Shi'ite fighters, who have joined the Iraqi army to fight
against militants of ISIS, take part in field training in Najaf.
Knowledge for many Americans about the terrorist fanatics known as ISIS, ISIL or the Islamic State, is confined to the public beheading of two U.S. journalists. Even if they did not see the horrific propaganda videos of James Foley and Steven Sotloff being killed with a knife, they're aware of the murders. In fact, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll
found that 94 percent of Americans say they have heard about the slayings—"higher than any other news event the NBC/WSJ poll has measured over the past five years."
And they've been made more fearful of terrorist attacks. Forty-seven percent believe our nation is less safe than it was before the attacks that took place 13 years ago today.
Perhaps that's because the drummers of war have not interrupted their tattoo to let people know that many experts on terrorism think any danger that ISIS could kill Americans on U.S. soil has been way overblown. Mark Mazzetti, Eric Schmitt and Mark Landler at the New York Times report:
Daniel Benjamin, who served as the State Department’s top counterterrorism adviser during Mr. Obama’s first term, said the public discussion about the ISIS threat has been a “farce,” with “members of the cabinet and top military officers all over the place describing the threat in lurid terms that are not justified.”
“It’s hard to imagine a better indication of the ability of elected officials and TV talking heads to spin the public into a panic, with claims that the nation is honeycombed with sleeper cells, that operatives are streaming across the border into Texas or that the group will soon be spraying Ebola virus on mass transit systems—all on the basis of no corroborated information,” said Mr. Benjamin, who is now a scholar at Dartmouth College.
In announcing his plans for dealing with ISIS, President Obama himself conceded that there are no reasons to believe that these terrorists—who made startling military gains in the war-torn chaos of Syria and political shambles of Iraq—pose an immediate threat to the United States. But he said they could in the future do so. Hence we've now stepped off the cliff for a years-long military involvement once again. That could very well backfire. Some experts believe that involvement may be exactly what the strategists of ISIS hope to achieve.
There is more below the fold.
Jack Jenkins at Think Progress points out that the group's strategy seems in part derived from a pdf-book that appeared online in 2004 under the nom de guerre Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery. It's a grim but compelling read. Jenkins points to one relevant part:
Naji, for example, writes in the book about how to deal with airstrikes from foreign powers, saying that countries should be made to “pay the price”—meaning some form of retribution—for bombing jihadists. [...]
“What these guys do not like, to a man, is the US sitting back and using air power,” [said William McCants director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution]: “This is very damaging to them. It’s an ‘unmanly’ activity, and it doesn’t give them a huge propaganda bump. [So] you need to hit the United States hard right on the nose. You force it to either completely get out of the region, or you force it to stop acting through proxies and commit ground forces.” [...]
Thus, Naji’s writings, even if only somewhat influential to ISIS’s thinking, offer a word of caution to the U.S.; ISIS’s tactics, although undoubtedly cold-hearted and brutish, are anything but random, and their methods appear to be rooted in a calculated plan that accounts for—and may be bolstered by—the possibility of U.S. military intervention. How the Obama administration responds could spell the difference between a United States that breaks ISIS, or becomes another player in their twisted game.
A dozen years ago, critics of the drumbeat for an invasion of Iraq repeatedly made use of a word we would be wise not to forget now: quagmire.