Russian-backed forces have defeated the so-called Islamic State in Syria. U.S.-backed forces have defeated the Islamic State in Iraq. Peace may be at hand.
The winners in these wars were Russia, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the Shi’ite militias in Iraq. The losers, in addition to the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL and Da’esh), were Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates and Israel.
The United States was in a contradictory position. By invading Iraq and overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. gave power to Iraq’s Shi’ite majority, which is aligned with Iran. This went against long-range U.S. goals, which are to support Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Also, the official justification for intervention in the Middle East was to fight Al Qaeda terrorists. But the regimes attacked by the U.S. government—Saddam’s Iraq and Assad’s Syria—were enemies of Al Qaeda, as was the Ayatollahs’ Iran. No matter what U.S. did, it would either strengthen Al Qaeda or strengthen Iran.
Given the inherent contradiction in U.S. policy, I think the current outcome was the best that could be expected. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump deserve credit for not escalating a new war to keep Russians out of Syria and Iranians out of Iraq. I’m not sure Hillary Clinton, given her record of starting wars, would have shown the same wisdom.
This map of the Middle East, showing which entities actually control what territory, was published by Frank Jacobs on the Strange Maps web site. Here’s Jacobs’ key to the map.
The Syrian central government (in light grey), based in Damascus, controls a coastal strip of territory in a patchwork shared with a number of rebel forces. The interior of the country is lost to government control, except a single light grey island in a sea of dark grey (for IS): the besieged city of Deir ez-Zor.
The ‘official’ rebels (in green) control a fragmented archipelago of territories, spread across the north, middle and south of the country – also concentrated in the east, but without coastal access. Aleppo, in the north, is on the front line between government and rebel forces, with horrific consequences for the city and its people.
Large parts of northern Syria are controlled by the Syrian Defence Forces (in red): a contiguous zone in the northeast, and a smaller zone in the northwest. Both are separated by the zone of contact between Turkey and Islamic State, although that zone has gotten a bit narrower since the takeover by the SDF of Manbij. The SDF, by the way, are mainly Kurdish forces, and the area they control is often referred to as Rojava – Kurdish for ‘West’.
The Islamic State controls not only the largest part of Syria, but has also spilled over into Iraq, where it dominates mainly Sunni areas in the centre, up to and including the city of Mosul in the north. The IS’s territory is surrounded by enemies, but has the advantage of being contiguous, with the exception of two exclaves, one in southwest Iraq, and another one in southeast Syria.
What remains of Iraq is controlled in the south by the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad (in light blue), and in the North by the Iraqi Kurds (in yellow).
One of the worst thing that could happen is an escalation of the U.S. “war on terror” into a global war between Christendom and Islam. That is the goal of al Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS).
If it happened, the United States and much of Europe would become as beleaguered as Israel is today. The devastation that has been visited on Gaza, Palestine, Iraq, Libya and Syria would be spread to the whole world.
That is why Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama were careful to distinguish jihadist terrorists from Muslims in general.
Unfortunately, there are Americans, such as Lt. General (ret) William “Jerry” Boykin, who don’t.
President Bush fired him in 2007 from his post as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence for saying that the United States is in a holy war of Christian crusaders against Muslim jihadists. Even though Boykin was a brave and patriotic soldier, Bush acted in the best interests of the United States.
Boykin has endorsed Ted Cruz for President, and Cruz has appointed him as one of his top advisers. I think Cruz also wants to make the “war on terror” a religious war.
The Syrian situation reminds me of a remark by Adam Smith in (I think) The Wealth of Nations — about how masterminds who think of themselves as master chess players, using other people like pieces on a chessboard, will find the people they think they are manipulating are actually playing their own game.
The aims of the U.S. government in the Middle East are, in no particular order, to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, to counter the growing power of Iran and to destroy the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Da’esh).
The bitter experience of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions means that the American people will not tolerate a large-scale intervention with ground troops, so American leaders, including the principal Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, look for pawns to carry out U.S. purposes.
Here is a rundown on these pawns and the games they are playing.
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirate governments, all predominantly Sunni Arab nations, fear the rise of Shiite Iran and Shiite power in Iraq much more than they do Sunni Arab ISIS or al Qaeda. To the extent they fear ISIS and al Qaeda, it is more as an internal threat, and they are happy to see their local rebels go off to fight and maybe die for ISIS. The Saudi government doesn’t crack down on individuals who contribute to ISIS because they reflect the beliefs of Wahabism (aks Salafism), the harsh version of Sunni Islam that rules Saudi Arabia.
The Kurds in northern Syria and Iraq are fighting ISIS effectively, but they are fighting to defend themselves and their goal of an independent Kurdistan, to be carved out of the existing territory of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, not as part of any overall “war on terror”. They aren’t going to give up that goal just because it is inconvenient to the USA.
The Turkish government desires the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria and the suppression of Kurdish nationalism more than suppression of ISIS. Oil from ISIS-controlled territory enters Turkey, and money and arms go from Turkey to ISIS. Turkish politicians talk of the glories of the Ottoman Empire and of the unity of ethnic Turks across Asia.
The Iraqi government desires to prevent breakaway movements, whether ISIS, other Sunni Arab fighters or Kurds.
The Sunni Arab militias and tribal leaders in Iraq blame the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and setting up an Iraqi government dominated by Shiite Arabs, so they’re not willing to be U.S. proxies in a campaign against ISIS.
The Shiite Arab militias in Iraq hate ISIS, but their leaders distrust the United States and won’t work with Americans.
The “moderate Arab” rebels in Syria primarily desire to get rid of Bashar al-Assad and talk about fighting ISIS primarily to obtain U.S. weapons – many of which wind up in the hands of ISIS, al-Nusra and like groups.
The Iranian government desires to support Shiite Muslims against all enemies, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey or ISIS, and to defend Syria and also Hezbollah, which represents the Shiite Muslims in Lebanon.
The Syrian government is an enemy of ISIS because ISIS is an existential threat to its existence. But the Assad regime regards the other Syrian rebels and the Kurdish separatists as equally threatening
This leaves Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Putin justifiably fears the influence of ISIS and other jihadist terrorists on the large Muslim population in the Caucasus and other regions of the Russian Federation. He also wants to defend Russia’s Syrian ally and keep Russia’s naval station in Syria. But for him, the war against ISIS is a war of self-defense, not merely a means of extending Russian influence.
If fighting ISIS is the top U.S. priority, then the U.S. government should find a way to cooperate with Russia against ISIS. If the U.S. government is unwilling to cooperate with Russia against ISIS, then fighting ISIS is not the top U.S. priority.
Is Vladimir Putin’s objective in Syria to destroy ISIS or to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad? It seems to me that the answer is “yes”.
I’ve read articles criticizing Putin for concentrating Russian airstrikes on rebels other than ISIS. Some of these articles hint that Putin or maybe even Assad are secretly supporting ISIS.
I think this criticism mistakes the nature of air power. Command of the air can be devastatingly effective when used in combined operations with ground troops. But bombing alone, in and of itself, seldom defeats a determined enemy.
What these maps show is that Putin’s air strikes are concentrated on “rebels” not part of ISIS and not part of the al-Nusra front (formerly known as al Qaeda).
There is, however, no clear distinction between ISIS, al-Nusra and generic “rebels”. Individuals and small bands change affiliations according to the situation, and U.S. weapons given to “rebels” are often acquired by ISIS through capture, gift or sale.
Christoph Reuter of Spiegel Online suggested that Assad wants to defeat the U.S.-backed rebels first and ISIS last, because, so long as ISIS is in the field, he can present himself as the only alternative. I suppose this is possible, but the simpler explanation is that Russia is concentrating on bombing the troops that are actually fighting the Syrians.
The U.S. government is an enemy of the nations fighting ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taiban. These include Syria, Iran and Russia and, in the past, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I’m not praising these nations’ governments. I’m just pointing out they are the enemies of the terrorists the U.S. government supposedly is making war on.
U.S. military intervention creates the kind of environment in which ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taliban flourish. When the structure of civil government and civil society are smashed, as happened in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, only criminal, religious or military groups can flourish, or criminal religious warlords such as ISIS, al Qaeda or the Taliban.
Many Americans support the claims of ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taliban to be true representatives of Islam. Presidents Obama and George W. Bushdistinguished between terrorists and mainstream Islam, but many American politicians and journalists seem to be intent on turning a struggle against a tiny group of terrorists into a crusade against the world’s more than 1 billion Muslims.
Ironically, many Iranians and Iraqis believe that Americans intentionally created ISIS. I’m sure there was no such intention. I just think that certain people in the U.S. government sought to use the war on terror as a screen to achieve other geopolitical objectives which they gave higher priority.
One of these objectives was to be the dominant military power in the Greater Middle East. Another was to control oil, gas and pipeline routes. A third was to back Israel, Saudi Arabia and other allies against their enemies and rivals.
They neither achieved these objectives (unless waging war is a goal in itself) nor effectively fought terrorism.
§§§
If we Americans are serious about waging a war on terror, we should stop doing things that make the terrorists stronger.
The Christian community in Syria dates back to the time of St. Paul, who was converted on the road to Damascus.
Today the survival of Christianity in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries is under threat. Syria has lost 700,000 Christians in the past five year, nearly two-thirds of its Christian population. Iraq has lost more than a million Christians since the 2003 invasion.
The so-called Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Da’esh) singles out Christians for beheading and rape. It calls them “crusaders,” meaning that they are supposedly part of an age-old European invasion of the Middle East. Yet Syria was a Christian country for centuries before Mohammad was even born.
Many religious scholars fear for the survival of the ancient Christian communities in Syria and Iraq. This is something new, not a centuries-old conflict.
Christians and Muslims mostly lived together in peace during the Arab Caliphates, the Ottoman Empire and European colonial rule, and, if there was persecution, it fell short of genocide.
Despite all this, there are relatively few Christians among the Syrian and other Middle Eastern refugees knocking on the doors of Europe and the United States.
An estimated 10 percent of Syria’s population is Christian, yet they constitute only 2.5 percent of the Syrian applicants for asylum in Europe. I would have expected more, if only because, unlike with Muslims, there are no predominantly Christian nations in the Middle East region.
I don’t think this is because of intentional discrimination. Asylum seekers are screened in refugee camps, and Middle Eastern Christians reportedly are reluctant to enter refugee camps because of persecution and abuse by Muslim refugees.
Certain American and European politicians have called for asylum of Syrian refugees to be limited to Christians. [1]
Barring refugees solely on the basis of religion is wrong and possibly a violation of international law. But there surely is justification for an affirmative action program for some of the world’s most persecuted people.
Evil did not come into the world with the first murder. Evil did not come into the world with the first execution. Evil came into the world when the people killed an innocent person because he was the same family or tribe as a murderer. ==Author unknown
I admit I don’t know what to do about the so-called Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Da’esh). But I do have a good idea of what the French, U.S. and other governments should not do. They should not do what ISIS wants them to do.
Terrorist attacks are the classic strategy of rebel and guerrilla movements that lack popular support. They provide governments into striking out blindly at innocent people, creating grievances that enable the rebels to recruit.
These were the tactics of the left-wing guerrilla movements of the 1970s. It was the tactic of Osama bin Laden in the 9/11 attacks. His goal was to provoke the United States into getting bogged down in a quagmire war in Afghanistan.
French bombing raids won’t destroy ISIS. Neither will they deter ISIS. The ISIS fighters see their own attacks as retaliation for what the French and other Western governments have done to Arab peoples.
Instead the attacks help ISIS recruit new members and depict its movement as the defenders of the Arab world against outside aggression.
The supposed legal authority for American military interventions is a resolution by Congress authorizing the President to use military force to root out terrorists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
But after 14 years, radical terrorists such as Al Qaeda and its successors, including the so-called Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL and Da’esh), are stronger than ever. Why?
It is because the American military is invincible in destroying the governmental and economic structures of nations, but is incapable of establishing order.
This is partly by design. The so-called revolution in military thinking inaugurated under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called for use of small, highly-mobile, highly-trained special forces with high firepower, instead of the mass armies of the World War Two area. Such forces are effective at killing people and breaking things but not at long-term occupations.
The other is that the U.S. government, being averse to committing sending large numbers of Americans into battle, supports extremist Islamic terrorists when they are fighting other designated enemies. This is what happened in Libya, and is the real reason for the Benghazi tragedy. It is what is going on in Syria now.
The people in Washington who’ve planned military policy in the past 15 years must think that (1) the United States is so rich and powerful that no mistake can possibly have any fatal consequence and (2) the only proof that a policy is a mistake is an admission that it is a mistake.
The radical jihadist militias that the U.S. government is arming want to impose Sharia law on Syria. Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad, were ruthless dictators who’d stop at nothing to stay in power. But they never persecuted Christians or other religious minorities merely because of their faith.
The McClatchy newspaper chain had a different business model than its U.S. rivals. Rather than catering either to the public or to the powers that be, their editors and reporters reported the news as they saw it, without fear or favor. Sadly this didn’t work out.
Vladimir Putin has sent Russian forces to Syria to prop up the regime of Russia’s ally, Bashar al-Assad.
He said he is joining in the war against the so-called Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Da’esh). The U.S. government said Russia is targeting the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army and other “moderate” rebels rather than ISIS itself.
I’m not sure how significant that difference is. I don’t think it is realistic to think it is possible to overthrow Assad and keep ISIS out of power without sending American forces to occupy Syria—and even then the outcome would be doubtful.
Many countries besides the USA and Russia have conducted air strikes in Syria. One list includes Australia, Bahrein, France, Israell, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and should have included Canada and Turkey.
I don’t think Russia is in a position to challenge the U.S. military presence in the Middle East directly. I think Putin’s plan is to enhance the power of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah vs. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel, but to minimize actual Russian activity.
The European refugee crisis is due mainly to the Islamic State’s reign of terror in parts of Syria.
Bashar al-Assad is a ruthless dictator who will do whatever it takes to stay in power. But his regime doesn’t mutilate and kill people because of their religion or lifestyle. People of different religions and ethnicities have co-existed peacefully under his government.
This is not true of the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Da’esh). Under their rule, you are not safe unless you are willing to live under their extreme and wrong ideas of what Islam was like in the days of Mohammad.
Since the surge of millions of refugees into Europe directly affects U.S. allies, and since ISIS is the direct cause of this crisis, why does the United States hesitate to join forces with the Iranian government, which is the main enemy of ISIS?
Gareth Porter, writing for Middle East Eye, has a good idea of the reasons:
US policy toward the Middle East has long been defined primarily not by threats originating in the region but by much more potent domestic political interests, both electoral and bureaucratic.
The power of the Israel lobby in Washington, primarily but not exclusively over Congress, is well known, and that has imposed a rigid political and legal framework of hostility toward Iran on the US government for two decades, beginning with a complete trade embargo that remains in place and creates major obstacles to any shift in policy.
What is seldom acknowledged, however, is that the interests of the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA have become tightly intertwined with those of the anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East.
A set of mutually reinforcing bureaucratic interests now binds US policy to an alliance structure and military and intelligence programmes in the Middle East that have come to replace objective analysis of regional realities in determining US policy.
I read a couple of interesting posts during the past couple of days about Russia increasing its political and maybe its military presence in the Middle East.
I don’t know what to make of them, and I have no way of knowing what is on President Vladimir Putin’s mind.
Syria’s al Assad and wife in Moscow
I do know that, if I were in Putin’s place, with the USA and its NATO allies stirring up trouble in nations bordering mine, I would look for ways to stir up trouble for the USA and NATO.
If I were Putin, I would see ISIS as a threat, and look join forces with Syria, Iran and other anti-ISIS forces.
A pro-Russian, pro-Putin blogger who calls himself the Saker says that Putin has neither the desire nor the power to project Russian power any great distance from what the Russians call their “near abroad.”
The Saker pointed to the Russian Federation’s military oath, which is to defend the Fatherland. It says nothing about invading foreign countries.
But the American military oath is to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution. It also says nothing about invading foreign countries, and this hasn’t proved a limitation. As the Saker remarked, U.S. foreign policy resembles the old Soviet “international duty” to intervene globally wherever necessary to defend supporters and defeat enemies.
Gov. Jeb Bush blamed President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the rise of the bloodthirsty Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL) because they abandoned the policies of his brother, President George W. Bush.
In fact, Obama and Clinton contributed to the rise of ISIS by following the policies of George W. Bush.
The Islamic State’s predecessor, Al Qaeda, had no presence in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Al Qaeda and later ISIS were able to establish themselves in Iraq because the U.S. invasion destroyed the governmental structure of Iraq, and nobody was able to put it back together again.
But didn’t the withdrawal of American forces open the door to ISIS? Whether it did or not, the withdrawal was begun under an agreement negotiated by President George W. Bush in his last year in office with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The reason for the agreement was that the American occupation was highly unpopular in both countries.
Realizing this, President Bush stopped listening to Vice President Dick Cheney and replaced Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld with Robert Gates. President Barack Obama retained Gates and implemented the Bush agreement.
President Obama’s most important foreign policy innovation was to make interventionism politically sustainable by finding a substitute for American boots on the ground—flying killer drones, Special Forces assassination teams and subsidies for Arab fighters.
During the 14 years since the 9/11 attacks, radical Islamist terrorists have grown stronger, and they gave grown strongest in those countries in which the U.S. military has been most active. This includes Libya, which Hillary Clinton reduced to the same state of bloody chaos and ISIS-friendly environment as Iraq.
She and Jeb Bush are both war hawks. She is the more experienced and knowledgeable war hawk, but there is no reason to think either would change the bad course of American foreign policy.
One reason that Al Qaeda and ISIS are strong is that US attacks on Muslim countries create the conditions of chaos in which they flourish. Another is that the US government has been more interested in undermining nations that happen to be enemies of Al Qaeda and ISIS that in fighting Al Qaeda and ISIS.
Women of Kurdistan
The latest example of this is President Obama’s support of the Turkish government in its attack on the Kurdish people. The Kurds are dedicated and effective enemies of ISIS and support democracy, religious toleration and women’s rights, which are supposedly the ideals the US government represents.
But Kurdish nationalism threatens the unity of Turkey, and the support of Turkey is essential to the covert war being waged by the United States against Syria, whose government also is an enemy of ISIS.
The “war on terror” which the United States began on Sept. 12, 2001, is on the one hand so urgent that we Americans are being asked to give up basic Constitutional liberties, but on the other hand not important enough to distract from overthrowing regimes that Washington has targeted—first Saddam, then Qadaffi and now Assad.
Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine has published a grim and terrifying account of life under the so-called Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Daesh).
It reminds me of reports of life in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War or in the USSR under Stalin’s terror.
I think that U.S. efforts against ISIS will be futile so long as they are conditional—that is, conditional on not doing anything to offend Saudi Arabia or help Iran or Syria.
Iran and Syria are not democracies, nor was Libya before the overthrow of Qaddafi, but in these countries it was possible for a normal person to lead a normal life without day-to-day horrors.
The result of destruction of Libya, the proxy war in Syria and any attack on Iran are to create conditions of lawless violence from which movements such as ISIS can emerge.
Everybody has met self-centered people who behave as if they are the only people in the world who matter, and everybody else exists only to carry out their wishes.
If they are sufficiently rich and powerful, they can get away with this for a certain amount of time. But in the end, they wind up isolated and friendless.
Unfortunately the United States conducts its foreign policy as if we Americans are the only people in the world who matter, and everybody else exists only to carry out Washington’s wishes.
This is bound to end badly.
Peter Van Buren, who was kicked out of the State Department for writing about the fouled-up U.S. occupation of Iraq, pointed out in an article for TomDispatch how this is playing out in current U.S. policy toward Iraq and the Islamic State (ISIS)
The fundamental problem underlying nearly every facet of U.S. policy toward Iraq is that “success,” as defined in Washington, requires all the players to act against their own wills, motivations, and goals in order to achieve U.S. aims.
The Sunnis need a protector as they struggle for a political place, if not basic survival, in some new type of Iraq.
The Shiite government in Baghdad seeks to conquer and control the Sunni regions.
Iran wants to secure Iraq as a client state and use it for easier access to Syria.
The Kurds want an independent homeland.
When Secretary of Defense Ash Carter remarked, “What apparently happened [in Ramadi] was that the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight,” what he really meant was that the many flavors of forces in Iraq showed no will to fight for America’s goals.
I am astonished by how the murderous Islamic State has arisen seemingly out of nowhere and now controls as much territory and people as many countries now represented in the United Nations.
Everybody seems to be against ISIS and they wage war against everyone except those willing to submit to their idea of Sunni Islam. Yet they seem to go from strength to strength.
I am reminded of the Bolsheviks, who also seemingly came out of nowhere, represented a minority of the population of the old Russian Empire and yet through unrelenting force and propaganda came to rule a great nation.
The Bolsheviks did not come to power all by themselves. Lenin was sent into Russia as a German covert action to undermine the Russian war effort.
They were a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, a Marxist party with its main strength among factory workers in the big cities. The October Revolution was a military coup against a government led by the Mensheviks, the other Marxist faction.
They were opposed by the Social Revolutionary Party, a non-Marxist radical agrarian party with strength among the Russian peasant majority. They also were opposed by Russian liberals who favored a capitalist democracy, by supporters of the former Tsarist regime, by separatists in Ukraine and central Asia, and by the armies of the Western allies and Japan.
The anti-Bolshevik forces disliked each other almost as much as they did the new Bolshevik government, and they never could unite. Trotsky’s Red Army defeated them one-by-one.
The western Allies could not have defeated the Bolsheviks without the same all-out effort as their fight against Germany and the war-weary people of the Allied nations were not willing to support such an effort. The effect of the Allied intervention was to make Russians think of the Bolsheviks as patriotic defenders of their country.
Finally years of lawless violence made people willing to support any government that would provide a minimum of law and order.
I do not say the Bolsheviks were exactly like the Islamic State. For one thing, they had a positive program—”land and peace”, although they later reneged on the “land” part. Nor do I say the Islamic State is destined to triumph as Lenin’s Bolsheviks did.
But I see parallels between the Bolsheviks then and ISIS now.
ThinkProgress had a good article about how a sensible American Imam explained to Muslim teenagers that the Islamic State’s propaganda is contrary to the authoritative teachings and the historic practice of Islam.
When people are ignorant of their own religion, they are vulnerable to those who try to sell them a twisted version of it. The best cure for ignorance is accurate knowledge.
The disturbing thing to me about the article is that Imam Mohamid Magid’s effort is necessary in the first place. It is disturbing that ISIS has such a big presence on American social media. The New York Times reported that ISIS sends out an estimated 500 million messages a day via 46,000 Twitter accounts.
It also is disturbing that ISIS propaganda has an impact. I can understand radical Muslim movements with grievances against the United States, Israel and other Western countries. I do not volunteer to become a victim of such movements, nor advocate that others do so, but they are understandable in a way that ISIS is not.
The primary targets of ISIS are other Muslims and harmless religious minorities who have been living in peace in majority-Muslim countries, and the images that ISIS broadcasts of be-headings and burnings are manifestations of sadistic cruelty. This is very hard to understand.
U.S. government officials estimate that 150 young Americans have gone or tried to go to Syria to join ISIS, the New York Times reported. Imam Magid said some of them were no doubt mentally ill, and I’m sure that is true.
Eric Hoffer pointed out years ago in his book, The True Believer, that people who join extremist mass movements are not those who are rooted in a traditional religion, but people who are uprooted from their culture and desperately need something to give them sense of meaning and belonging.
The reason the Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL) is so hard to defeat is that so many Middle East leaders are more fearful of Iran than of ISIS.
The Middle East is divided by a conflict of alliances superimposed on a conflict of religious factions, and both sides are more concerned about their relative power than about ISIS.
One side consists of Iran, a theocratic Shiite state, which supports the Shiite-backed government of Iraq, the Alawite-backed government of Syria, Shiite militias in Iraq and Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Lebanon.
Arrayed against Iran are Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, the Sunni militias in Iraq and Syria and, implicitly, Israel. There also are the Christian Arabs, the Kurdish people and others who are caught in the middle.
ISIS grew out of Sunni militias, who were fighting in Syria against the government and in Iraq against the Shiites. What makes ISIS a problem for the anti-Iran coalition is that they not only persecute Christians and Shiite Muslims, which has been going on for a long time, but also other Sunni Muslims who don’t accept their version of the faith.
The Saudis, Gulf emirates and Turks would like to get rid of ISIS, but not to change the balance of power in favor of Iran and Syria.
The U.S. government has the same problem. Washington wants to destroy ISIS, but for a long time was unwilling to give up the hope that there are “moderate” Sunni militias that would overthrow the government of Syria. So Washington kept sending arms to Sunni rebels in Syria which wound up in the hands of ISIS.
The Iranian government has for years been the enemy of America’s chosen enemies—the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and now ISIS. Washington has ceased waging economic warfare against Iran, but has not ceased trying to checkmate Iranian power in the Middle East. But so long as Iran is held in check, ISIS is likely to survive.
I believe there is such a thing as goodness, which is devotion to human flourishing in myself and others, and I believe there is such a thing as badness, which is the human weaknesses that prevent people from serving the good.
I also believe there is such a thing as evil, which is hatred of the good.
There are such things as good countries, which allow their people to flourish, and there are bad countries, where corruption, privilege and power without accountability prevent human flourishing.
And there are such things as evil regimes, such as those of Hitler and Stalin, which kill and torment people for no real reason except pure malice.
The ISIS regime and its allies such as Boko Haram in Nigeria seem to be pure evil, although they may attract followers who don’t realize what they’re getting into until it is too late. If I could push a button and blow up all the ISIS leaders while sparing innocent human life, I certainly would do so.
At the same time, I recognize that the seeds of the ISIS atrocities and of almost every other bad and evil human action exist within myself. I have never wanted to set anybody on fire or slowly saw anyone’s head off at the neck, and I have never fantasized about it, but I have thought and done things that, in their small way, were just as pointlessly malicious.
To recognize the evil in myself is not to deny or mitigate the evil of ISIS. It is to recognize the truth of what Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer, once said, which is that the battleline between good and evil does not run between nations nor between individuals, but through the heart of every human being.
Terrorist attacks are the classic strategy of rebel and guerrilla movements that lack popular support. They provide governments into striking out blindly at innocent people, creating grievances that enable the rebels to recruit.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 