This is a kind of tricky post to write because of what just happened to the Jordanian pilot. And I want to be clear--I have no sympathy for ISIS. Its actions are abhorrent to me. The group is a moral abomination.
That said... ISIS's power over us stems mainly from its use of modern media. The group is savvy enough to understand that you can amplify the significance of a murder exponentially if you post a video of it online. You could kill dozens of people and it would largely go unnoticed. But if you beam a single killing into the homes of millions of Americans, it feels as if ISIS has arrived in your living room. There is also something about taking one life as opposed to taking many that makes the former seem far worse than the letter. Again, it's the result of the distorting and amplifying powers of the media.
Consider this news from the Nigerian border:
Boko Haram fighters have shot or burned to death about 90 civilians and wounded 500 in ongoing fighting in a Cameroonian border town near Nigeria, officials in Cameroon said Thursday.
Some 800 Islamic extremists attacking the town of Fotokol have "burned churches, mosques and villages and slaughtered youth who resisted joining them to fight Cameroonian forces," Information Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakari said.
The death toll here from this one incident is far higher than the total of all the Westerners ISIS has killed. But the massacre by Boko Haram wasn't televised or filmed. It largely went unnoticed.
One person killed by ISIS is one too many, but numbers also matter. And the reality is the number of Westerners killed by ISIS is small. But to grasp this, we need to think in a different way than we currently do--we need to experience an abstract statistic as powerfully as intensely as we do a single televised murder. I don't know if we as a country can do that anymore.
The right now is promoting a powerful narrative--the world is spinning out of control on Obama's watch. If you step back a moment from the images on Youtube or TV for a moment, you can immediately see how false this is. This is a period of extraordinary safety and peacefulness for the United States. It's as if no one any longer remembers the Cold War. The Soviet Union wasn't a symbolic threat to us. It was an existential one. With the push of a button, its nuclear warheads could have wiped out the entire US population. The wars we are engaged with now are mostly ones of choice, desire, and arrogance.
The desire to go to war with ISIS is motivated primarily by shame. If the group controls Iraq, we have to admit our war there failed. We were defeated. But foreign policy can't be based on a fear of losing face.
Dealing with ISIS should primarily be seen as a human rights issue. Faced with this evil, what can we in the West do to stop it without making the situation worse? But we shouldn't treat it as a security issue or a situation where we are at peril. If we do, we are trying to kill a mouse with a bazooka. The collateral damage is too great to risk.