In an ominous video posted to the Internet in June, fighters for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (al-Dawlah al-Islāmiyyah fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham) taunt unarmed members of the Iraqi security forces. The unarmed Iraqi soldiers lie on the ground with their hands behind their back. An ISIS fighter forces them to say the word “baqiya” to signify that ISIS will endure. One of the Iraqi soldiers hesitates. The ISIS fighter then proceeds to murder him. It was not until such videos surfaced, and news of ISIS’ rapid territorial gains, that almost anyone in the United States cared to pay attention. As news of the horrifying deeds of ISIS spread, the calls for intervention grew louder. Now, we yet again find ourselves leading a “coalition of the willing” to tackle the situation. Mission creep quickly turns into mission gallop with all the usual suspects involved, and what they fail to see is not only that our past interventions in the name of the “War on Terror” have failed but have in fact made us more of a target.
In his speech detailing the plan to “degrade” ISIS, Obama stated: “This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.” This is a revealing example, not because it has been “successful” as Obama claims, but because of how much our counterterror policies in both Yemen and Somalia have utterly failed to do anything positive. If our strategy in Yemen was successful, you might think there would be a decrease in the number of terror attacks taking place in the country, but you would be wrong. Since our drone attacks escalated starting in 2009, the number of terror attacks in Yemen has increased dramatically. The exact same dynamic has taken place in Somalia. Not only has terrorism increased in both countries, but our intervention has failed to help stabilize either country. Somalia is still in the throws of a multidecade civil war that has claimed hundreds of thousand of lives, and Rabbuh Hadi, the leader of Yemeni government, faces a continuing insurgency from the south and Houthi rebels from the north. The International Crisis Group recently went so far as to say that Yemen’ government is “at a crossroads more dangerous than any since 2011,” the year of Yemen’ revolution that ousted Abdullah Saleh. And none of this considers the extent to which ISIS emerged out of our intervention in Iraq, which is perhaps the most recent glaring example of how foreign intervention can backfire in spectacularly awful ways.
Our interventions not only often spell trouble for people in countries around the globe where we intervene, but they make it more likely that we become a target of terrorist attacks. This is not merely conjecture, studies have found that this is the case on multiple occasions. A study by Nuemayer and Plumper (2009) found that United States military aid increases the amount of anti-American terrorism. A working group paper on national security found that, “When all else is equal, anti-Americanism is more likely to lead to localized violence where American target are pervasive and/or accessible.” A systemic review of counterterrorism policies noted that, “Retaliatory attacks… have significantly increased the the number of terror attacks in the short, particularly against the United States…” This is no secret to our government. As early as 1997, a Department of Defense Task Force Report on Transnational Terrorism had this to say: “Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.” Despite this, the report still went on to argue that the United States should take a leadership roll in the fight against transnational terrorist groups. So here we are again 17 years later, fighting the same battles and expecting that the results will be positively different. If history is any guide however, the outlook is anything but positive.
