U.S. must not take victory lap over Islamic State’s defeat

After more than eight months of fighting, U.S.-backed Iraqi forces this week succeeded in liberating Mosul — Iraq’s second-largest city — from the barbaric Islamic State movement. On Tuesday, there was also a report from a human rights group with a good record of insights into the Syrian civil war that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been killed in that ravaged nation, where the terror group has also steadily been losing ground.

Given that the victory in Mosul means a respite from carnage that left many thousands dead, a feeling of accomplishment is appropriate — but not a sense of satisfaction. That’s because whether the topic is Iraq in particular or the larger picture of Islamist terrorism, there is much to worry about.

The Shiite Muslims who control Iraq’s government still aren’t trusted by the nation’s Sunni Muslim minority. These Sunnis welcomed or tolerated the arrival of Islamic State’s Sunni fighters and are likely to have a similar attitude about a future Sunni uprising — unless they are treated more equitably. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has proven more adept than his recent predecessors and appears to understand that reaching out to Sunnis is crucial. There’s been talk of moving to a more decentralized government — allowing Sunnis much more control in the areas where they are predominant — and of sharing oil wealth more broadly among all Iraq’s regions. (One of the driving factors in the Shiite-Sunni rivalry is the geologic peculiarity that nearly all the Persian Gulf’s oil deposits are located underneath areas where Shiites are concentrated, even in Sunni-majority oil giant Saudi Arabia.)

So there are reasons for hope. But given that the Shiite-Sunni schism dates back to Islam’s founding in 632 A.D. — and that the intense fight for regional dominance between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia has only intensified in recent years — Iraq could soon be a proxy war battlefield again.

Meanwhile, all the factors that drive jihadism among young disaffected Muslims remain firmly in place — lack of economic prospects in Europe and the Middle East, resentment of Western affluence and perceived decadence, hatred of the United States and its Western allies for their violent interventions in Muslim nations and the ease of affiliation with like-minded people through the Internet. Maajid Nawaz, a Britain-born former Islamist turned author and politician who is widely respected for his insights into extremism, expects a long struggle with what he calls a “global jihadist insurgency” with followers across the world.

But America needs a reckoning for its own mistakes. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq not just because of fears of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction but because of the Bush administration’s desire to usher in democracy in a region full of authoritarian regimes. The effort has failed. Of the six nations with pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring of 2011, all are now once again dictatorships, with the exception of tiny Tunisia. And one of the nations in the region that used to be a democracy — Turkey — now looks more like a religious dictatorship as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan steadily increases his powers and silences critics.

This amounts to only the latest sobering lesson for America that there are sharp limits on the United States’ ability to make over other nations to its liking. The triumph in Mosul must not obscure this overriding fact.

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