Chuck Hagel: Efforts against IS are only 'responsible containment'

 

“The best the United States and our allies can hope for is a responsible containment of the problem … Containment is a bad word. I know that. Politicians are afraid of it, they break out in hives. But it is a realistic term,” Hagel told MEE at an event in New York.

 

“The next president of the United States is going to be dealing with this … and maybe the next president.”

 

Hagel’s comments come amid growing concerns that US-led efforts to defeat the Sunni Muslim extremists are proving more difficult to dislodge from the caliphate they have carved out across swathes of Syria and Iraq.

 

Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran, was US President Barack Obama’s defence chief from February 2013 to February 2015, covering the time that IS spread across Syria and Iraq and the US declared a mission to “degrade and destroy” the group.

 

His successor, Ash Carter, addressed Congress on Thursday and warned that Iraq was not committed enough to defeating the extremists and that lack of recruits was hampering efforts to regain ground across the country’s western regions.

 

Last week, US President Barack Obama authorised the Pentagon to send up to 450 extra troops to Iraq in an bid to beef up the training of local security forces in their fight against IS, which seized territory from Iraqi forces in a lightening offensive last summer.

 

“ISIS is not going to be destroyed, fixed, resolved … by military. The military is part,” Hagel told MEE at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in upper Manhattan, adding that Obama did not aim to merely contain IS until the end of his term.

 

“I don’t think the president’s intention is to run out the clock. I often heard this president say … that he wanted to leave his successor with as few problems as he possibly could.”

 

For several months, the US has provided training and advice to Iraqi forces as they try to push back IS fighters who have gained territory in Iraq. But US troops are so far not engaging in active combat themselves. Many Republicans in Congress say the US should not rely solely on the Iraqi forces.

 

This week, Evan Barrett, a political advisor to the Coalition for a Democratic Syria, said that US-led efforts against IS in the Syrian civil war were flawed and that Obama needed to re-think his strategy against IS and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

 

“The biggest catalyst for a policy change towards Syria are the failures of Obama’s current policy,” Barrett told MEE. 

 

“It seems likely that Obama will cynically run out the clock on his term, rather than strike a new course to address the underlying causes of the war in Syria and the murderous policies of Assad’s regime.”