Widening war in Iraq and Syria is a necessary path to peace

US President Barack Obama was pilloried two weeks ago for admitting that his administration lacked a strategy to combat Islamic State in Syria.

In Washington on Wednesday, he hit back at his critics and Islamic State alike.
 
Obama now says that the United States will take the fight to Islamic State militants 'wherever they are.' The airstrikes against Islamic State in Iraq will be extended to Syria, while Congress will debate US$500 million worth of military aid for moderate rebels in Syria caught in a three-way battle against the authoritarian Assad regime and extremist jihadi groups.
 
The Australian government has not yet received a formal request for additional assistance, but Prime Minister Tony Abbott has mooted expanded Australian involvement.
 
Rather than immediately assuming that this ramped-up foreign intervention will fuel further instability, we should develop a realistic framework for assessing Obama's — and by extension, Abbott's — strategy in Iraq and Syria.
 
Syria is embroiled in a brutal civil war that has lasted more than three years and cost more than 190,000 lives; Iraq is bitterly divided along sectarian lines and is being progressively dismembered; and both nations are plagued by Islamist fighters with genocidal tendencies.
 
Given this cocktail of political chaos and cruelty, foreign intervention could never be expected to deliver perfect peace and stability.
 
Nevertheless, the international community has the means and the moral obligation to at least push back against Iraq and Syria's march to hell.
 
The United States and its allies and partners can and should empower the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters to resist Islamic State's murderous blitzkrieg across western Iraq, while also offering long sought-after financial and material support to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to root out Islamist elements in the uprising and hold the line against the Assad regime.
 
Wisely, this is precisely what Obama has proposed and what Abbott has supported.
 
Of course, the Iraqi state, Kurdish forces and the FSA are not irreproachable partners. The government in Baghdad is hamstrung by ongoing sectarian divisions; the Kurds are expected to eventually further destabilise Iraq with a concerted push for fully fledged independence; and in the event of an FSA victory, the Assad regime-linked Alawite minority will probably be persecuted.
 
Refusing to intervene would allow the international community to avoid entangling itself in these complexities. But as Obama and Abbott understand, the security and human costs could be as high as the establishment of a brutal terrorist quasi-state spanning Iraq and Syria and the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians and religious minorities.

Dr Benjamin Herscovitch is a Beijing-based research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.