This old semi-satirical article from The Atlantic disturbed me:
Defeating ISIS: The Board Game
I read this and ask myself, who is our ally against ISIS? Nobody.
(Granted, this was before Russia entered the picture; but it's surprising how little Russia changed things in the regional calculus).
This started by asking myself, why is our #1 ally in the Mideast, "the only democracy in the Middle East," Israel, not helping us against ISIS, at least not openly? I read the news; I read nothing about Israel in the fight against ISIS.
This thought alone disturbs me.
It disturbs me even more that countries in the region don't see ISIS as the biggest threat, but rather their neighbors, or homegrown groups. Or the Kurds, whom Russia and the U.S. love to love but can't really support too much, because of Turkey.
What disturbs me the most, I guess, is that the world's #1 military power seems to care a lot about ISIS while all the countries where ISIS actually exists don't seem particularly bothered by it.
It bothers me when I'm feeling manipulated. I don't like being jerked around. I think that's what's going on with ISIS.
Showing posts with label Islamic State. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islamic State. Show all posts
Monday, April 4, 2016
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
ISIS is Islamic, but we should still shut up about them
Islam has never been united. For one thing, there is no Muslim pontiff who speaks for the world's 1.6 billion Muslims living on six continents. Yet even the Roman Catholic Pope speaks for only about half of the world's 2.2 billion Christians; and millions of those Catholics choose to disregard him on such crucial matters of the faith as birth control, premarital sex, divorce and gay relationships.
If we sat down and took a deep breath, we'd all admit that there is no perfect, ideal version of Catholicism, or Christianity for that matter, that exists separately from the people who call themselves Christians. Anybody who says he is Christian and practices some form of the faith, no matter how strange, is a Christian. Attempts to label practitioners on the margins of a faith as "heretics" or "not true believers" has been tried, will continue to be tried, in vain. It only comes with conflict, violent schisms, cults and new denominations.
The same is true of Islam, with its Sufi, Sunni, Shia branches... and a bunch of sects and sub-sects that I don't know or understand. It is diverse and always changing.
ISIS in particular, with upwards of 30,000 fighters, or about 0.00002 % of the world's Muslims, is Islamic, just as they claim. A dark and evil part, but a part of Islam nonetheless. Just as violent white supremacists in the KKK or Branch Davidians are indeed part of the Christian pageant, because they profess themselves to be so. You or I can stand aloof and say they're not, but Christianity is what Christians do; Islam is what Muslims do; including all the good and bad. These religions are not what some sacred texts say. We can't just define away the behaviors -- and the believers -- that we don't accept as pure or "mainstream." (Although millions of believers will continue to do just that, to the detriment of world peace and understanding....)
Likewise, the U.S. should not -- and I'm thinking of Barack Obama specifically but before him scores of prominent conservatives -- engage in pointless, unwinnable schismatic debates about who is or isn't Islamic. It's apparent why both sides are tempted to do so: conservatives want to stoke xenophobic fear among Americans that justifies, post facto, their wars of choice in the Mideast and continued spying and infringements on our civil and constitutional liberties; and President Obama, in response, wants to calm Americans' nerves, and avoid antagonizing one-fifth of the globe, including America's peaceful 2 million+ Muslims. Conservatives' anti-Islamic argument is mean and stupid on its face; Obama is stupid for engaging seriously with stupidity.
Just as our arguing that ISIS is not Islamic does not seem to affect their appeal to disaffected recruits from all over the world, nor does our paying so much attention to ISIS hurt their cause. Just the opposite. When the most powerful nation in the history of the world -- not to mention the "Great Satan" -- declares that ISIS is scary and powerful, it's the best possible endorsement for the Islamic State's recruitment and fundraising efforts.
Keeping a cool head and maintaining perspective on global threats are responsibilities of being a superpower. We must be serious when choosing our enemies, and more serious in how we fight them. That doesn't automatically mean all guns -- and mouths -- ablazing.
I've said it before: With all of its vast power, the U.S. shouldn't say that ISIS is an "existential threat," "clear and present danger," or anything of the kind. It's the equivalent of a well-armed huntsman hyperventilating at a swarm of mosquitoes.
Since 9/11, almost no leaders of any political stripe are willing to say the truth: We cannot defend ourselves against every attack on U.S. soil by extremists, especially by lone wolf terrorists inspired by the Internet and driven by deep personal resentments and/or violent mental illness. (ISIS's forte.) And especially against those attacks on U.S. soil that require very little coordination or preparation (that could tip off domestic spies), and make use of readily available weapons of mass terror: assault-type weapons, ammunition, and bomb-making ingredients.
In October 2002, I grasped this sad fact immediately and personally during the DC sniper attacks. The terrorists, who everyone was sure must be al Qaeda, ended up being a disgruntled, mentally disturbed Army vet (the sniper) and his impressionable teenage nephew (the spotter and getaway driver). They were armed only with a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle. They killed 17 people and wounded 10 others, and perhaps worse, caused widespread terror in several states before they were caught, by selecting victims at gas stations and shoppers in parking lots, two of the commonest places in American life. That's how easy terrorism is. And there's nothing stopping anybody today from doing exactly the same thing. Nothing. Nowadays we just have a few more cameras around that anyway wouldn't pick up snipers tucked away in the distance....
Our leaders continue to lie to us that by eliminating (as in 100%!) the threat of Islamist extremism "over there," and oppressing the peaceful Muslims at home, we can keep ourselves safe "over here." In fact, by persecuting Muslims at home, and making stupid wars of choice over there, we make Americans less safe over here, in ways that we've witnessed numerous times. (In a word: blowback). And worse, we who usually refuse to trust our leaders, who know they tell us what we what we want to hear, choose to believe their lies. (The 240,000-employee strong Dept. of Homeland Security, which didn't exist prior to 9/11, the NSA, the Pentagon's top brass, and the military-intelligence contractors getting $285 billion a year certainly thank us for our choice!) We should know better.
When influential bloviators like Glenn Beck, and even conservatives that I know, say that radical Islam is one of America's most dire problems, nobody dares laugh at them. Yet if I said the KKK was something every U.S. Presidential candidate should propose a plan to fight, I'd be laughed out of town. Never mind that there are upwards of 3,000 Klan members in the U.S., in all 50 states, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, as opposed to 100 or fewer members of ISIS in the United States, according to the Pentagon.
Either way it's like arguing which is worse, the mosquito or the fly. The West, in particular the United States, has many more important problems to address.
Publicly, we should ignore ISIS; outside the public eye of cameras and journalists, we should fight ISIS seriously but in proportion to the threat they pose, in the time and manner of our own choosing, and not have our actions be driven by the release of disgusting YouTube videos.
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Zakaria: ISIS wants U.S. '800-pound gorilla' to fight them
I've been saying this from the start, nevertheless, here you go, an expert opinion:
Remember, ISIS has gone from nothing to becoming the replacement for al Qaeda, the most well-known jihadi organization in the world. How? By taking on the 800-pound gorilla of the world, the United States of America.How exactly then would that create recruitment for wannabe jihadis?Because if you are one of the many jihadi organizations or one of the many radical Sunni organizations in Syria that is sort of struggling for market share and adherents, that's one thing. If you become the organization that battles the United States, the crusaders, the West – if you become the face of radical Islam that is up against this new crusade – now, all of a sudden, you are the place everyone wants to come to. You're the place everyone wants to send money to. There's a lot of this that has to do with fundraising.
Sunday, September 28, 2014
War Nerd: ISIS threat is still overblown
The War Nerd maintains that Islamic State is indeed the JV team, albeit with good PR and a penchant for child rape, yet certainly not an existential threat to the U.S. or indeed Iraq or even the Kurds.
Check it out!
By Gary Brecher
September 28, 2014 | Pando Daily
Saturday, September 27, 2014
What we know about IS leads back to Iraq debacle
According to this report, the top three leaders of Islamic State are Iraqis: one from Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI); and two Sunni ex-generals from Saddam's army.
The leader and religious figurehead of IS, born Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai, (aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, aka Caliph Ibrahim), was captured in 2004 or 2005 and released in 2009 under "unknown" circumstances. (Smooth move!)
The two Sunni generals, we can surmise, almost certainly lost their jobs after Dubya's Coalition Provisional Authority issued an order on May 15, 2003 to dissolve the 250,000-man Iraqi army, a day after the order to implement "De-Ba'athification" of all public and government posts.
So it's still correct to blame Bush.
By Nick Robins-Early
September 27, 2014 | Huffington Post
Bergen: 'Jihadist threat is quite inconsequential'
Here's how CNN's Islamist terrorism expert Peter Bergen sums it up:
The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the threat posed by jihadist organizations around the globe is quite inconsequential when compared with what the West faced in the past century.
Why? First, because there aren't that many of them:
If we tally up the low and high estimates for all these groups, we can begin to have a sense of the total number of jihadist militants that are part of formal organizations around the globe. We found that on the low end, an estimated 85,000 men are fighting in jihadist groups around the world; on the high end, 106,000.
And secondly, because:
The vast majority of the estimated 85,000 to 106,000 militants fighting with militant jihadist groups around the world are fighting for purely local reasons, for instance, trying to install Sharia law in northern Nigeria or trying to impose Taliban rule on Pakistan and Afghanistan, while only a small number of these militants are focused on attacking the West.
So maybe we shouldn't be shitting our pants with fear, and itching for another Mideast war without a chance of victory or timeline?
By Peter Bergen and Emily Schneider
September 26, 2014 | CNN
Thursday, September 18, 2014
U.S. should stay out of bloody Mideast religious wars
Hear, hear! Before we insert ourselves in a sectarian conflict of Sunni vs. Shia in Syria, Iraq and beyonjd, Hoffman asks us to consider what bloody horrors we "reasonable, rational" Europeans inflicted on ourselves during our sectarian wars [emphasis mine]:
The agreements reached in Westphalia followed 130 years of strife, including the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, when Protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England beat back Catholic King Philip II of Spain’s rampage across Europe to put down heresy. Other rulers fomented mob violence with incidents such as the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France, when the Catholic king targeted well-born Protestants. The king’s assassins murdered nobles in their beds while commoners knifed and strangled Protestant neighbors in the streets.One-quarter of Europe’s population was killed during the devastating Thirty Years' War (1618-48), another bloody phase of the Reformation. Brutal punishments included burning at the stake and pouring excrement down the throats of captives, a torture known as the “Swedish drink.” War spread famine and bubonic plague across Europe. Like now, greed complicated religious conflict, as combatants wrestled over lands and gold.Exhausted, Protestants and Catholics finally agreed to negotiate. Gathering in separate towns, they sent messengers back and forth to avoid seeing one another’s despised faces. After five years of argument, the Peace of Westphalia concluded the tragic wars of religion. Separation of church and state took hold.
By Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman
September 16, 2014 | Reuters
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Frum: 'Emotional' war on ISIS is a 'policy of aid-Iran-but-don’t-admit-it'
There's plenty of criticism of Obama in conservative Republican Frum's opinion piece, but this graph sums it up best for me [emphasis mine]:
Debates over foreign policy have a bad tendency to vaporize into abstract discussions of first principles: intervention or non-intervention? Responsibility to protect or mind our own business? Iraq and Syria today present a case that makes nonsense of abstractions. Intervene? The United States and its allies should intervene when intervention will advance U.S. and allied interests, consistent with U.S. and allied values. But where do we find the U.S. and allied interest in a war between al-Qaeda’s even nastier younger brother, on one side, and the mullahs of Iran on the other? If Iran were saying, “Please help us, and we’ll reorient our policy in a friendlier direction,” that would be one thing. They are not saying that. They are not doing that. They are doing the opposite.
And then here's Frum's body slam to finish:
It’s not crass, not narrow, not unethical for the president of the United States to test any proposed foreign policy—and most especially the use of armed force—against the criterion: “How will this benefit my nation?” That test is not a narrow one. The protection of allies is an important U.S. interest. The honoring of international commitments is an important U.S. interest. And it could even be argued that humanitarian action can be justified when it will save many lives, at low cost in American blood and treasure, without creating even worse consequences inadvertently. This new campaign against ISIS does not even pretend to meet that test. It’s a reaction: an emotional reaction, without purpose, without strategy, and without any plausible—or even articulated—definition of success.
'Nuf said. But it's spoken too late.
By David Frum
September 10, 2014 | The Atlantic
Monday, September 8, 2014
Younge: Americans want U.S. power without cost or risk
Gary Younge is right, American's are schizo, post-Dubya, when it comes to the POTUS and foreign policy:
Obama’s apparent inability to make anything happen on the international stage is unnerving many. Big things keep taking place to which he appears to offer only incremental responses within a strategic void. [...]Obama’s foreign policy approval ratings, once one of his strengths, are now pitifully low. According to a Pew research survey, more than half of Americans believe that he is insufficiently “tough”. This is partly presentational: Obama has always found showy rhetoric in the face of serious problems hokey. His deliberative style owes more to the constitutional law professor he once was than the leader of the armed forces he now is.His reputation for “weakness” is also ironic given the number of people Obama has assassinated with drones. [...]The public actually supports most of what Obama has done. Polls show that a majority of Americans back air strikes against Isis and troop withdrawals from Iraq; the use of drones to kill “suspected terrorists” abroad; and overwhelmingly prefer sanctions over military action against Russia. A plurality believe that Obama is removing troops from Afghanistan at the right pace. But a president is more than the sum of his policies.
As I've said before, I don't think there is an Obama Doctrine, besides, I suppose, "Don't do stupid shit"... whatever, that is, Obama and his inner circle consider to be stupid.
But does every President need a doctrine? That's a separate question. But one must question how much freedom any POTUS has to make his own strategic choices without succumbing to policy inertia of past presidents. Just look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia... The choices and facts on the ground were already made over years if not decades before. But I digress....
Almost certainly what Obama is planning now against Islamic State is not doctrinal; it's reactive to media and public pressure after ISIS killers publicly cut off the heads of American hostages and persecuted Arab Christians. He wouldn't be the first president pushed by the public into military action, but it's certainly no way to run a foreign policy.
By Gary Younge
September 7, 2014 | Guardian
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Bergen: Americans fighting for ISIS will die over there
We're all gonna diiiiieeeeeeee! Mobilize the army! Scramble the bombers! DEFCON 1! Kill 'em all! Kill, kill, kill! Aaaaaaaaaaa!
Now that I've done the obligatory Scaring The Shit Out Of You, followed by the customary Let's Kill Them All First that you've become accustomed to on cable and talk radio, here's some more sober analysis of the actual threat to America posed by Islamic State, from CNN's resident Islamist terrorism expert Peter Bergen (and some other dude).
By Peter Bergen and David Sterman
September 5, 2014 | CNN
ISIS has Americans worried. Two-thirds of those surveyed in a recent Pew Research poll said they consider the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to be a "major threat" to this country. But are such fears really justified?
Despite the impression you may have had from listening to U.S. officials in recent weeks, the answer is probably not really.
For a start, U.S. officials have been inflating the numbers of Americans fighting for ISIS, which has muddied the issue for the public. U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, for example, told CNN's Jim Sciutto on Wednesday, "We are aware of over 100 U.S. citizens who have U.S. passports who are fighting in the Middle East with ISIL forces." (ISIS is sometimes referred to as ISIL and now calls itself the Islamic State).
But the Pentagon soon corrected Hagel's comment, saying the 100 count is the total number of Americans fighting for any of the various groups fighting in Syria, some of which are more militant than others -- and some of which are even allied with the U.S. Indeed, Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center -- the government office tasked with assessing terrorist threats -- also confirmed that 100 is the total count of the various Americans fighting in Syria and not a count of those fighting for ISIS.
Hagel's comment is only the latest inflated claim regarding the number of Americans fighting with ISIS. Last week, the Washington Times cited anonymous official sources who said there are 300 Americans fighting with ISIS, despite the Pentagon estimating the figure to be more like a dozen.
True, a dozen is still too many. But it is important to remember that just because these Americans are fighting with ISIS, it doesn't necessarily translate into a significant threat to the American homeland.
One need only look at the example of Somalia to see why.
The last sizeable group of Americans who went overseas to fight with an al Qaeda-aligned group are the 29 Americans known to have traveled to fight with the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab after the 2006 invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian army. However, none of those 29 subsequently planned or conducted a terrorist attack inside the United States, according to a survey of more than 240 jihadist terrorism cases since September 11 conducted by the New America Foundation.
Indeed, for more than a third of the American militants who fought with Al-Shabaab, going to Somalia was a one-way ticket. In 2008, a missile strike in Somalia killed Ruben Shumpert, a resident of Seattle. A year later, Burhan Hassan, a 17-year-old from Minneapolis, was killed in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Abdirizak Bihi, Hassan's uncle, reportedly said at the time, "We believe he was killed because he would have been a key person in the investigation into the recruitment (of young Somali men) here in Minneapolis."
Al-Shabaab militants also are said to have killed Alabama native Omar Hammami, who joined the group in 2006 and took a high-profile position in its media operations before his death last year.
At least two Americans fighting for Al-Shabaab died while conducting suicide attacks in Somalia.
Shirwa Ahmed, a 26-year-old from Minnesota, became the first known American to conduct a suicide bombing for an al Qaeda-associated group when he drove a car packed with bombs into a government compound on October 28, 2008.
In 2011, meanwhile, the FBI confirmed that Farah Mohamed Beledi, a 27-year-old Minnesota man who was born in Somalia and moved to the United States at age 12, was killed while attempting to detonate a suicide bomb in Somalia.
In addition to the American militants who died in Somalia, six were arrested, four when they returned to the West and two in East Africa. Kamal Said Hassan, a 28-year-old Minneapolis man who traveled to Somalia and attended an Al-Shabaab training camp before returning to the United States, was arrested and in 2009 pleaded guilty to supporting Al-Shabaab.
In another case, Mahamud Said Omar, an American resident who helped organize Al-Shabaab's recruitment pipeline and visited a training camp, was arrestedin the Netherlands in 2009. Omar was extradited to the United States and in 2012 was convicted on terrorism charges.
Of course, the fact that 13 of the 29 American militants who fought in Somalia remain at large is a reminder that the CIA and FBI also need to pay attention to the potential threat posed by American foreign fighters in Syria. But this is no reason for U.S. officials to overhype the threat posed by ISIS to the United States.
Yes, Americans should always be mindful of the threats posed by extremists. But as the case of U.S. citizens in Somalia suggests, Syria could very well end up being a graveyard for Americans fighting there rather than a launch pad for attacks on the United States.
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