According to this piece in Politico, it is, and Obama will be fighting a losing battle:
With his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President Obama is doing more than to knowingly enter a quagmire. He is doing more than play with the fates of two half-broken countries—Iraq and Syria—whose societies were gutted long before the Americans appeared on the horizon. Obama is stepping once again—and with understandably great reluctance—into the chaos of an entire civilization that has broken down.
Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism—the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays—all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. With the dubious exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of the Gulf—which for the moment are holding out against the tide of chaos—and possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world...
No one paradigm or one theory can explain what went wrong in the Arab world in the last century.
The writer goes on to talk about the power-shifts over time from monarchies to secular dictators to Islamist fundamentalist groups, and though it became clear in 2011 with the Arab Spring that there is a deep desire among the Arab people for democracy, for the moment democracy seems like a distant dream. He concludes his article, in part, with this:
Almost every Muslim era, including the enlightened ones, has been challenged by groups that espouse a virulent brand of austere, puritanical and absolutist Islam. They have different names, but are driven by the same fanatical, atavistic impulses...
Yes, it is misleading to lump—as some do—all Islamist groups together, even though all are conservative in varying degrees. As terrorist organizations, al Qaeda and Islamic State are different from the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative movement that renounced violence years ago, although it did dabble with violence in the past.
Nonetheless, most of these groups do belong to the same family tree—and all of them stem from the Arabs’ civilizational ills...
My generation of Arabs was told by both the Arab nationalists and the Islamists that we should man the proverbial ramparts to defend the “Arab World” against the numerous barbarians (imperialists, Zionists, Soviets) massing at the gates. Little did we know that the barbarians were already inside the gates, that they spoke our language and were already very well entrenched in the city.
What do you think of this? Please join me for more below the fold.
This discussion of the Arab world's self-destruction, through political and religious infighting, is important, I think, because we Americans usually don't hear the current situation framed that way. It's always about the next crisis without any real historical analysis, accompanied by the usual saber-rattling from the right, and it leaves us forever making the same mistakes over and over.
But after reading this piece I was left wanting to know more about how Arabs and the Western world have interacted and how that's affected their history. I'm still not sure how their social disintegration got started, and why there have been so few effective democratic forces for change in the region.
I also don't cut Americans as much slack as the author seems to, though it's nice to read about our involvement in a larger historical context. I think George W. Bush's war added a lot of fuel to the authoritarian fire already burning over there, and that the "atavistic" forces of domination, nationalism, and patriarchy we see in Islamists and Arab dictators are the essentially same ones that exist within the U.S., though in a different form. Rather than kill our own people outright, American authoritarians made enemies of "them" and helped to worsen the chaos there - and worsen it here, too, by diverting American energy and money to war instead of using it for the needs of the people. These are the "civilizational ills" that exist in all civilizations today, and they will destroy the world, in my opinion, if we aren't able to keep the movement toward global democracy alive.
More militarization isn't the solution, of course. This article might give Obama a way out of American military expansion, if he can see the region as self-destructing rather than as a threat to Western democracy. There aren't any organized political entities we can support there against the Islamists, so there's no point in going in there and trying to train anybody. That's a lesson that Americans apparently still haven't learned after years of failures - we're dealing with forces way beyond our capacity to control.
Fri Sep 26, 2014 at 12:21 PM PT: Really appreciate all the thoughtful comments - thanks, everybody.