The fall of Ramadi and Palmyra within a week to the forces of Islamic State marks a new phase in the ongoing struggle in the Middle East. Ramadi, the tenth-largest Iraqi city – capital of the primarily Sunni region of Anbar province that was once known as a hellhole where thousands of American soldiers died in IED explosions – fell to advancing ISIS forces as the Iraqi government forces just melted away. An Iraqi army over 6,000 strong apparently just left their posts and disappeared in the face of ISIS forces mostly around 500 strong that were advancing in pick-up trucks and carrying small weapons. It was a replay of the fall of Mosul last year, where the government forces also just disappeared.

Within a week, a similar scene played out in Palmyra on the other front of this multinational war, Syria. At 4000 years old, the ancient oasis town of Palmyra is one of the oldest cities in the Middle East, and it is also a UNESCO World Heritage site that is known as the birthplace of the legendary Roman-Arab queen Zenobia. Palmyra was defended by Syrian government forces for over three months in the face of a heavy ISIS assault, and its defenders finally gave in. The city is now fully occupied and controlled by ISIS, with reports of mass beheadings and genocide in the area surfacing intermittently.

The U.S. State Department spokesperson Marie Harf tried hard to defend the efforts of the administration's coalition, mentioning that Iraqi government forces held their lines outside the city, which, as Professor Tom Nichols has said, is perhaps the worst euphemism for fleeing with their tails between their legs. This new development has subjected President Obama's ISIS strategy to renewed strain and criticism from both his own party and from Republicans. General Martin Dempsey said that the Iraqi forces trained and provided with supplies by the United States were not "driven out of Ramadi, but drove out themselves," showing shockingly low morale for professional fighting forces facing a battle for their own existence. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates went so far as to say that the current administration has "no strategy at all," but is simply winging it day by day.

These setbacks underscore a few important points. First of all, there is no denying that the administration's strategy, or lack thereof, is failing in the Middle East. The Iraqi government forces are callous, lack fighting morale and are plagued by lack of discipline, corruption and squabbles between different divisions; they are completely incompetent overall. On top of that, there is sectarian rivalry among the country's armed forces, with forces in primarily Sunni areas divided in their loyalties between taking orders from an American-backed and mainly Shiite-dominated government and accepting help from neighboring Iran, a Shiite power and the largest supporter of Shiite militias fighting ISIS across Iraq. The Obama administration is struggling to overcome this huge trust deficit and lack of credibility not only in Iraq, but across the Middle East. No amount of training, materials and money can overcome a lack of morale if fighting forces are not ready to fight.

Secondly, the administration's half-hearted approach, lack of goals and conflicting interests in this war have created major problems. A few years ago at the beginning of the Arab Spring, Professor Daniel Drezner wrote an article in Foreign Policy magazine mentioning that maybe the Obama administration's intention was to keep war in the Middle East going at a slow burn, as instigating a war of attrition between the various destructive Arab and Iranian forces while maintaining the United States' role as an offshore balancer would be the most realist thing to do. Your humble correspondent was disinclined to adopt this hypothesis then and tends to disagree even now, and not just because this would require a Machiavellian level of realpolitik sense that Washington – especially under Obama – is completely incapable off.

The problem is not that Washington lacks a strategy, but that it is following two different and at times even opposing strategies simultaneously. The realist in Obama would not have worried about what's going on in the Middle East. If history gives any indication, the Middle East – especially the regions of Iraq and Syria – is correcting for a historical anomaly and mutating away from arbitrary colonial borders created by the British and French toward logical borders that reflect sectarian lines. The Kurds are finally carving out a land of their own, and the entire region of Mesopotamia is being divided into a Shiite southern crescent, with the northern parts of Iraq and Syria that border Turkey becoming a Sunni-dominated zone. Any realist leader wouldn't be too worried if these areas were to undergo their own version of a Thirty Years' War, as this would pose no direct threat to the interests of the United States. The conflict can be contained with proper offshore balancing, minimal interference, and policing of the Mediterranean to contain and discourage the flow of refugees.

But the Obama administration is led by liberal interventionists of the highest order, including Susan Rice and Samantha Powers. That, coupled with twenty-first century morality, a liberal order based on human rights and an upcoming election campaign season in which every failure will be scrutinized, is leading the administration to set unreliable red lines and unachievable short-term goals. Also added to the situation is the dilemma of working side by side with noted adversaries including Bashar al-Assad and Iran even though they share a greater common enemy in the form of Islamic State, thereby forgetting an important historical lesson learned when the U.S. and the West allied with the Soviet Union to defeat Nazism.

The administration shows a lack of tactical maturity in its reluctance to fully commit to the war, in its simultaneous attempts to completely extract the U.S. from the mess, in its half-hearted bickering and cooperation with adversaries that share common interests, in its lack of a future deliverable plan for American influence in the Middle East, and in its susceptibility to a constant ideological tug-of-war. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that this is going to be remedied anytime soon.

The writer is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/SumantraMaitra.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn

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