Motus Mentis

In trying to catch up on all the stories we missed during our August break, I’d be remiss not to comment on the malevolent Muslim entity calling itself the Islamic State, and what we should do about it. My view is not, in many respects, a mainstream one.

That said, I’ll hasten to align myself with some mainstream opinions: first, that the emergence of ISIS is a horrifying eruption of genuine evil, and second, that it has done everything a regime could possibly do, short of an attack on our own soil, to provoke a vicious military response by the United States. It has overrun territories that we spent long years, billions of dollars, and thousands of lives to secure, capturing huge stockpiles of U.S. weapons and matériel in the process. Even more provocatively, it has publicly and gruesomely executed American civilians. It has massacred and enslaved men, women, and children throughout the region, and wherever it goes it imposes unspeakably barbarous cruelties. If ever there was a foe that all of us can agree deserves utter annihilation, this is it.

In response to this, then, what are we to do? Pundits and politicoes on both sides of the aisle have been bawling for action since midsummer, while President Obama has appeared, until now at least, more concerned with recreation than reprisal, or even reaction. He has now announced his intentions. I am not reassured.

Least reassuring of all in the President’s speech was his assertion, right up front, of a staggeringly disingenuous falsehood: that “ISIS is not Islamic”. If that is the foundation upon which our strategy, both in the Middle East and here at home in the West, is to be based, then we are doomed.

What is that “strategy”? Mr. Obama enumerated four points:

First, airstrikes. Fine with me, but airstrikes by themselves can only do so much. They are effective against supply lines, and against military targets on open ground, but they are problematic wherever the enemy can melt into the civilian background. Unless one has in mind indiscriminate slaughter of both ISIS and their civilian prey — and the West no longer has the stomach for this sort of thing — airstrikes will not be an option in densely populated areas.

Second, Mr. Obama proposed providing support on the ground — arms and training — to enemies of ISIS. This is, for obvious reasons, by far the weakest plank in the platform. It is sheer desperation.

Mr. Obama mentioned the newly formed Iraqi government as one of the champions we will be backing. But we have been training and arming the Iraqi military for a decade or more now; they have been routed again and again by ISIS, with high rates of desertion and defection. Why would we imagine that this time around, with hardened resolve, we will somehow be able to turn them into the 82nd Airborne? Moreover, every time they lose in the field, their arms and equipment fall into the hands of the enemy; by repeatedly rearming them we are as often as not arming ISIS.

Also on the list are the “Syrian opposition”. But ISIS is the Syrian opposition. Subtract them, and you are left with a ragtag assortment of Muslim warlords (in most cases mere runners-up to ISIS in the regional battle royal), and a few genuine Western-style reformers. But the latter are a feeble congeries of what the President himself has described as “ farmers or dentists or maybe some radio reporters who didn’t have a lot of experience fighting.’ Can we expect them to prevail against a heavily armed and financed fighting force that managed to crush even the doughty Pesh Merga? The odds are that any group we arm in Syria will lose, and that any arms we provide will end up being used against us. Have we learned nothing? The entire region is a snakepit, a nest of vipers. That we can select this or that serpent from the writhing mass, pack its fangs full of venom, and send it forth as our champion while certifying its fealty is a palpable absurdity.

Mr. Obama spoke of coalition. But support is scanty, and alliances among the regional interests are mercurial and evanescent. (Victor Davis Hanson has summed this up nicely in a recent essay.) The Turks, who are one of the few players in the area who have the military power to make a difference, have already announced that they will not provide any support whatsoever, and will not even allow U.S. forces to operate from Turkish soil. (That ISIS holds forty-nine Turkish diplomats and their families hostage is, no doubt, a factor here, as is Prime Minister Erdogan’s Islamism, support for Hamas, etc.) As far as I am aware, not a single nation has pledged actual military participation in operations against ISIS. Germany and Britain have already made clear that they refuse.

Clearly, if anyone is going to do the work of defeating ISIS militarily under this “strategy”, it will be the United States, mostly alone. Those stakeholders in the region who might have done so in our absence — the Turks and the Saudis, for example — will be delighted to stay out and let us do it for them. The idea that these nations will be more inclined to participate if we lead the way is another palpable falsehood; the more we do, the less they will need to do — and the less they do, the more we will find ourselves doing.

Third, Mr. Obama proposed to redouble our counterterrorist efforts. Expect more of all that you have come to know and love from the NSA and the TSA. He will also “chair a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to further mobilize the international community around this effort.”

Ah, the U.N. I’m sure we can all heave a sigh of relief.

Lastly, the President had this to say (my emphasis):

Fourth, we will continue to provide humanitarian assistance to innocent civilians who’ve been displaced by this terrorist organization. This includes Sunni and Shia Muslims who are at grave risk, as well as tens of thousands of Christians and other religious minorities. We cannot allow these communities to be driven from their ancient homelands.

In comedy, timing is everything.

Well, what to do, then? Despite the difficulties, there seems to be a prevailing sentiment that we ought to smash ISIS. (I’ll confess that I feel its pull myself.) But almost entirely absent is any rational contemplation of the outcome. Indeed, I did something the other day that I’ve never done before: I called a nationally syndicated conservative talk-radio host, during a program in which he had been howling for war, to ask him what would happen after we won. Given that the entire region is an ungovernable hell-hole, I asked, and given also that any power vacuum seems inevitably to be filled by brutal jihadist warlords, wouldn’t we simply be forced either to rule the place ourselves — forever — or to withdraw (as we just did), and soon find ourselves facing the same mess all over again (as we just have)? His response was that, should we leave, then yes, “there’s a power vacuum, but there are also countries in the area that can fill it — and we ought not.”

This theory has, however, already been put to the test. Our exit from Iraq left a power vacuum — and it was ISIS, not the other “countries in the area”, that rose up to fill it. Why should this be any different next time? I think the host realized that this was a something of a soft spot in his plan; ultimately he said “what’s the alternative? To sit around picking our noses?” and said that we ought to “let the chips fall where they may”.

There is no doubt that we can crush ISIS if we want to; in purely practical terms, it is probably within our capacity to extinguish all biological activity throughout the region (and I daresay that if we did, the world would almost certainly be a safer and happier place for centuries to come.) But can there be any reasonable doubt that if we attempt it on the terms the President has outlined, and in accordance with our new and ruthful style of war-making, that we will be hard-pressed to win, and never be able to leave? This is what the President so tellingly omitted from his “strategy” speech: any definition of victory, or any vision of how we might exit. If we go up against ISIS on these terms, their caliphate will be our tar-baby, forever.

So: what else might we do? As painful as it might be not to use our overwhelming power to punish these vermin, our real national interest might be better served by:

‣   Airstrikes wherever they might be useful, along with relentless pinpoint attacks against ISIS leadership whenever possible. In the event of attacks against Western nations, retaliation should be swift, certain, disproportionate, and harsh.

‣   Support for the (very) few reliable forces in the region, most notably the Pesh Merga.

‣   Humanitarian support, in whatever form we can provide, to those afflicted, besieged, and displaced.

‣   The most vigorous containment we can muster. Above all — and this is the nettle that nobody in the West seems ready to grasp — we must quarantine Islam in its homelands, while securing our own borders. If there is a coalition to build, it is a coalition among Western nations to agree that Islamism is a metastatic disease, that the pathogen is Islam itself, and that any mass population of Muslims contains an irreducible percentage of carriers. As I urged in my previous post, the West must come to understand “that mass importation of Islam to the West has been a blunder of incalculable magnitude, and that it should be arrested at at once, and reversed as humanely and expeditiously as possible.”

There are two advantages to this approach. The most obvious is that we spare our own lives and treasure, rather than bleeding them away ad inifinitum into the unquenchable sands of the Mideast. The second is that it is only by refusing to police the region ourselves that the other principalities of the area may at last be forced to step into the breach.

Above all else, we must be clear about the real nature of the conflict between Islam and the modern West. Our reader JK just sent along a link to a refreshingly frank assessment, which you can read here.