THE UNITED States has awakened to a new reality that the Islamic Levant mercenaries in Iraq are more dreadful than Al Qaeda.
This sets into motion a new strategy to refocus synergies in this part of the world, after having pulled out of the region in exigency. US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel categorically said that the IS militants are the biggest threat to the United States. This new groups basic intention, however, is to not to fight the Westerns or attack strategic targets across the oceans, as Al Qaeda believed in, but to redraw the geography of Middle East by implementing their radical ideology. That is why the IS is dubbed as an imminent threat, as the sectarian and ethnic ballgame in the region is too sensitive and fraught with consequences. This is tantamount to torpedoing the US interests in the region. Apparently that is why Americas top general Martin Dempsey says that the IS fighters should have been nailed down in Syria and the best way to do so was to have attacked their bases.
If this argument is any criterion than one can say that going after President Bashar Al Assad and in one way or the other buoying hardliners from across the region in Syria was a strategic blunder. Assad had successfully kept the lid on such extremist forces and the Arab Spring-engineered upheaval in Damascus has not only cost the US a silent ally in the region, but has also exposed Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia to grave threats of homegrown militants. The IS is not a virtual threat, as Al Qaeda flaunted itself, but a real and indispensable reality that has to be fought and defeated.
While Washington is in the process of redrawing its roadmap for intervention in the Middle East, it has to keep in mind that it shouldnt limit itself to a surgical operation. What the region needs is a new geopolitical contract wherein the popular political forces be made direct stakeholders in the process to eliminate terror. The Kurds and other minorities have waited for long to see themselves in the corridors of power with a new identity of their own. Britain, too, in its quest to stem the tide of radicalism among its youth is contemplating an appropriate strategy. If territorial and ethno-lingual imbroglios are addressed in a genuine manner, the region could be saved from going the extremist way. Solving the Palestinian statehood question remains at the heart of discord in the region. Its time to see Israeli atrocities in the same light as the West has awakened to IS brutality. –Khaleej Times
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