U.S. trying to forge anti-ISIS coalition
WASHINGTON – The United States faces no small task in drumming up allies to fight the Islamic State as part of a new coalition that foreign policy analysts already are criticizing as a hollow effort unless the Obama administration proves a commitment to wading into a conflict it’s largely avoided for three years.
Offering few specifics, U.S. officials this week announced that they were assembling an international coalition that could offer military, intelligence and humanitarian support in a joint campaign to dislodge the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, from the Iraqi and Syrian territories that make up its vast, self-proclaimed caliphate.
President Barack Obama didn’t elaborate on the plans Thursday during a brief address in which he stressed that it would take time and deliberation to come up with a broad-based, international response to the threat posed by ISIS. He’s dispatching Secretary of State John Kerry to the Middle East to nudge along the coalition-building. Obama pledged there would be a “military aspect” to the still-developing plan but dismissed reports that an intervention is imminent.
“We don’t have a strategy yet,” Obama said.
European and Arab nations aren’t exactly lining up in response to the U.S. battle cry against ISIS, for a variety of reasons. They haven’t forgotten the lampooning of the so-called “coalition of the willing” in the Iraq War. They still doubt the U.S. commitment to intervene in Syria, or they simply don’t share the U.S. panic over the Islamic State, according to foreign policy analysts.
Some partners are skeptical about throwing in with the Americans because they blame the U.S. for inadvertently helping ISIS to flourish by abandoning the more moderate rebels fighting the Assad regime in Syria. Others are still upset with Obama’s eleventh-hour scuttling of planned U.S. strikes against regime targets nearly a year ago, after a deadly chemical weapons attack.
The waffling has left would-be coalition members in Europe and the Middle East confused as to how far the Obama administration is willing to go.
“There’s a leading, following problem,” said Shadi Hamid, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy. “Various countries in the region prefer to wait and see because they’ve been burned in the past by American pledges and promises.”
At the State Department, spokeswoman Jen Psaki confirmed U.S.-British talks about joining the coalition and said Kerry “will spend a great deal of time on the phone” to enlist other nations.