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Today, the United States continues to have at least hundreds of troops operating
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in Syria and perhaps more—having had 2,000 troops as late as early 2019. In
October 2019, the Trump administration withdrew American forces from parts of
northeastern Syria. Despite Trump’s unplanned withdrawal, the United States
appears far from ending its counterterrorism war in Syria.
Prior to the withdrawal from northeastern Syria, there was an expectation among
many national security professionals that the United States would maintain
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This expectation does not appear to have diminished substantially. The House of
Representatives voted in a bipartisan 354 to 60 majority to express opposition to
Trump’s withdrawal, demonstrating the continued consensus in favor of
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maintaining a presence. Even Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell wrote an op-ed criticizing the withdrawal and warning that the
United States needed to maintain forces to prevent ISIS attacks on the homeland.
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Meanwhile, the security situation in Syria and Iraq remains tenuous, illustrating
the limits of American military power to achieve the United States’ political ends.
In July 2019, New America Fellow Nate Rosenblatt and former New America/
Arizona State University Senior Fellow David Kilcullen, assessed that the conflict
around Raqqa was power-locked, with the U.S. presence suppressing but not
eliminating the underlying tensions, and a shift in the conflict could allow ISIS to
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reemerge. According to Rosenblatt, the chaos that followed the American
withdrawal from northern Syria, supports that conclusion illustrating that the
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conflict hadn’t ended but was merely frozen. Rosenblatt notes that “the
possibilities are now wide-open” for the area around Raqqa, including a potential
ISIS resurgence, and that while Russian and Iranian-backed Syrian government
forces could conceivably re-lock the conflict by filling in as the dominant power,
it would likely come at a high humanitarian cost that could fuel the influence of
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jihadists. Analysts with varying views of the Syrian military and its Russian and
Iranian backers warn of the dangers of assuming a Syrian government return to
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power in areas the regime lost control over can resolve the conflict. Turkish-
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The United Nations Sanctions Monitoring Committee states that ISIS continues
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to carry out attacks in Iraq. In both countries, large numbers of fighters remain
either in detention or having escaped, providing a potential for reemergence. The
Lead Inspector General for Operation Inherent Resolve’s report covering April to
June 2019, notes, based on open sources, that “ISIS retains between 14,000 and
18,000 ‘members’ in Iraq and Syria, including up to 3,000 foreigners” while also
assessing that the group “maintains an extensive worldwide social media effort”
and was able to establish an increasingly stable “command and control node and
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a logistics node” in Iraq. General John Allen and Brett McGurk, both former
special presidential envoys for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, stated at a
September 2019 Brookings Institution event on the counter-ISIS campaign that
the campaign cannot be viewed solely in a retrospective manner but is still
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ongoing.
Although the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a U.S. raid on October
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26, 2019 may disrupt the group, it is unlikely to lead to ISIS's defeat. Prior
targeted killings of terrorist leaders, including prior leaders of ISIS, have not
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defeated terrorist groups, and ISIS's underlying sources of strength remain.
The historical lesson of ISIS's reemergence after the surge is that ISIS is quite
capable of operating as a terrorist and insurgent entity even under substantial
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pressure and the loss of leaders, only to reemerge later.
With regards to the United States, the threat level has not changed substantially.
Because ISIS's threat to the United States, even at the height of the war, was
almost if not entirely a result of its power to inspire attacks, the loss of territory
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has done little to change the situation fundamentally. The same month that
ISIS lost its capital city of Raqqa to U.S.-backed Syrian democratic forces,
Sayfullo Saipov killed eight people in a truck ramming attack in Manhattan. The
same week that CENTCOM congratulated the Syrian Democratic Forces on
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Preventive war logic promotes a tendency to replace analysis of the costs and
benefits of specific actions with an effort to match one’s intuitive values. Michael
Mazarr diagnoses such a phenomenon as being at the core of the decision to
invade Iraq in 2003, arguing that the 9/11 attacks provided a catalyst that shifted
U.S. decision-making, which had a preexisting missionary impulse and strategic
reasons to consider regime change in Iraq that were constrained by fears of costs,
to a form of value-matching where weighing of costs and benefits became less of
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a focus. This shift can generate an American foreign policy that
underestimates the limits of its military power to achieve political goals.
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The inability to annihilate ISIS, and the related need for resilience and
management, makes the political conditions that are often obscured by
preventive war logic the only effective basis for a strategy. As Fishman writes,
“The Islamic State will not achieve a ‘final victory,’ so the United States should
focus on building a positive vision of its own—and encouraging stakeholders to
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get on board.” The great danger of the preventive war paradox is that in
pursuing the military destruction of ISIS's capabilities, the United States will
undermine or simply fail to address the development of such a broader regional
political solution. Fishman correctly warns, “the Islamic State can be suppressed
by a fractured coalition, but it will not be defeated by one. That is why the current
fight against the Islamic State is not a recipe for victory; it is a recipe for
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perpetual, low-level war.”
For some strategic theorists, perpetual low-level war may not be a bad thing. For
example, many Israeli strategists have embraced a strategy of “mowing the
grass” in which military force is repeatedly used—not with the intent of achieving
victory but rather of suppressing a threat perceived to be more or less inevitable
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in the medium-term to manageable levels. There may be some lessons from
this tradition, but the endless war footing it embraces poses significant questions
of morality and societal impact. Moreover, even in the Israeli case, the concept of
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The recent withdrawal from northern Syria will not end the risk of U.S. forces
grinding against other powers’ forces. The potential continuation of airstrikes
and efforts from outside Syria as well as the continued presence at al-Tanf and in
eastern Syria mean the United States will still be interacting with Russia and Iran
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in Syria. In addition, tensions will continue in Iraq.
A third problem that emerges with the adoption of preventive war logic is that
even if decision makers avoid the pitfalls of the logic in Syria and Iraq, the
precedent can overstretch American power. The expansion of the range of threats
that the United States will respond to include threats that are not imminent
increases the costs imposed upon the military to respond to these multiplying
threats. The scholar Jack Snyder made such a criticism of the Bush
administration’s logic of preventive war during the 2003 invasion of Iraq by
drawing upon the history of imperial policing. He wrote, “Typically, the
preventive use of force proved counterproductive for imperial security because it
often sparked endless brushfire wars at the edges of the empire, internal
rebellions, and opposition from powers not yet conquered or subdued.
Historically the preventive pacification of one turbulent frontier of empire has
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With ISIS affiliates of various strength still operating in other parts of the world,
the question of why Syria and Iraq required military action but other affiliates
don’t looms large. These affiliates present a range of potential sites of escalation
stretching from Central Africa and North Africa through the heart of the Middle
East into Central, South, and Southeast Asia. Jihadist groups have adopted
strategies specifically aimed at overstretching U.S. power, and when the United
States expands the battlefield with little connection to imminent and specific
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threats, it tends to benefit this jihadist strategy.
One of the primary justifications for preventive war when it comes to terrorist
groups generally—and with regards to ISIS specifically—is that their intent to
conduct external attacks is clearer than is the case with states that are part of the
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international system. This clarity can mitigate some of the dangers of
preventive war logic. However, the assumption that this clarity of intent
sufficiently mitigates the dangers of preventive war logic is a false promise.
The Obama administration and others were not wrong to identify ISIS as having
maximal objectives. There were clear signs of ISIS's intent to carry out
substantial violence beyond Syria and Iraq at the time of the initiation of strikes.
One of the most significant of such signs was the declaration of the Caliphate
itself, at least in propaganda terms, signaling a global vision and a more
aggressive and immediate goal of bringing it into being than had been previously
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advocated by al Qaeda. The vision of the caliphate and the religious
justifications ISIS adopted are pretty much impossible to assimilate into the
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accepted international order.
The group’s foreign fighter recruitment in 2013 and 2014 already suggested that
the group would contain motivations connected to conflicts far outside of Syria
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and Iraq. European foreign fighters were already engaged in attack plotting by
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summer 2014. Libyan fighters who were part of the so-called Battar Brigade,
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Yet, increased clarity of intent does not eliminate the problems of adopting
preventive war logic with regards to counterterrorism. Intent is never entirely
clear and tends to exist on a spectrum. This was made clear by then Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper’s presentation of the 2015 Worldwide Threat
Assessment, in which he stated, “If ISIL were to substantially increase the
priority it places on attacking the West rather than fighting to maintain and
expand territorial control, then the group’s access to radicalized Westerners who
have fought in Syria and Iraq would provide a pool of operatives who potentially
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have access to the United States and other Western countries.” Far from being
absolute, the extent of ISIS's intent was a matter of debate and varied across the
organization in 2014, with ISIS being made up of multiple sub-groups, some of
which had clear intent to conduct external attacks and others of which seemed
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more locally focused.
There are also confounding variables. The decision to initiate military action
against ISIS may have played a role in shaping ISIS's decision to engage in
external attacks and the willingness of some fighters and others to cooperate and
support that strategy. Data on attack plots in Europe suggests that state
participation in wars in the Muslim world partially explains the pattern of jihadist
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attacks in Europe. This is not the only driver of attacks, with networks and
entrepreneurs playing a larger role, but it does show that, even with jihadist
terrorists, it is dangerous to presume that intent is so clear and that preventive
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war cannot shape intent. Many commentators noted the potential for military
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action to further ISIS's propaganda and encourage more attacks.
Even if the United States correctly judged the level and movement of intent in the
ISIS case as having justified preventive war, other problems with preventive logic
—whether the reaction of other parties or the danger of overstretch—persist
because they do not derive from lack of certainty regarding intent as does the
danger of creating a precedent.
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