Listening to President Obama's press conference today, I was struck by the President's repeated comparison of ISIS to al-Qa`ida, his insistence that ISIS "is not a state, let alone a Caliphate", and his vow to "degrade and destroy" ISIS in much the same way that the Bush and Obama administrations have fought al-Qa`ida over the last thirteen years.
It seems to me that several questions need to be asked. Why does this Administration feel ISIS is a threat to the American homeland? The cold blooded murders of two American journalists and several thousand prisoners of war show that ISIS is a group of barbarians, but they do not demonstrate an effective threat to the west. If ISIS is as threatening as we are being led to believe, why aren't regional powers such as Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia actively fighting it? They would seem to be much more vulnerable than the United States; they are ISIS's neighbors, and their peoples are predomainately Sunni Muslim, making them much more fertile recruiting grounds than the overwhelmingly Christian United States of America. Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt have all at one or another time been the seat of a Caliphate, something unimaginable here, where the vast majority of Americans feel no attraction to Islam.
Why does the President equate ISIS with al-Qa`ida? Al Qa`ida is a loose network of marginal extremists, but ISIS is a government with an army. It rules a broad swath of territory in Syria and Iraq, and professes the goal of conquering the whole region. ISIS is the germ of a potential empire similar to many that have ruled in that part of the world in past centuries. Al-Qa`ida, by contrast, could never do more than hide in the shadows.
The ISIS phenomenon, it seems to me, is not unlike others in history, such as the eighteenth century Emirate of Diriyah, the ancestor of today's kingdom of Saudi Arabia; or the Almohad (al-Muwahhidun, "Unitarian") movement that ruled much of North Africa and southern Spain in the twelfth century. The question has to be asked: why is ISIS, which cuts off people's heads for no good reason, our enemy, but Saudi Arabia, which does the same thing, and follows much the same ideology, our friend?
From my perspective, Americans are agents of chaos in the Muslim world. We destabilize or overthrow governments in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, while in Somalia we act to perpetuate chaos by preventing the emergence of a movement, al-Shabab, that might otherwise give the country a stable, if obnoxious in our eyes, regime. Why are we doing this?
If indeed ISIS is our enemy and a direct threat to our way of life, yet we are incapable of stepping in and taking its place directly as the rulers of Syria and Iraq, then who do we have in mind to take its place? For as surely as nature abhors a vacuum, human societies must have order. Who will provide that order? Presdent Obama does not seem to know, so is it then a good idea to "degrade and destroy" the only effective power in upper Mesopotamia? Why will the next movement that rises to fill the vacuuum we have created be any better than ISIS?
I would feel much more comfortable to hear that we have aligned with an extant power, such as Turkey or the Assad regime, to establish it in place of that which we undertake to overthrow. Make Iraq a British colony; revive the Ottoman Empire; give Syria to the Egyptians; any of these would seem a surer way to order in the region than funneling yet more arms to various militias. Isn't that how ISIS came by most of the weapons it now wields?
The general course of our foreign policy in the Muslim world leaves me deeply troubled.