Fueling Endless War: The Consequences of Preventive War Logic

The adoption of preventive war logic to frame the counter-ISIS war has fueled America’s endless wars. Today, the United States finds itself increasingly committed to a long-term presence not just in Iraq but also Syria. Meanwhile the terrorist threat remains resilient. The war has also introduced new risks. The preventive war logic has compounded and contributed to these dangers.

Today, the United States continues to have at least hundreds of troops operating in Syria and perhaps more—having had 2,000 troops as late as early 2019.¹ In October 2019, the Trump administration withdrew American forces from parts of northeastern Syria. Despite Trump’s unplanned withdrawal, the United States appears far from ending its counterterrorism war in Syria.

In an October 14 statement, Trump framed the withdrawal as a redeployment in which “United States troops coming out of Syria will now redeploy and remain in the region to monitor the situation and prevent a repeat of 2014, when the neglected threat of ISIS raged across Syria and Iraq.”² The statement confirmed Trump’s intent to initiate a preventive snapback of U.S. force if ISIS were to grow in strength.

The Department of Defense reportedly plans to continue airstrikes and surveillance from outside Syria, and some troops may redeploy to Iraq and other neighboring areas, where about 5,000 U.S. forces already operate in a country the United States sought to withdraw from prior to the ISIS war.³ The Iraqi government, however, has voiced opposition to an increased U.S. presence in the country, putting the redeployment part of the plan in doubt.⁴ The United States also appears likely to maintain about 150 troops within Syria at al-Tanf, justified primarily on the basis of counter-ISIS operations, but also serving objectives related to American competition with Iran and Russia.⁵ American forces may also stay in eastern Syria.⁶ President Trump has embraced the mission of protecting oil supplies in Eastern Syria by maintaining and redeploying U.S. troops to the area. The deployment, which officials represent as essentially a way of convincing Trump to allow for the continuation of counterterrorism missions could even result in there being no net decrease in U.S. forces in Syria after the withdrawal from northeastern Syria by some counts.⁷ The supposed withdrawal has not ended the war, nor has it decreased the troop presence in the region.⁸

Prior to the withdrawal from northeastern Syria, there was an expectation among many national security professionals that the United States would maintain military forces in Syria for the foreseeable future. An unscientific, informal survey conducted at New America and Arizona State University’s Future Security Forum found that fewer than 10 percent of an audience largely made up of national security professionals expected the U.S. to have no troops in Syria and Iraq in 2030, and almost a third expected there to be more than 5,000 troops in the two countries.⁹ If there are U.S. troops operating in Iraq and Syria in 2030, that would mean four decades spanning at least six administrations of United States military involvement in Iraq, and the addition of more than a decade and a half of war in Syria.¹⁰

Despite Trump’s unplanned withdrawal, the United States appears far from ending its counterterrorism war in Syria.

This expectation does not appear to have diminished substantially. The House of Representatives voted in a bipartisan 354 to 60 majority to express opposition to Trump’s withdrawal, demonstrating the continued consensus in favor of maintaining a presence.¹¹ Even Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote an op-ed criticizing the withdrawal and warning that the United States needed to maintain forces to prevent ISIS attacks on the homeland.¹²

Meanwhile, the security situation in Syria and Iraq remains tenuous, illustrating the limits of American military power to achieve the United States’ political ends. In July 2019, New America Fellow Nate Rosenblatt and former New America/Arizona State University Senior Fellow David Kilcullen, assessed that the conflict around Raqqa was power-locked, with the U.S. presence suppressing but not eliminating the underlying tensions, and a shift in the conflict could allow ISIS to reemerge.¹³ According to Rosenblatt, the chaos that followed the American withdrawal from northern Syria, supports that conclusion illustrating that the conflict hadn’t ended but was merely frozen.¹⁴ Rosenblatt notes that “the possibilities are now wide-open” for the area around Raqqa, including a potential ISIS resurgence, and that while Russian and Iranian-backed Syrian government forces could conceivably re-lock the conflict by filling in as the dominant power, it would likely come at a high humanitarian cost that could fuel the influence of jihadists.¹⁵ Analysts with varying views of the Syrian military and its Russian and Iranian backers warn of the dangers of assuming a Syrian government return to power in areas the regime lost control over can resolve the conflict.¹⁶ Turkish-backed forces might also be able to re-lock the conflict, but Turkey appears uninterested in exerting the influence needed to do so as far south as Raqqa and would face challenges if they tried.¹⁷

The United Nations Sanctions Monitoring Committee states that ISIS continues to carry out attacks in Iraq.¹⁸ In both countries, large numbers of fighters remain either in detention or having escaped, providing a potential for reemergence. The Lead Inspector General for Operation Inherent Resolve’s report covering April to June 2019, notes, based on open sources, that “ISIS retains between 14,000 and 18,000 ‘members’ in Iraq and Syria, including up to 3,000 foreigners” while also assessing that the group “maintains an extensive worldwide social media effort” and was able to establish an increasingly stable “command and control node and a logistics node” in Iraq.¹⁹ General John Allen and Brett McGurk, both former special presidential envoys for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, stated at a September 2019 Brookings Institution event on the counter-ISIS campaign that the campaign cannot be viewed solely in a retrospective manner but is still ongoing.²⁰

Although the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a U.S. raid on October 26, 2019 may disrupt the group, it is unlikely to lead to ISIS's defeat.²¹ Prior targeted killings of terrorist leaders, including prior leaders of ISIS, have not defeated terrorist groups, and ISIS's underlying sources of strength remain.²² The historical lesson of ISIS's reemergence after the surge is that ISIS is quite capable of operating as a terrorist and insurgent entity even under substantial pressure and the loss of leaders, only to reemerge later.²³

Because ISIS's threat to the United States was almost if not entirely a result of its power to inspire attacks, the loss of territory has done little to change the situation.

With regards to the United States, the threat level has not changed substantially. Because ISIS's threat to the United States, even at the height of the war, was almost if not entirely a result of its power to inspire attacks, the loss of territory has done little to change the situation fundamentally.²⁴ The same month that ISIS lost its capital city of Raqqa to U.S.-backed Syrian democratic forces, Sayfullo Saipov killed eight people in a truck ramming attack in Manhattan. The same week that CENTCOM congratulated the Syrian Democratic Forces on liberating the last of ISIS's territorial holdings, another vehicular ramming attack was foiled before the alleged perpetrator could find a workable target.²⁵

The circumstances described above are a predictable result of the embrace of a preventive war logic. That is not to say that the endlessness is not also rooted in the complexity of Middle Eastern conflicts and might have occurred regardless of the rationale the United States embraced. However, the preventive logic contributed to the war’s endless character while making the United States more vulnerable to its dangers.

Preventive war logic promotes a tendency to replace analysis of the costs and benefits of specific actions with an effort to match one’s intuitive values. Michael Mazarr diagnoses such a phenomenon as being at the core of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, arguing that the 9/11 attacks provided a catalyst that shifted U.S. decision-making, which had a preexisting missionary impulse and strategic reasons to consider regime change in Iraq that were constrained by fears of costs, to a form of value-matching where weighing of costs and benefits became less of a focus.²⁶ This shift can generate an American foreign policy that underestimates the limits of its military power to achieve political goals.

A particularly powerful trigger of this kind of shift in reasoning is the existence of a “deep uncertainty” that drives a search for justifications that cut through the complexity of weighing costs and benefits of specific actions.²⁷ Such uncertainty is not exclusive to wars where preventive logic plays an important role, but the character of preventive war exacerbates this dynamic. As the scholar Colin Gray writes, “Contingency, personality, surprise, and general uncertainty render strategic futurology a profoundly unscientific enterprise. And the more distant the menace in time, the greater the risk of misestimation. This is not utterly to condemn preventive war as a strategic concept; that would be foolish. But it is to suggest in the strongest possible terms that, as an accepted policy option, it is fraught with an awesome possibility of error.”²⁸

As noted earlier, detailed senior-level deliberations continued throughout the campaign. However, there is some evidence of a shift towards an identity-based framing surrounding the justification of the September 10 escalation. Present-day calls to maintain a military presence—when the initial decision to engage in a military campaign did not see a far-greater ISIS presence as necessarily cause for intervention—provides further evidence that decision-making shifted into an identity- and values-based framework rather than maintaining a cost-benefit analysis. It is of course possible this change simply represents a determination that the Obama administration’s initial assessment was wrong.²⁹ Even so, policymakers need to be wary about shifting towards a mission of destroying ISIS's challenge to American values—rather than more limited missions to protect specific interests weighed against the cost of such missions—when hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops could not accomplish that task when the group was far weaker.

A related problem that emerges with preventive war logic is an over-focus on reducing a rival’s capabilities while worsening the overall security situation, what some have termed the “preventive war paradox.” According to Scott Silverstone, “The problem with the logic of preventative war begins with a truncated understanding of what determines threat. Its central logic fixates on the relationship between power and political order, treating this relationship as though there is a straight line linking an increase in power to an increase in security.”³⁰ As a result, the logic tends to focus on preventing the growth of capability while neglecting that the success of a war is judged by its political outcome.

Preventive war in turn is “particularly susceptible” to generating future threats by triggering a “security paradox” in which it undermines the desired political order specifically because, as Silverstone puts it, “preventative war has long been classified in political, legal, and moral terms as an act of aggression itself.”³¹ As a result, preventive war can often succeed in immediate tactical victories while eventually resulting in a less secure situation overall. Moreover, unless the target of military action is completely annihilated, it will likely continue to wage war, often with greater effort than before.³²

In the case of the counter-ISIS campaign, there is already precedent cautioning that the United States is unable to annihilate ISIS. As former New America Fellow Brian Fishman writes in his well-researched book on ISIS: “After the success of the Awakening and the Surge, American commanders and policymakers celebrated the ISI’s [a name used by the group prior to its move into Syria – Islamic State of Iraq] inability to control territory. This was undoubtedly a triumph, but largely overlooked in that victory was the group’s continued existence as a distinct, and very powerful, terrorist organization.”³³ ISIS continued to carry out major terrorist attacks even at the height of the surge.³⁴ In addition, the political conflicts that underlay the conflict continued even during the surge.³⁵ If more than 150,000 American troops could not annihilate ISIS's precursor, there is little reason to believe the much smaller number can annihilate ISIS today.³⁶ Indeed, one analysis suggests that ISIS's capabilities are far greater today than its predecessor’s capabilities in the period before ISIS burst onto the global scene.³⁷

Preventive war logic promotes a tendency to replace analysis of the costs and benefits of specific actions with an effort to match one’s intuitive values.

This inability to annihilate a terrorist enemy has also been demonstrated by America’s broader counterterrorism situation. Despite 18 years of war, al Qaeda remains resilient, with affiliates across the Middle East; and jihadism as a movement also remains resilient, feeding off of the region’s political and economic conditions.³⁸ Nicholas Rasmussen has cautioned against the use of words like “defeat” and “destroy,” the very register that emerged with the adoption of a preventive war logic and the broadening of the counter-ISIS campaign. He called them “very ambitious objectives that, even if we were maximally resourced, even if everything broke our way in the international environment, even if every positive projection of the international environment you could develop came true, we still would have struggled to meet those objectives on the kind of timeline we were setting for ourselves.”³⁹ Instead, Rasmussen emphasizes the importance of words like “cope,” “manage,” and “resilience.”⁴⁰

The inability to annihilate ISIS, and the related need for resilience and management, makes the political conditions that are often obscured by preventive war logic the only effective basis for a strategy. As Fishman writes, “The Islamic State will not achieve a ‘final victory,’ so the United States should focus on building a positive vision of its own—and encouraging stakeholders to get on board.”⁴¹ The great danger of the preventive war paradox is that in pursuing the military destruction of ISIS's capabilities, the United States will undermine or simply fail to address the development of such a broader regional political solution. Fishman correctly warns, “the Islamic State can be suppressed by a fractured coalition, but it will not be defeated by one. That is why the current fight against the Islamic State is not a recipe for victory; it is a recipe for perpetual, low-level war.”⁴²

For some strategic theorists, perpetual low-level war may not be a bad thing. For example, many Israeli strategists have embraced a strategy of “mowing the grass” in which military force is repeatedly used—not with the intent of achieving victory but rather of suppressing a threat perceived to be more or less inevitable in the medium-term to manageable levels.⁴³ There may be some lessons from this tradition, but the endless war footing it embraces poses significant questions of morality and societal impact. Moreover, even in the Israeli case, the concept of mowing the grass overestimates the sustainability of such a strategy due to the role of public opinion as well as due to the ability of rivals to adapt and utilize new technologies.⁴⁴ While the costs to Americans may have been relatively low so far, the counter-ISIS war was not a low-cost, easily repeatable campaign for the partners the United States relied upon. In addition, adopting “mowing the grass” as a counterterrorism strategy will continually be susceptible to the tendency of interventions based on limited regional security rationales to generate the snapback not just of war, but of more radical preventive war logics.

Even a prediction of perpetual low-level war is optimistic; the dangers sown by the preventive war paradox in the wake of the counter-ISIS campaign are not restricted to matters of counterterrorism. The United States is increasingly finding itself embroiled in larger geopolitical contests. Russia and Syria have called the U.S. presence in Syria “illegal” and called for its removal, suggesting they don’t find the justifications undergirding the U.S. presence to fight ISIS sufficiently credible to overcome their strategic interests in opposing a U.S. presence in the country.⁴⁵ The United States already finds its forces coming into conflict with Russian proxy forces in Syria.⁴⁶ There have also been clashes with pro-Iranian forces in Iraq.⁴⁷ Commenting from outside government, Brett McGurk, who previously led the coalition, warned that the United States’ objectives in Syria expanded under the Trump administration to include pushing Iran out of Syria and achieving change in the way the Assad regime governed Syria.⁴⁸ Nor is the danger only a matter of Iranian-supported groups, tensions in Iraq are also driven by local dynamics and opposition to foreign presence, and American actions to try and deter Iran or others poses potential to trigger security dilemmas and escalation.⁴⁹

The recent withdrawal from northern Syria will not end the risk of U.S. forces grinding against other powers’ forces. The potential continuation of airstrikes and efforts from outside Syria as well as the continued presence at al-Tanf and in eastern Syria mean the United States will still be interacting with Russia and Iran in Syria.⁵⁰ In addition, tensions will continue in Iraq.

A third problem that emerges with the adoption of preventive war logic is that even if decision makers avoid the pitfalls of the logic in Syria and Iraq, the precedent can overstretch American power. The expansion of the range of threats that the United States will respond to include threats that are not imminent increases the costs imposed upon the military to respond to these multiplying threats. The scholar Jack Snyder made such a criticism of the Bush administration’s logic of preventive war during the 2003 invasion of Iraq by drawing upon the history of imperial policing. He wrote, “Typically, the preventive use of force proved counterproductive for imperial security because it often sparked endless brushfire wars at the edges of the empire, internal rebellions, and opposition from powers not yet conquered or subdued. Historically the preventive pacification of one turbulent frontier of empire has usually led to the creation of another one adjacent to the first.”⁵¹ President Obama himself expressed similar concerns.⁵²

With ISIS affiliates of various strength still operating in other parts of the world, the question of why Syria and Iraq required military action but other affiliates don’t looms large. These affiliates present a range of potential sites of escalation stretching from Central Africa and North Africa through the heart of the Middle East into Central, South, and Southeast Asia. Jihadist groups have adopted strategies specifically aimed at overstretching U.S. power, and when the United States expands the battlefield with little connection to imminent and specific threats, it tends to benefit this jihadist strategy.⁵³

Preventive logic increases the costs imposed upon the military to respond to multiplying threats.

One of the primary justifications for preventive war when it comes to terrorist groups generally—and with regards to ISIS specifically—is that their intent to conduct external attacks is clearer than is the case with states that are part of the international system. ⁵⁴ This clarity can mitigate some of the dangers of preventive war logic. However, the assumption that this clarity of intent sufficiently mitigates the dangers of preventive war logic is a false promise.

The Obama administration and others were not wrong to identify ISIS as having maximal objectives. There were clear signs of ISIS's intent to carry out substantial violence beyond Syria and Iraq at the time of the initiation of strikes. One of the most significant of such signs was the declaration of the Caliphate itself, at least in propaganda terms, signaling a global vision and a more aggressive and immediate goal of bringing it into being than had been previously advocated by al Qaeda.⁵⁵ The vision of the caliphate and the religious justifications ISIS adopted are pretty much impossible to assimilate into the accepted international order.⁵⁶

The group’s foreign fighter recruitment in 2013 and 2014 already suggested that the group would contain motivations connected to conflicts far outside of Syria and Iraq.⁵⁷ European foreign fighters were already engaged in attack plotting by summer 2014.⁵⁸ Libyan fighters who were part of the so-called Battar Brigade, largely made up of residents of Derna, began to return to Libya, helping set up ISIS structures there in Spring 2014.⁵⁹

Yet, increased clarity of intent does not eliminate the problems of adopting preventive war logic with regards to counterterrorism. Intent is never entirely clear and tends to exist on a spectrum. This was made clear by then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s presentation of the 2015 Worldwide Threat Assessment, in which he stated, “If ISIL were to substantially increase the priority it places on attacking the West rather than fighting to maintain and expand territorial control, then the group’s access to radicalized Westerners who have fought in Syria and Iraq would provide a pool of operatives who potentially have access to the United States and other Western countries.”⁶⁰ Far from being absolute, the extent of ISIS's intent was a matter of debate and varied across the organization in 2014, with ISIS being made up of multiple sub-groups, some of which had clear intent to conduct external attacks and others of which seemed more locally focused.⁶¹

There are also confounding variables. The decision to initiate military action against ISIS may have played a role in shaping ISIS's decision to engage in external attacks and the willingness of some fighters and others to cooperate and support that strategy. Data on attack plots in Europe suggests that state participation in wars in the Muslim world partially explains the pattern of jihadist attacks in Europe.⁶² This is not the only driver of attacks, with networks and entrepreneurs playing a larger role, but it does show that, even with jihadist terrorists, it is dangerous to presume that intent is so clear and that preventive war cannot shape intent.⁶³ Many commentators noted the potential for military action to further ISIS's propaganda and encourage more attacks.⁶⁴

Caution is required in assessing the intent of terrorist groups as numerous psychological biases encourage overestimation of terrorist intent and threat. People tend to view terrorists as having grandiose intents and being unwilling to compromise even when terrorists may have more limited goals because they infer inflexible terrorist objectives from the willingness to target civilians or commit atrocities.⁶⁵ This is a particularly dangerous dynamic in connection with preventive war logic due to the tendency to replace cost-benefit thinking with value matching to reduce the uncertainty of projecting future threats that are not imminent.⁶⁶

Even if the United States correctly judged the level and movement of intent in the ISIS case as having justified preventive war, other problems with preventive logic—whether the reaction of other parties or the danger of overstretch—persist because they do not derive from lack of certainty regarding intent as does the danger of creating a precedent.