(Russian/Русский перевод coming soon) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), August 9, 2022

SILVER SPRING—Not just from experts, but from many members of the general public are drawing some sharp comparisons between humanitarian efforts for Ukraine on one hand and for other parts of the world outside of the European world on the other.  For many of those pointing out major differences, the Middle East has been a region rife with examples.

With few exceptions, the only discussions comparing aid efforts (mostly centering on admitting refugees) that I have seen or been able to find with moderate effort in article or report form are emotional appeals often based on racial/ethnic/religious/cultural differences and/or that adopt a moralistic tone but are not terribly analytical.  And, to be fair, this is fair ground for discussion and exploration.

But to assume bigotry and racism is the primary foundation for the different approaches without exploring these other dimensions may score some points with certain aggrieved crowds, but it is not a serious exploration of the determining factors behind the different responses.  In the end, it is hard to get into the mindsets of different leaders of NGOs and governments, to be a proverbial fly-on-the wall for their internal deliberations (as opposed to public statements, which are often a mix of public relations efforts and genuine efforts to offer explanations).  But just as it would be reductionist to assume “the reason” for the different response levels is racism, it would also be naïve to assume cultural or worse biases play a minimal or no role: this dimension, too, deserves serious consideration, not just feel-good virtue signaling written from a perspective of (sometimes understandable) moral outrage.

The following exploration will look at some of the broader (and some specific) (geo)political considerations driving some of these differences between humanitarian efforts for the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war and those for the Iraq in general and, specifically, the battle for Mosul, in 2016-2017 to narrow down a point of reference for that long series of crises in that nation. 

While the most intense fighting and the Mosul campaign are long over, with more finality to those operations, the Russia-Ukraine war is still very much ongoing, so the level of analysis and the finality of that analysis will be very different for the two conflicts.

Still, while in some senses, the two are apples and oranges, their comparison still offers a chance at valuable insights.  In this sense, the small introductory exploration here intends to be a gateway for further exploration.

*****

The “Politics” of Considering Humanitarian Responses in Ukraine 2022 and Mosul 2016-2017

Politics is both messy and complicated, geopolitics even more so since it is broader and transcends national boundaries.  And in this sense, security, logistics, and economic/financial concerns cannot be separated, nor should they.

In an ideal world, every region and culture would have an equally strong, equally experienced professional humanitarian crisis industry (and never have a need to use those skills).  Obviously, that is not the case, and the West, especially European- and North American-based centers of its gravity, have a disproportionate history of creating, organizing, and leading the world’s major international humanitarian organizations and responses.  Indeed, international humanitarianism as practiced today is a Western-originated, Western-developed concept, with even many of the more senior non-Western staff in the sector having some combination of education, work experience, or residency in the West.  Today, it is still largely Western or Western-led organizations backed largely by Western governmental donors that lead and dominate international humanitarian responses (governments by far provide most of the funding compared to private donors and most of the largest government donors are by far Western; of the ten largest donors by governmental organization in 2021, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were the only non-Western countries in the top ten by one accounting for 2021; Japan is not European but is Western in its government, and Turkey’s funding mainly went to refugee camps on its own so it is literally asterisked in a relevant report for 2020).

Of course, this comes with certain inherent problems, not least among them the that there is this very real racial hierarchy that comes from the fact that particular parts of the world dominated by one particular race (Caucasians) are dominating an entire international industry, with all the history that such past and, though in evolving ways, present domination entails.  Certain imbalances, inequalities, and problems “naturally” result from such unequal histories and structures, not least from racism but also not least from the lack of required specialized capacities in many host nations of both host country authorities and available staff hires within the local population—particularly in remote areas—in spite of a very real, robust-though-hardly-perfect effort within the industry towards localization.  Overall, solutions to these issues are generally more easily theorized than specifically developed and implemented and the very safety of aid workers themselves can be an issue.

It is of note, even in Ukraine (a developed, so-called “first world” European country), that the relevant conflict creates zones that are far more accessible to humanitarian workers and those that are far less so; even before the relatively recent February 24, 2022, escalation by Putin, major United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports noted that “non-Government controlled areas” (NGCAs) were really hurting in terms of needing aid and were not getting it, namely the parts of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts under control of Russia and/or its separatist proxies, a situation made even worse by COVID-era restrictions.  Thus, even in Ukraine, some places where people needed the most help were less safe for aid workers, and this was the case in 2016-2017 while the Mosul campaign was well underway in Iraq.  During this battle in Iraq, which began in mid-October 2016, it took a month for the first major international-organization-aid convoy to get to the city of Mosul.  Yet even in this current Ukraine war, Russia is routinely blocking and obstructing humanitarian corridors for civilians during some of the worst violence of the conflict.  Thus, access is a problem in both locations.

But not equally so.  As a continent, Europe is the most advanced human development location by far and also has the most advanced logistics network of any continent.  So moving supplies, staff, and volunteers quickly and safely is easier in Europe than anywhere else in the world as far as dealing with a larger regional response, and these problems are usually regional, with people fleeing from one country to others, with humanitarian staging areas and headquarters often needing to be out of harm’s way.  And, as mentioned, many of the most capable, well-funded organizations are Eurocentic in their history and organization, so having a major operation on the European continent has some natural advantages that translate into a much easier-to-run operation just from those cultural leanings and familiarity that come with the territory.

While some of the nations surrounding Ukraine are also problematic (especially autocracies Russia and Belarus), others have been robust democracies for years, with the lowest-scoring democracy by Freedom House’s 2021 methodology (Moldova, 62) still far, far higher than the highest-scoring (by far) of Iraq’s neighbors (Kuwait, at 37).

Along those lines, even though Ukraine has only been a democracy since the end of the Cold War and has been at war since 2014, outside of the Donbas front lines from then until the late-February 2022 escalation by Russia, it was similar to other European countries in terms of freedom of movement and press freedom; the 2021 Reporters Without Borders ranking for Ukraine was 97^th most free for the press (106^th after the war’s 2022 escalation), compared to 163^rd for Iraq in the same year and 172^nd in 2022; in Freedom House’s 2017 rankings (the report has had no new editions since), Ukraine was 111^th compared to 155^th for Iraq; while issues with Ukraine were mostly related to restrictions on Russian media and oligarchic ownership, Iraq was considered one of “the world’s deadliest places for journalists.”  Yes, aid workers and journalists play different roles in conflict zones, but the nature of their work has enough similarities—especially in ways they have to access dangerous areas and multiple parties—that the rankings are at least somewhat indicative of aid workers’ ability to operate.

So the parts of Ukraine not under Russian occupation have, for most of three decades, been a place that operated in a European context where relatively free movement, modern governmental institutions, and safety for international operators all existed; even now, as the recent escalation by Russia has unfolded since the end of February 2022, the heaviest fighting is centered on a few specific fronts now that this escalation seems to have narrowed somewhat geographically, meaning most of the country is now and has for months been relatively safe (save for somewhat random missile strikes) and under the control of the Ukrainian government, which fostered the aforementioned conditions favorable to international actors, including humanitarian workers, for years.

The same cannot be said for Iraq.

For years after the U.S. invasion of 2003, Iraq was and still is a fractured and weak country, without a tradition of Western democracy and in a neighborhood of other Middle Eastern countries that are highly problematic when it comes to freedom, with safety for international actors often an issue in countries that are severely repressive and not places where international actors can operate freely or without considerable challenges (Saudi Arabia is deeply repressive and closed in many ways; Iran is also repressive, restrictive, and very anti-Western; Syria is like both of those but with a civil war raging on top of that).

Within Iraq, a nascent Iraqi government struggling to become a democracy respecting of human rights vied for control with Iraqi sectarian and ethnic militias representing Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, as well as Iranian militias and coalition military forces led by the U.S in addition to various terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda and ISIS and Saddam Hussein regime loyalists.  It was not always clear who could be trusted or even approached when it came to negotiating terms for humanitarian operations, and violence could derail anything at any time (full disclosure:  I was proud to be an extra in director Greg Barker’s Netflix film Sergio, about Sergio Vieira de Mello, the brief leader of UN humanitarian operations in post-Saddam Iraq until he was killed by a terrorist attack in August, 2003, and I highly recommend the film for a window into the perils of humanitarian work).  This was the operating environment for would-be humanitarian service providers, and there is no question that the challenges involving safety, logistics, navigating cultural differences, even Iraq’s extreme climate together mean that the present Ukrainian environment is one in which most large, well-funded aid organizations would find it easier to perform their missions, even allowing for Ukraine’s challenges.

So all those challenges mentioned concerning the Iraqi context still present major real-world, practical reasons that would inhibit not just international Western-dominate aid groups from more robust participation in aid work, but also local aid groups and staff: if anything, there are situation where more internationally recognized organizations employing people with European Union (EU) and other Western passports can afford those workers more protections than local staff, whose families will often be in the conflict zones and, along with the local workers themselves, will be more vulnerable to threats, intimidation, kidnapping, and actual violence than on average anyone coming from a European capital or New York.  The desperation with which so many local aid workers tried to leave Afghanistan during and after the recent U.S. withdrawal is only the most obvious recent case in point.

Local staff can also easily be caught in a dangerous conundrum: one formal report on the situation during the Mosul battle noted that it was so bad inside the city that it was almost impossible for international staff to operate in the city; and while local staff were far more able to operate, it was extremely risky for them to do so.  Going further, the report noted that in situations where it might seem like local aid workers would have an advantage, “perverse consequences” could be the result.  Another Mosul after-action humanitarian report noted that battle demonstrated that there is a lot of work to do to improve performance and safety across a number of major humanitarian dimensions, as did a study from the RAND Corporation.  Even in Ukraine, though, one British aid worker died just a few weeks ago after being illegally taken captive by Russia’s proxy separatist allies in Donetsk and detained for over two-and-a-half months.  Even in what is considered a relatively “better” operating environment, then, the risks are considerable.  Unfortunately, the harder the environment in which to operate and the more different the environment from what is familiar to the major organizations, the less effective and more problematic humanitarian efforts will be.

One controversial WHO-organized program ended up providing front-line medical services during the battle for Mosul since Iraqi and Kurdish forces did not possess certain medical capabilities needed to save lives, but two of the most prominent humanitarian medical organizations—the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)—declined to participate, citing ethical concerns with being seen to be taking sides during the conflict.  The idea that came out of deliberation after the battle was that such efforts could not be considered “humanitarian” and would have to be labeled differently.  Now, ICRC in particular faces criticism for being “too” neutral in Ukraine.  From Mosul to Ukraine, there are often no easy answers for humanitarian efforts to these deeply complex problems and neutrality itself can become an issue, especially when the likes of terrorist ISIS or the barbaric Russian military are involved as combatants.

On Tribalism

We cannot conclude before admitting the obvious, that there is a natural tribalism to humans that has only been exacerbated in our current era, even before Brexit and Trumpism reared their ugly heads in the West.  Even in the twenty-first century, humans are a very tribal species: e.g., though it is increasing, interracial marriage is not the default norm around the world.  Today, as I have noted, we live in an era of increasing tribalism around the world.  Just in recent decades, in less developed parts of the world, from the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s to the ethnic and sectarian violence that erupted in Iraq after the U.S. invasion of 2003, from, more recently, Bangladesh, India, Syria, and Israel-Palestine to Ethiopia, and Iraq (again), to name a few, tribalism has gone in far more violent and deadly directions than in the admittedly deteriorating politics of West, which so far has begun hinting at, but is not yet devolving into, the type of violence seen in other parts of the world (the Balkans in the 1990s were a big exception but that was at a moment when the nations of the only-just-former Yugoslavia were not yet truly Western even while they were European).

It should be noted in this context that European racism does not only extend to non-white peoples: bigotry towards Eastern European migrant-workers in Britain was one of the drivers fueling the 2016 UK Brexit vote.  And there is no doubt there has been for years and currently is a significant and growing anti-immigrant, anti-non-European racist sentiment among the populations and politics of Europe (and for those keeping score, it should be noted that Putin’s Kremlin has been a big booster within Europe of both the far-right and anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim sentiment).

In this tribal world, it is natural for Kenyans to generally care more about those in their own historic tribe or region within Kenya, to care about Kenyans more than those from other nearby countries, to care about East Africans more than West Africans, to care about fellow black Sub-Saharan Africans more than Arab or Berber North Africans, and so forth.  This is a natural general rule and can be applied to just about any peoples anywhere and this is confirmed by what we can read in the news and see with our own eyes every day.  Is it really surprising, then, that Europeans care more about Ukrainians, as fellow Europeans with some degree of shared history and culture, than for people trying to come to Europe from continents away?  That is not to suggest that this is “good” or desirable, it is simply acknowledging how humans are built and that different responses are not the default anywhere in the world in majority-proportions, not in Europe nor the Middle East nor anywhere else.

In this vein, attitudes within the Middle East should be examined just as robustly as attitudes within Europe.  I lived over five years in Jordan, and I can tell you that the idea of some wonderful lovefest of pan-Arabism in the Arab world is a fantasy.  I would not call it simmering, but there was an undercurrent of hostility in Jordan towards the many Syrian refugees than ended up in Jordan.  There is also discrimination and decades-long tensions directed from the truly local Jordanian population (originating from the East Bank of the Jordan River) towards the many Palestinian refugees who fled conflict with Israel over the decades and many of whom came from the West Bank of the Jordan River (yes, that West Bank) who now are actually the majority of Jordan’s population.  Also, Jordanians (and most other Arabs) also do not like Gulf Arabs (but mainly because they are incredibly snobby and condescending to Jordanians and non-Gulf Arabs).  There are also levels of serious sectarianism in places like Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, where there is tremendous distrust among these various Arab groups, between not only Sunni and Shiite but between Muslim and Christian and Muslim and Druze within specific countries even leaving aside the issue of refugees, and Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East face discrimination.  I could keep going, but you get the point and the problem: even in the Arab Middle East, Arab refugees are not exactly welcome and, indeed, apart from countries right on Iraq’s or Syria’s borders, other Arab countries have done less to take in Syrian refugees than some European countries, like Germany (Saudi Arabia and and other Gulf Arab nations have literally taken in zero Syrian refugees).  Thus, it strikes me as odd that prosperous European countries could so easily be decried as racist when prosperous Arab countries far closer and more culturally compatible are doing far less than a number of those European countries to take care of fellow Arabs.  In any case, these divisions themselves produce significant challenges to any humanitarian aid operations.

A Response to Inspire More Progress, Less Envy

In conclusion, while it is easy to see racism in the differences between various humanitarian responses, at least in the case of Ukraine compared to other examples (in this case—at least a little, in my small effort—Iraq), I will take a controversial position: in a world where crises within certain regions keep coming (albeit for a complex variety of reasons, some of which can certainly at least be partly blamed on the West), instead of decrying Europe’s response to a European crisis as “racist” for being too good, perhaps a more productive mentality for people from people in other regions would be to ask why their own regions have not responded as enthusiastically to helping people from their own regions.  In some cases, obviously a lack of resources is part of the answer, and yet in the Middle East, we have Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s richest nations, not taking in any refugees.  If other parts of the world learn form Europe’s current example in Ukraine, perhaps fewer people would want to flee from far away to Europe and would find helping hands, open homes, and warm hearts closer to home.

Again, that is not to deny that racism may very well be a serious factor—it certainly is a factor—but note that such bigotry is common everywhere and even within the various distinct regions of the world.  There may be far more applicable lessons in the immediate future from looking at Europe with Ukraine as a positive example, and while Europe, the U.S., and the West certainly have more work—far more work—to do in fighting racism within their societies, it cannot be said that all these other regions in the world do not have a tremendous amount of work to do on that front as well.

In the end, while achieving and awaiting further long-term progress on fighting racism in the West and all around the world along with helping to reform humanitarianism to have less Western-bias and less Eurocentric leadership must be priorities, Europe’s response to the Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine can at least provide a hopeful model for how people in other regions of the world can come together to take care of their own to address current refugee crises and sadly, the crises inevitably coming in the future.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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Just because Obama’s ISIS, counterterrorism, and Middle East strategy is complex and will not fit on a bumper-sticker or in a soundbite does not mean it is not a good one, and a bit of time trying to understand it will reveal that Republicans criticizing Obama’s strategy are dangerously unfit for office, as their alternatives betray a total lack of understanding of the basic dynamics behind ISIS, terrorism, and the Middle East, with Republican policies like to be advocated in the coming debate certain to make ISIS stronger and expose Americans to even more danger.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse December 14, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) December 14th, 2015

The White House

Note: the chart used later in this article can also be shared through its own post here

AMMAN — Though a common refrain among Republicans for some time, in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, we are hearing with renewed force that Obama cowardly refuses to call out our enemies “by name,” i.e., he avoids calling them Islamic or Muslim extremists terrorists, avoids saying that we are “at war” with “radical Islam.”  The rationales Obama’s critics suggest as to why he apparently does this range from a cowardly, timid sense of liberal political correctness all the way to claiming that Obama actually sympathizes with the terrorists and/or is a Muslim himself.

There is something of a legitimate point encased behind the more incredulous claims made by the Republicans: that Obama is avoiding emphasizing the Islamic character of the terrorists and the fact that they are Muslims (some people would like to argue that these extremists committing terrorism are, in fact, not Muslims because of their extreme actions, but the sad truth is that while all faiths have violent extremists that the majority of their co-religionists would like to disown, these extremists do find inspiration for violence from those very faiths and their faiths’ history, traditions, and texts, and must, in fact, be owned by these faiths and their co-religionists whether they want to own them or not).  But the Republicans’ point itself is a myopic one because Obama’s decision to avoid emphasizing the Islamic aspects of ISIS is, in fact, based on a very sound overall strategy to deal with the groups like ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, etc.

As usual, the Republicans can’t see the forest for the trees and are way off on their strategy; I don’t even mean this in a pejorative sense, but in a demonstrably-provable-trend sense of the Republican Party being incredibly myopic and short-sighted in its approaches to a whole host of issues, both in terms of foreign affairs and domestic issues (and that could be a whole series of separate articles). 

Before we continue in assessing Obama’s approach and choice of language, we must realize that there are other actors on this stage: the terrorists themselves.  And we must understand what they want.

Now, some of the readers might at this moment begin to get emotional, and accusations of this writer here being a “terrorist sympathizer” might be forming in some minds.  To that I would inquire, “Does a detective ‘sympathize’ with a murder suspect when trying to establish a motive, when trying to investigate and learn about this person?”  No rational person would say that this is the case; rather, it is a basis of good police-work to know as much as possible about suspects and their motivations.  Well, it is absolutely no different with terrorism.

Understanding the Forces Behind Terrorism’s Success/Appeal

Much has been made of an Atlantic article by Graeme Wood titled “What ISIS really wants,” and it will be addressed shortly; but the mother-of-all articles to come out since 9/11 regarding terrorism would have to be Mark Danner’s “Taking Stock of the Forever War,”written for The New York Times Magazine.  In this landmark article, released on fourth anniversary of the attacks and when America was well into its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a sickening truth was made plain for all to see if they had not yet realized it…

Bin Laden and al-Qaeda played the U.S. like a harp. 

What is incredible is that, in the very nature of how the U.S. conducted its war in Afghanistan, the U.S. more or less avoided the trap al-Qaeda was hoping to set.  But not so with Iraq…

See, bin Laden’s and al-Qaeda’s philosophy and aims are hardly inscrutable; they had, rather, made their aims clear with statements known publicly for many years.  For bin Laden, there was the “near enemy:” the non-Islamic regimes ruling over Muslim lands, whether they were democracies, monarchies, or dictatorships.  These regimes were supported by the “far enemy:” distant, powerful governments in the West, with the United States leading, that supported the “near enemies” with military, economic, and political aid.  In terms of bringing about the ideal system—Islamic governance based on the Golden Age of early Islam—attacking the “near enemy” regimes would be fruitless without first addressing their major Western backers.  The plan was simple: draw the West, especially the U.S., into a lengthy ground war in at least one Muslim country, one that would inflict casualties on Western forces, sap Western economic strength in the process, and leave Western publics war-weary enough that when the West eventually withdrew, Western appetite for intervention in the Muslim world would be exhausted or at least vastly reduced and the path for toppling the “near enemy” regimes would be clear Western road blocks cleared or minimized.

In the initial American intervention in Afghanistan, the entire U.S. approach was designed to be minimalist: the Taliban was brought down by air-power and U.S. Special Forces aiding local fighters.  It was not until Obama’s presidency that large numbers of U.S. troops were deployed to Afghanistan (and that was largely an attempt undo some of the damage of the Bush Administration’s policies).  Thus, the U.S. spent relatively little money there and exposed itself to only minimal damage and risk. 

This was not the case with Iraq, and though there was also a bit of a minimalist approach initially adopted there, that quickly devolved into a costly disaster requiring far more troops over a longer period of time to mitigate the damage.  But much damage had still been done: much higher casualties were incurred than American leaders told Americans would be the case; the war cost much more than advertised as well, and also lasted much longer; in late 2008, America elected one Barack Obama as president largely because of his anti-war stance and his pledge to withdraw from Iraq. 

As for al-Qaeda, the Iraq War was many ways a dream come true: while it never established the caliphate it dreamed of, its 9/11 attacks did start a chain of events that most certainly did sap American economic strength, did cause many American casualties, and did cause a war weariness in the American psyche that has meant the country is today far more reluctant to intervene in Muslim countries than it was in 1990 during the Gulf War or in 2001 and 2003, when the Afghanistan and Iraq wars started, respectively. After the Iraq invasion of 2003 especially, terrorism became far worse; Al-Qaeda itself saw its stature, number of operations, and membership increase dramatically over the course of both wars, and far more people are killed by terrorism today than before the Iraq invasion. By invading Iraq the way Osama bin Laden wanted, we performed exactly the part he laid out for us, and we suffered many of the consequences he hoped we would.

What enabled the U.S. to mitigate what could have been an unmitigated disaster, though, was not U.S policy in supporting a Shiite-dominated Iraqi government: it was the murderous extremism of al-Qaeda’s Iraqi branch(which began calling itself the “Islamic State of Iraq”late in 2006 as part of a coalition with other jihadist groups) against not only Shiites but also many Sunnis that alienated many Iraqis and drove them into the arms of U.S. forces during the “Surge” and the “Sunni Awakening” in 2007, combined with a major adjustment in U.S. counterinsurgency strategy that placed Iraqi civilians first.  The local al-Qaeda branch’s actions also created tension with al-Qaeda HQ: Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wanted their Iraqi branch to focus on U.S. forces and to avoid attacking Iraqi civilians.  But al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia, first led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and later others, focused on creating a civil-war in Iraq by targeting civilians in an overtly sectarian manner, and also by broadly targeting any civilians who did follow their extreme, strict version of Islam (except submissive Christians).  Al-Qaeda—including what would become ISIS—was crushed by local Sunnis fighting alongside U.S. forces.

The model for defeating terrorists that emerged here would be a key component of what has come to define Obama’s approach: win over locals to your side, and fight side-by-side against terrorism with such support.  Partnering with local communities this way became so effective that towards the end of the “Surge” forward, the newly minted “Islamic State of Iraq was” rarely more than a nuisance for Iraq until the year 2013, over a year after the U.S. had fully withdrawn from Iraq.  Its resurgence was due mainlyto Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s extremely sectarian policies that would drive the same communities that had aided in the fight against al-Qaeda/the Islamic State of Iraq in 2007 into open rebellion against Maliki and Iraqi’s government at the end of 2013.  Under those conditions, the formerly titled Islamic State of Iraq, now calling itself ISIS (an acronym meaning Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham/Levant, encompassing also Syria, Lebanon, and other areas) and now formally broken away from al-Qaeda, came into Iraq and entered an alliance of convenience with many Iraqi Sunnis against Maliki’s oppressive Shiite government.

This put the Obama Administration into a quandary: it have moved to fulfill Obama’s campaign promise to withdraw from Iraq, and if Obama was going to be sucked back into conflict in Iraq, he and his administration were going to be damn sure to be careful and that the conditions under which it would reenter conflict in Iraq would make sense for its overall goals for the region.  The core of this strategy was moving away from the U.S. shouldering the majority of initiative, burden, and responsibility for fights against regional extremism and also away from larger invasions, wars, and occupations like those that were initiated and (mis)prosecuted during the (W.) Bush Administration, all while moving towards America being a friend, supporter and ally of the local and non-oppressive forces in the region fighting extremism. 

When people complain about Obama “not having a strategy” for the Middle East, they clearly seem to have missed this obvious strategy here, as exemplified by virtually all of the Administration’s actions and inactions in the region for some time.  This strategy is quite sound, as 1.) it avoids making the U.S. the main target as would happen when having its forces lead, 2.) it allows the fight to be properly framed primarily as a local vs. extremists fight, rather than a U.S./West vs. Muslims conflict, 3.) it helps to avoid generating more extremists by assisting with less-oppressive local partners rather unconditionally supporting more oppressive regimes.

This last point is particularly important in light of the Arab Spring, but also in general; many of those behind terrorist attacks against Americans—including most of the 9/11 hijackers—are from countries with oppressive governments that are supported by the United States;  hence, the “far enemy” supporting the “near enemy” rhetoric.  Even without completely ending it relationships with oppressive regimes—an ideal if impractical approach—the Obama Administration has been careful to distance itself from such regimes in the Middle East, at the very least avoiding the warm embrace of past administrations.  Egypt is a good example of this, and so is Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, but perhaps the best example is Iraq…

When Maliki’s Iraqi government asked for heavy U.S. assistance in the face of ISIS’s onslaught last summer, Obama knew that it was Malik’s own oppressive, heavy-handed policies targeting Sunnis that had largely created the crisis.  If Obama had unquestioningly come to the aid of Maliki and his government in Iraq when it was seen as brutally oppressing Iraqi Sunnis, Obama’s assistance would have just played into ISIS’s strategy of framing the conflict as the U.S. and Iraqi governments merely being forces of oppression against Sunnis.  Rather, Obama knew it was crucial to U.S. interests and strategy not be seen as aiding in Maliki’s oppression, and told Maliki that he would need to change his ways, or, failing that, told the Iraqis they would need to find a new leader worthy of American support if such support was to be forthcoming; Maliki did not swerve his course under heavy U.S. pressure, but Iraq’s political establishment did and forced Maliki out for a new, far less divisively sectarian Dr. Haider al-Abadi.  As I have written before, Obama’s withholding of support for Maliki’s oppressive government to bring about major internal Iraqi changes was a consummate diplomatic victory that was a win for America, Iraq, and the region.  If Obama had come to Maliki’s aid without demanding the Iraqi government treat Sunnis better, that would have been a gift to ISIS and further inflamed sectarian tensions and added to ISIS’s legitimacy and support among disaffected Sunnis.  Basically, Obama has signaled an end to doing dictators’ dirty work for them, and leaders that go past a certain point of heavy-handedness will find America more hesitant to help them than before.

Going back to the earlier analogy of a detective investigating a murder suspect: as I have noted before, violent crime and terrorism are actually similar problems with similar solutions; in the short term, force and deterrence is important, but in the longer run, “soft power” approaches that involve community and international development emphasizing human rights are even more important.  Obama is mocked for even suggesting this, but those doing the mocking only reveal their own myopia and disqualification from having anything to do with U.S. counterterrorism policy.

Obama’s Strategy

Note: chart is highlighted in its own post here

This leads up to the central aspects of both Obama’s Middle Eastern strategy and his ISIS/counterterrorism strategy, with Iraq as a springboard: gone are the days when Middle Eastern regimes would avoid tough political compromises with minority or disaffected ethnic, religious, and political groups, waiting for the U.S. to bail them out with military aid and sometimes military action that would simply beat these groups into destruction or submission; from Lebanon to Israel and Palestine, to Iraq and Yemen, to Syria and Egypt, many of the recent and also past conflicts revolve around a government oppressing various groups and using force, rather than politics, to achieve a “solution.” 

With Obama more than any other president, American aid the degree of it depends on whether regimes use politics over force.  Obama distanced himself from Maliki, and has also distanced himself from Egypt’s oppressive Sisi; though Syria’s Assad would be a good ally against ISIS, America working with Assad has been ruled out based on his morphing into a mass murderer.  At least rhetorically, Obama has even clashed repeatedly with close ally Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his heavy-handedness with the Palestinians.  The clear reality is that these regimes and others were able to use (the expectations of) American support and/or American military action to continue oppression carte blanche.

Now to Graeme Wood’s important article about ISIS: If bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s main aims was a long struggle to drive out western support for non-Islamic regimes with the hope of establishing a caliphate in the distant future—emphasizing the here-and-now-struggle over the caliphate—then ISIS’s focus is different: its people want to be the barrier carriers and enforcers of what to them is the only acceptable version of Islam (one based closely on Koranic text and theology), purifying the world with the blood of the non-compliers (ISIS’s expanded definition of takfir apostates) and to use this status to build both a following and a caliphate here and now, with the eventual, more distant goal of fulfilling apocalyptic prophecies.  Their power, then, begins with them claiming the mantle of Islam, the “true” Islam that will stand up to the West.

Thus, even if it does not find itself supported by a majority of Muslims, it is also undeniably Islamic; as noted earlier, most religious people are not extremists, but all religions have their extremists and religion in general tends to intensify and barbarize conflict.  More than anything else, ISIS wants and needs to be associated with Islam.

Which bring us to the other main aspect of Obama’s Middle-Easter and ISIS strategies: when defining and speaking about groups like ISIS, the smart play is to de-emphasize their Islamic nature.  Conflicts are not won with each side presenting objective descriptions of each other and each other’s characteristics and motivations; they are won with convincing and resounding narratives that almost never tell the whole story.  Propaganda, or information war, is often crucial to victory, and this has been true for thousands of years.  That does not mean that it is often best or advisable to engage in fantastical, blatant distortion, but in the case of ISIS, on the part of the West, it must mean to go out of the way to do as much to separate ISIS from Islam as possible in public statements and speeches.

Obama did not win the presidency by being a stupid man, and, in general, is not stupid, but very shrewd, even for all his flaws.  Of course he knows that ISIS is Islamic and his unwillingness to associate ISIS with Islam is not out of any sense of political correctness, timidity, or cowardice: rather, it is a very important and necessary part of a sound strategy to counter and eventually defeat ISIS.  By going out of its way to not associates radical extremist Islamic jihadist terrorists with Islam, the Obama Administration has been able to hurt terrorists’ narratives all over the world; bin Laden himself wrote of this (and the arena of narratives is one of the crucial battlefields of this war).  One of our most important allies in this conflict, King Abdullah of Jordan (a mainly Muslim country in case you did not know), is completely behind this strategy. 

ISIS’s apocalyptic vision called for a great final battle in northern Syria between itself and a great (Western?) army of “Rome,” the final showdown between faithful, true Muslims and the kuffar infidels before the end times.  The more some prominent Republicans constantly associate ISIS and terrorists publicly with Islam, the more they “shamefully…blur the linebetween [normal] Muslims and Islamic extremists,” the more they question and apply scrutiny to all of Islam and all Muslims, the more they call for massive U.S.-led military (ground) operations against ISIS, the more this gives ISIS’s murderous extremists exactly what they want, the better they can sell their narrative, the more recruits they will find, the more successful they will be. 

We saw this happen for al-Qaeda when we invaded Iraq, the aftermath of which saw a swelling of al-Qaeda’s rosters and of terrorism worldwide.  We seem to be particularly amnesic with regards to history, and, especially of late, with counterinsurgency and picking quality allies.  In the Vietnam War, America backed a regime unworthy of its professed values or the Vietnamese people, one that had no respect for human rights, and the population turned against America and the South Vietnamese government.  Another example is American support for Iran’s Shah, and America is still paying the price for that support.  Now, Republicans are calling for more robust support for Egypt’s oppressive President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi against Islamist insurgents there, including an ISIS affiliate.  They seem blithely unaware that such support might actually empower the insurgents fighting against Sisi’s regime.  In fact, if the U.S. were to go back to robustly aiding dictators who show no regard for human rights, it will prove ISIS’s propaganda true: that America and the West are teaming up with non-Islamic oppressors, who together are working against the masses of regular Muslims. 

And, crucially, more people will line up to fight us than if we were to be more careful about who we strongly supported, to whom we gave weaker support to, and who we did not support.  Iraq’s recent history proves this: the Sunnis in Western Iraq fought with American forces to defeat al-Qaeda in 2007; in 2014 they fought with ISIS against a Shiite government in Baghdad, led by Maliki, that shared no power, offered no compromise, gave no quarter to Sunnis, all while using the security forces of the state to promulgate violence against Sunni leaders and villages.  Iraq’s Sunnis were willing to fight against extremists Sunni Islamic terrorists when they believed they would get a fair shake in the Iraqi political system; when they instead were forcefully and deliberately marginalized, many of them allied with the same terrorists they had recently fought.

Instead of accommodating aggrieved groups and working out long-term compromise, these regimes will just use American support to get away with literal murder, fueling even more instability and conflict in the future.  This was a major lesson of both 9/11 and the Arab Spring, but the myopia of the Republicans leaves no room to even acknowledge this.  Instead, Obama seeks to force these regimes to engage in political compromise—the only way to defuse the sectarian tensions raging across the Middle East today—by using American aid as leverage.  By pushing these regimes to become something that locals will see as governments worth fighting for, there will emerge local government forces of Muslims with enough motivation and legitimacy (in addition to American and Western support) that can stand up to ISIS and deprive ISIS of the narrative and territory on which it feeds and survives.  Obama correctly understands than an organization like ISIS cannot be defeated by America: it must be defeated by the Muslims and governments in ISIS’s sphere of operations, and America can be there to help, but it must be the locals who lead.  A big part of any success will be the degree to which ISIS becomes divorced from Islam in the minds of the region’s Muslims.  The foolish Republicans and others who do not understand how important this aspect is to the regional dynamics and ISIS’s ability to both absorb and project power only empower ISIS in the long run.

Conclusion

The above describes Obama’s broader strategy for dealing with ISIS, counterterrorism, and the Middle East.  It is a complex, nuanced strategy for a complex, nuanced problem.  To be fair, the Obama Administration has hardly been perfect in its messaging of its complex strategy and how its components fit together.  Yet the strategy is also hardly rocket science, and even a modest understanding of Middle Eastern dynamics reveals that it is not only the best strategy, but the only one that yields a good chance of long-term success and short-term progress against terrorist extremists like ISIS.  Particularly troubling is the dominant Republican view, that if a strategy cannot fit into a bumper sticker (Trump’s “bomb the shit out of” ISIS) that means it is not (and that there is no) strategy; also, their idea that the solution to complex foreign policy problems should be modeled on John Wayne westerns.  Among many other reasons, these are reminders why the Republican Party and their leading candidates are not fit for high office, let along prosecuting a global fight against ISIS and its ill-intentioned brethren.

Getty Images

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 19, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 19th, 2015

Other articles in this series:

How Not to Stop Terrorism & Gun Violence: Lessons from the Republicans

American Guns: Not Just Killing Americans (See Mexico)

Gun Violence in the U.S.: The Numbers Behind the Madness

Why Is the U.S. So Good at Gun violence?

The Irrelevant Second Amendment

Out of the many past and present world conflicts that I have studied over the last decade, I have spent as much time with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as with anything else.  And one thing that strikes me is how myopic and tactically oriented Israeli officials, especially Israeli political leaders, have been in terms of dealing with the issue of Palestinian and Arab terrorism.  Israel wins every war, every battle.  But its lack of strategic, long-term thinking has cost many lives on both sides of the conflict and has led to ineffective long-term policy that threatens to trap Israel into a quicksand of conflict and permanently alter it in very negative ways as to the nature of Israeli democracy and society.  The recent Israeli documentary “The Gatekeepers” (truly a must see) does perhaps the single best job of illustrating this point when all six surviving heads of Shin-Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, conclude that a lack of strategic vision from Israel’s leading politicians has put Israel in a very dangerous place with no easy way out.  That such hard, practical men can all agree on this is what makes the film so compelling and disturbing at the same time.

Our own approach to terrorism here in the U.S. has been very different, and for different reasons we are also suffering from the ramifications of bad policy.  For all his faults, though, George W. Bush recognized after 9/11 that simply going to kill the terrorists who plotted 9/11 would not do much to limit our long-term exposure to such attacks and threats; he knew that there was something sick in the postwar, postcolonial Middle East and its cadres of monarchs and dictators that may have kept order and oil flowing but had done little for their people, economies, or societies.  And he was right about that.  That he thought the best way to help kickstart transformation in the Middle East was to invade Iraq, topple Saddam Hussein, and set up a democracy in his place, though, was questionable at best; whatever you thought of that idea, the execution of this plan not only left much to be desired but could be called criminally negligent at worst, and more or less doomed Iraq’s American-top-down-imposed-democracy-project from almost the start. 

At least, though, America saw a problem—Islamic terrorism—and attempted some sort of long-term fix (albeit one that ended in disaster in the short term and only leaves us with a giant question mark at best in the present and even medium-term future, its long-term results, then, also not looking good). This is in contrast to Israel, which (mostly) never seemed to think setting the Palestinians up with a state and a future of their own was worth exploring or planning over the course of nearly five decades of a hardly benign Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip and an even more destructive policy of transferring hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children into these Arab-dominated areas in settlements that the whole world, including the UN Security Council (and including the U.S.) has condemned as illegal and a roadblock to peace.  And while in some ways the U.S., thankfully, is getting some help from Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, the internet, and Arabs themselves when they all helped to spark the Arab Spring, which has helped to bring about the ending of that sick, moribund post-colonial system of generally American-supported dictators and monarchs, accomplishing in a fraction of the time what a decade-long war in Iraq could not even for all its setbacks, Israel is still staring into an abyss, propelled by its own hubris and myopia.  Thus, America is now eyeing the Middle East with a much longer view, then, while Israel still envisions little beyond tomorrow, next month, or next year.

Though America does not suffer from the same strategic blindness and inaction that Israel does regarding terrorism, sadly, it does seem to suffer from such afflictions in almost all major domestic policy issues of the day.  The “War on Terror” thus joins the “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs” as other wars against things which cannot be defeated.  Terror is a tactic, and you cannot defeat a tactic, nor can you defeat terror by killing all the currently existing terrorists because that does nothing to address the issues that created terrorists in the first place; crime is not simply a matter of arresting and locking up criminals (and nobody is better at that than the U.S., as we have the highest incarceration rate in the world and have for over a decade), as arresting and even executing criminals will not change the murder rates in South Side of Chicago or the Northeast quadrant of Washington, DC.; drugs (prescription or otherwise) are something that will always be with us and abused by some to their own ruin and the ruin of those who care about them, their families, and their communities, but like crime or terror, drugs are not an enemy that can be defeated.  The same childlike idealism that led George W. Bush to believe that he would become, in the words of Bill Maher, the Johnny Appleseed of democracy in the Middle East has led the American populace and many of its leading politicians to believe that crime and drugs are an enemy that can be defeated: punish criminals, punish drug users and dealers, lock them up, and the problem goes away, right?

Wrong.

Until 2012, which saw a slight increase in violent crime, the previous few years had seen a steady though slight decrease in violent crime.  The decreases returned in 2013 and in preliminary data from 2014.  However, as a Pew study shows, since the late 1980s, the U.S. prison population has almost tripled, from over half a million (almost 600,000) to over one-and-a-half million people (almost 1.6 million) in 2007; the prison population peaked at over 1.6 million in 2009 and has only decreased slightly since then; that’s over 1 of every 100 adults.  Furthermore, the pew study shows the amount states are spending is steadily increasing, with 13 states spending over $1 billion each on corrections and five states spending more or the same on corrections as they do on higher education.  California and Texas alone spend over $12 billion on prisons in 2007, all states together spending over $49 billion, a 315 percent increase since 1987.  Corrections average out to be the fifth largest state expenditure, with one out of every fifteen dollars that states spend being spent on corrections.  Furthermore, increases in this category have been higher than increases in Medicaid and in education spending.  As I have pointed out before, we already spend very little on gun control or on funding the ATF.  Much like healthcare, then, with their prisoners Americans seem content to take very few preventive measures—which are relatively very cost effective—and to wait for something bad to happen—a person getting sick, someone shooting another person—before taking action, action that then becomes much more costly and less effective at longer term prevention.  As the Pew report notes, the corrections system seems to do very little correcting.

Again, to Bush’s credit, he saw remaking the Middle East, and Afghanistan, through military force as a preventive, long term measure.  At least he attempted something long-term, whereas the Israeli leaders seem almost content to manage short-term crisis after short-term crisis through what is in many ways is the foundation of their state: the Israel Defense Forces, with very little serious effort given to a long term peace. Yitzhak Rabin tried (albeit very late in his career) and he was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish extremist.  Israel’s counterterrorism policy, then, is counterterrorism at its purest, simplest, and most ineffective: respond to each attack with overwhelming force and/or lethal precision.  That seems to be all it has in its play book, as I have noted before, and this approach is eerily similar to America’s approach to healthcare, crime, and any of a number of other issues: when something breaks (e.g., a body party), fix it; when terrorists or criminals strike, kill them and their supporters.  In this view, it is simply a matter of individual behavior, of individual health issues.

These approaches fail to see the big picture: how preventive, regular medicine and consultations as part of an affordable, subsidized national health care system can save the nation as a whole (and most people) a ton of money in the long run and save many lives.  Addressing Palestinian aspiration for a state of their own anytime during the last several decades could have seen much of the Palestinian efforts towards terrorist actions transformed instead into the business of a people with their own sovereign state and society to run.  Helping underserved communities and developing them economically and educationally would do a lot to lessen crime as young men in particular—those who are most likely to commit violent crimes—find jobs and degrees instead of guns and drugs that are easy to sell.  So sickness is treated not directly, but by focusing on preventative medicine, while crime and terrorism have more or less the same solution: the same concepts of international development that can be effective in fostering long term conditions which would create societies where terrorism would find much less fertile ground to grow can be applied to areas right here in the U.S. in order to foster development in communities where crime is rampant.  In other cases, such as those of the Palestinians, Chechens, Kurds, or Tamils, the iron fist of oppression lasting decades or even longer generally does not stop terrorism but only encourages it since, for the desperate, terrorism is often the cheap, cost effective way to fight more powerful enemies when all other options have been denied to a group.  This explains the IRA’s decision to abandon terrorism when a framework was worked out for sharing political power in Northern Ireland.

As this striking interactive feature from the University of Maryland shows, terrorism in recent years has been remarkable concentrated: roughly two thirds of the world’s terrorist incidents in the last decade have occurred in four countries: Iraq, Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, and that ratio has more or less been consistent even as the absolute amount of attacks has more than quadrupled since the beginning of our so-called “War on Terror.”  This visual clarity makes it clear that so-called “Global War on Terror” has only led to a huge increase in terrorist attacks worldwide.  Before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, there were well under 1,500 terrorist incidents; by 2007 that had risen to over 4,500 incidents.  Iraq and Afghanistan alone had about 1,400 incidents, about one third of all terrorist incidents; another third were in Pakistan and India, the first country’s incidents very much tied to the war in Afghanistan, and many of the second country’s incidents also, though to a lesser degree, suffering from the Afghanistan/Pakistan terror nexus.  Basically, the U.S.’s actions had the effect of greatly increasing incidents of terrorism.  So even though Bush gets credit for trying a long term solution, the attempt was a disaster of epic proportions.  International development—the work of USAID, NGOs and the UN, among others—is a much better investment value for winning friends and helping to create conditions where extremism and violence find it harder to grow.  In fact, it is such good counterterrorism that both Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal made political and economic development the very point of the security operations in their counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In fact, the military in both these theatees engaged in massive development projects to the point that the military even added these types of “stability operations” to its list of core mission functions. 

So it is that the best counterterrorism is international development, just as helping to revitalize devastated, poor, uneducated communities is the best way to bring down crime.  We do not need people as smart and capable as Generals Petraeus and McChrystal to tell us that here, we just have to think of both our crime and terrorism problems as all-encompassing problems that transcend simple solutions like “lock ‘em up” and “kill ‘em all.”  Sure, there will always be your uncommon, freak murders and freak terror attacks, like that police officer in L.A. who went on a shooting rampage or the two brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings.  Some crazy cults like ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Japanese group that released sarin gas into the Tokyo Sunway can very likely be reasonably accommodated, but the Chechen or Palestinian fighting against oppression today, like the Irishman before them, can likely be accommodated by a long term peace settlement that will not please everyone but will be good enough for most.  Sometimes, you need to kill to defeat terror; but whenever possible, you should defeat terror by defusing the often legitimate grievances of its practitioners, much like helping would-be criminals escape from poverty, drugs, and failing schools, and taking preventative measures to keep weapons that enable them to more easily and effectively commit crimes out of their hands.  The U.S. was faulted after the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003 for not securing Iraq’s weapons depots, weapon which ended up in the hands of terrorists and insurgents; likewise, why would we want guns flowing around our more devastated urban areas like they flowed in Baghdad?

We don’t need to lock 1% of our adult population up or start massive wars to combat crime and terrorism.  Rather, we must cease our myopic approaches and need to address root causes and enablers, and (international) development and limiting access to arms for both would-be-criminals and would-be terrorists are much better starting-off points for successful policy.  We have begun to realize this in terms of counterterrorism, but we are woefully short of this mark when it comes to our home front.  In light of this most recent racially-motivated mass shooting in Charleston, SC, which can easily be considered both a hate crime and a terrorist act, this is the least we can do in face of the obvious failure of our approaches thus far.

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

July 7, 2014 Brian E. Frydenborg- LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at @bfry1981)

IDE

As more and more nations demand and attempt to enjoy the benefits of today’s globalized economy and community, international development is a field that will only grow larger and become more difficult to understand. Integral to the success of any international development project are growing good relationships and a deep understanding of how all-encompassing development and its effects can be. While the term “international development” and its field as currently constituted are only incarnations of a very recent nature, international development is central to many other fields, and the concepts and practices behind it date back to the ancient world. Even in the year 2014, few entities can match the record of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire when it comes to international development. The Romans could (not that they always did) bring peace, stability, excellent roads, (mainly) free trade, running water, sanitation, and voluntary and enthusiastic cultural meshing and assimilation faster than even the United States of America was able to in recent years in Iraq and Afghanistan (not that the U.S. incapable of this, but in many ways its execution fell far short of this or many would say it virtually did not even happen at all regarding some of these issues).

While both our technology and our own understanding of the field itself have changed greatly since the days of ancient Rome, and while the international development field is today changing as rapidly as almost any other field, the same basic keys to success that existed in the days of Julius Caesar are the same basic keys to success today. One of these is that development always works better when implemented as part of a broader security, political, economic, and social strategy. Another is that both top-down and bottom-up approaches are generally required, and this is quite similar to another point: that the more integrated local elites and locals in general become in the entire international development process, and the more they take ownership of it, the more likely long-term success will be achieved. Rather than a foreign imposition, then, or a simple dumping of resources, international development is all about partnerships—foreign and local, elite and grassroots, private and public—and bringing people into a system as more or less equals and empowering them in the process, rather than simply dominating them. Unlike many other empires, this approach is why Rome, unique among major empires until the U.S. in its inclusiveness, succeeded for so long where so many others either failed or only achieved short-term success. Rome’s success was so remarkable that former enemies often became willing allies and eventually even Romans themselves, often adopting Roman culture voluntarily while still retaining aspects of their own cultural identities concurrently and for long after they fell under Roman jurisdiction.

Today, those same ingredients are just as important and remain the core foundations of most successful international development projects. Currently, international development is increasingly not largesse handed out by big government programs, but partnerships among governments, among international and local actors, among private and public and non-profit institutions, and among different swaths of all the societies involved. And all these types of actors will also further interact with the other types. International development is increasingly led by governments but carried out by non-government actors; budgetary resources go less to governmental aid agencies, and are increasingly directly awarded by these government agencies to contractors and local actors of all sorts. The field is almost unrecognizable compared to a decade ago, and though there is more unpredictability today in it because of this, it is more collaborative and inclusive than ever before, with a larger number of partners and actors providing input and shaping the outcome than in years past. This more organic and local approach is already leading to better results, both in terms of outputs and outcomes, and even how success is measured is rapidly changing. All this means that it can be harder than ever to understand what was already a complex field as it becomes even more complicated, and the margins for error, in turn, become ever smaller.

Furthermore, it has become increasingly clear that international development is an essential component of and/or a complementary item to a whole host of other activities. Today, few military operations can achieve long-term success without a competent development component. Today’s globalized world means that if an area falls into poverty, violence, and chaos after a largely successful military operation, those gains become quickly undermined as the instability spreads to other regions, including, potentially, whichever region carried out the “successful” operation. Hard won battles can become a victory in vain almost overnight, then. The same is true with political aims and public policy, which can easily become stymied if populations are not themselves empowered and become stakeholders in stability, order, and prosperity in a region. Economic success on paper can easily be undermined, too, if that success leaves out the local base of society and ends up sustaining or increasing inequality instead. So in terms of the developing world, without successful international development operations it is hard to see how any kind of major international operation, partnership, or relationship can succeed at all in the long run. A simple look at the perpetual and increasing headaches the underdeveloped parts of the world create for themselves and the whole planet—no matter how many strong but narrow, non-comprehensive operations take place there—should make this obvious. This is why today the U.S. Government stresses the “Whole-of-Government” approach and the United Nations stresses its “integrated missions.”

Thus, in the end, neglecting relationships or failing to understand how incredibly interdisciplinary development as a field truly is dooms a project from the start. Successful development is about establishing deep, genuine, and steadfast relationships with an enormous variety of actors and embracing an approach that takes into account how everything involved in and surrounding development projects can affect those projects and how those projects, in turn, will effect everything they touch and surround, and all over time. Those who understand this can emerge as successful development professionals as we progress into the twenty-first century, while those who do not will experience only failed projects, wasted resources, and dashed hopes.