How to Think about ISIS

Bomb them back to the Stone Age. Send in the troops, as many as needed for as long as it takes. Call Islamic terrorism what it is. Declare war.

Here’s the counter-story: ISIS is a particularly nasty and  nihilistic terrorist group who wants nothing more than to be treated as an equal of Western democracies, and longs to provoke a cataclysmic battle between the U.S. and the caliphate. But it’s not our equal, and shouldn’t be given that stature. Defeating ISIS will take a multiple-pronged attack. Bombing campaigns against it can disrupt the flow of oil that generates money for its coffers. Freezing assets can constrict its ability to fund random violence. Pushing harder to get states involved that border the land taken by ISIS  is a priority, even though their aims and ours do not fully coincide. Doing more to help integrate Muslims into their new countries of choice is important. We’re not calling it “Islamic terrorism” because our allies in  predominately Muslim states have asked us not to. Conflating “Islam” and “terrorist” only feeds the ISIS narrative. ISIS isn’t opposed to Western democracy wherever and whenever it’s found; nobody thinks the group is going to attack Costa Rica. [ref. Peter Beinart’s article in the Atlantic.] ISIS also hasn’t attacked Israel, which I find interesting. Maybe they have some sense of limits after all. Free and open societies are always open to attack by small groups of people willing to die in the process. The disintegration of the Middle East isn’t primarily our problem; we can’t care about it more than the countries, like Saudi Arabia, who live there. If there are boots on the ground, they have to be Muslim boots, not U.S. or French or NATO boots.

So far President Obama is sticking with the latter story.  And so far, I’m sticking with him.