels are nonplussed in the aftermath of Tuesday's strikes. Their number one objective is to dislodge Assad and IS was helping them to that end. As one of their commanders explained to The Washington Post: "Our goal from the start has been to topple the regime, and then we can fight IS and the other extremists."
In the region, many still have vivid memories of the disastrous recent western military ventures in Iraq and in Libya.
In military-controlled Egypt, Massoud al-Hennawi, a columnist for the state-controlled Al Ahram newspaper, was as cynical as he was blunt, writing that Washington wanted "to divide our lands, destroy our nations, occupy our homelands, and monopolise our choices, without shedding one drop of their blue blood".
"They have no problem that our cheap Arab blood flows in rivers, if it achieves their goals and purposes." He's wrong about wanting to destroy nations – Washington has been propping them up for decades. But the messy contours of that effort are more blow back – of historic proportions.
