Islamic State (ISIS) militants can win, and will — if there's no ground force to defeat them, if they can take Baghdad, if Iraq "continues to unravel," and if Iran doesn't beef up its aid to them, former CIA official John McLaughlin says.
In a commentary posted Wednesday night for
The Washington Post, the deputy director and acting director of the CIA from 2000 to 2004 argues the possibilities aren't "in the realm of fantasy."
"The group is almost certain to survive the Obama presidency," he writes. "If two years into the next presidency, the Islamic State is still fitfully governing that area, it would be hard, in my view, to not call that a win."
And in that case, he adds, ISIS will "eventually look toward external targets such as the United States while posing a continuous threat to its neighbors and clinging to some form of harsh sharia law."
According to McLaughlin, four conditions will make an ISIS win "almost inevitable."
"First, the Islamic State's opponents would have to fail to marshal a sufficient ground force to take it on," he writes. "Bombing alone will not be enough. As of now, the Iraqi army is not up to the task."
"People don’t fight because they’ve been trained; they fight because they believe in something," he adds. "At present, the biggest believers in the region are with the Islamic State."
Secondly, McLaughlin writes ISIS "would have to get into Baghdad," noting "it doesn’t have to take the city to demoralize its opponents."
"Third, Iraq would have to continue to unravel," he adds. "This would leave the Islamic State’s opponents with a less secure fighting base and the country’s Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds even more adrift."
Finally, McLaughlin writes, "Iran would have to shrink from taking on a larger responsibility for defeating the Islamic State."
"These are the harsh realities," he writes. "But the one clear lesson from the past several years is that making no decision is still a decision — and one that can yield even worse choices."
There's two essentials to stopping the ISIS onslaught, McLaughlin asserts, including "taking back substantial territory," and finding a way "to achieve what has so far proved most elusive: an end to the alienation of Sunni populations in Iraq and Syria, the most powerful engine of attraction for Islamic State recruits."
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