ISIS

[Cackalacky]

The Islamic State Is Losing Iraq: A Dispatch From the War-Torn Nation | The New Republic

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

The threat is literally on the other side of the world. There are probably 500 bigger threats in this country currently. From police black sites to economic issues to bad drivers.

This mentality is EXACTLY what most of our military and political leadership said about Bin Laden's fatwa against the West in 1998. Only a small group of analysts inside CIA (Alec Station) knew who Bin Laden was, listened to him, and took him seriously.

 

[Buster Bluth]

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[Polish Leppy 22]

Two Women Arrested for Plotting ISIS-Inspired Attack in New York City | Mediaite

 

[TDHeysus]

.....2) I do think it calls for A TON of special forces teams and drones ready to roll every day.....

I agree, an aggressive drone campaign; aggressive to the point where it has not been seen like that before.

Make the black ISIS flag a target, let it be known that the black flag is a drone target, and aggressively strike that target wherever it is in the region. This action would be 'status quo' for this campaign, that woudnt even be the aggressive part of the campaign.

I removed the rest of my comments to avoid any 'back and forth' bickering because its is more than can be fully communicated with a internet post on a CFB board.

Did I mention it should be an aggressive campaign?

 

[Andy in Sactown]

I agree, an aggressive drone campaign; aggressive to the point where it has not been seen like that before.

Make the black ISIS flag a target, let it be known that the black flag is a drone target, and aggressively strike that target wherever it is in the region. This action would be 'status quo' for this campaign, that woudnt even be the aggressive part of the campaign.

I removed the rest of my comments to avoid any 'back and forth' bickering because its is more than can be fully communicated with a internet post on a CFB board.

Did I mention it should be an aggressive campaign?

I'm all for putting warheads on foreheads, but the first thing those immoral cocksuckers would do is put that black rag everywhere it shouldn't be: schools, hospitals, etc.

I do tend to think that they should be dealt with conventionally and that the boots on the ground should be Islamic. If Saddam was still around he would have gassed the shit out of them and run them down with T-55 & T-72 tanks. Good call Bushy. Created a power vacuum now occupied by these crazy fuckers.

 

[GoIrish41]

I agree, an aggressive drone campaign; aggressive to the point where it has not been seen like that before.

Make the black ISIS flag a target, let it be known that the black flag is a drone target, and aggressively strike that target wherever it is in the region. This action would be 'status quo' for this campaign, that woudnt even be the aggressive part of the campaign.

I removed the rest of my comments to avoid any 'back and forth' bickering because its is more than can be fully communicated with a internet post on a CFB board.

Did I mention it should be an aggressive campaign?

This all should inspire a new respect for U.S. might ... It should keep the terrorists at bay when villages of innocents are mercilessly bombed because some thugs took control. Good way to ensure a steady supply of enemies for generations to come. Good plan.

 

[Buster Bluth]

I agree, an aggressive drone campaign; aggressive to the point where it has not been seen like that before.

Make the black ISIS flag a target, let it be known that the black flag is a drone target, and aggressively strike that target wherever it is in the region. This action would be 'status quo' for this campaign, that woudnt even be the aggressive part of the campaign.

I removed the rest of my comments to avoid any 'back and forth' bickering because its is more than can be fully communicated with a internet post on a CFB board.

Did I mention it should be an aggressive campaign?

Have we mentioned before that what you're describing is the exact sort of thing that ISIS wants? There's enough collateral damage in your "aggressive campaign" so fuel their propaganda for a hundred years.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

This all should inspire a new respect for U.S. might ... It should keep the terrorists at bay when villages of innocents are mercilessly bombed because some thugs took control. Good way to ensure a steady supply of enemies for generations to come. Good plan.

That "steady supply of enemies" is coming whether you can come to grips with that or not. The most loyal, dedicated, and willing of that group are indoctrinated early and often. We can identify them and take them head on or crawl into the fetile position, cross our fingers, and hope they don't get inside our borders here.

 

[GoIrish41]

That "steady supply of enemies" is coming whether you can come to grips with that or not. The most loyal, dedicated, and willing of that group are indoctrinated early and often. We can identify them and take them head on or crawl into the fetile position, cross our fingers, and hope they don't get inside our borders here.

Why don't we take a generation off from meddling in the Middle East and see who is right?

I'll bet the less we meddle, the fewer enemies we have there. And as a bonus, we will, in the meantime, have a lot more soldiers who stay alive during their enlistments, and children who get to see both parents for dinner every night instead of only six months of each year.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

Why don't we take a generation off from meddling in the Middle East and see who is right?

I'll bet the less we meddle, the fewer enemies we have there. And as a bonus, we will, in the meantime, have a lot more soldiers who stay alive during their enlistments, and children who get to see both parents for dinner every night instead of only six months of each year.

Pretending these people are going to lay down their arms, stop their attacks, and live in peace because we take all our boots out of the Middle East is not only idealistic but ignorant of history and what these people say.

 

[Grahambo]

Pretending these people are going to lay down their arms, stop their attacks, and live in peace because we take all our boots out of the Middle East is not only idealistic but ignorant of history and what these people say.

Actually, a lot complain about our meddling which does trigger anger against the US/west. And its not about laying down arms as its more about them wanting to settle it themselves.

That's the TL;DR version.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

Actually, a lot complain about our meddling which does trigger anger against the US/west. And its not about laying down arms as its more about them wanting to settle it themselves.

That's the TL;DR version.

I understand what you're saying, but we're talking about two different animals. I believe there is a number of radical Muslims hell bent on carrying out jihad against the West, regardless if the US has 2 soldiers or 200,000 soldiers on Muslim lands.

 

[Grahambo]

I understand what you're saying, but we're talking about two different animals. I believe there is a number of radical Muslims hell bent on carrying out jihad against the West, regardless if the US has 2 soldiers or 200,000 soldiers on Muslim lands.

Yeah. Kinda like a sins of our fathers where its a little too late but gotta draw the line somewhere.

 

[EddytoNow]

Actually, a lot complain about our meddling which does trigger anger against the US/west. And its not about laying down arms as its more about them wanting to settle it themselves.

That's the TL;DR version.

You are correct. It is a Sunni vs. Shiite Civil War with small pockets of Christians caught in the crossfire. And in some instances its Sunni vs. Sunni. Our problem is we can't seem to decide who is our ally and who is our enemy. We should let the Sunni and Shiite have their Civil War without our interference. Let them destory each other. It's not our fight. The more we take sides the more enemies we create. We are defending artifical borders that are the remnants of colonialism.

 

[Grahambo]

You are correct. It is a Sunni vs. Shiite Civil War with small pockets of Christians caught in the crossfire. And in some instances its Sunni vs. Sunni. Our problem is we can't seem to decide who is our ally and who is our enemy. We should let the Sunni and Shiite have their Civil War without our interference. Let them destory each other. It's not our fight. The more we take sides the more enemies we create. We are defending artifical borders that are the remnants of colonialism.

Trust me, the entire ME is so jacked up and confusing. I wish I could go into detail but its almost like looking at one of those boards on a cop show that has all the strings on it criss crossing every which way..its crazy.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The Atlantic's Adam Chandler just published an article titled "The Painful Loss of Ramadi":

On Monday, a day after the reported fall of the Iraqi city of Ramadi to Islamic State forces, the Pentagon downplayed the significance of the loss.

"To read too much into this single fight is simply a mistake," said a Pentagon spokesman."What this means for our strategy, what this means for today, is simply that we, meaning the coalition and our Iraqi partners, now have to go back and retake Ramadi."

The reality is much more complicated. Even as the Islamic State takeover of the capital city of Iraq’s largest province seemed nearly complete on Sunday, the Pentagon continued to argue that the situation was still “fluid and contested.” That assessment was countered by reports that “hundreds of police personnel, soldiers and tribal fighters abandoned the city,” leaving it and a “large store” of American weapons in ISIS hands. The BBC cited a statement “purportedly from IS” claiming that the city had been “purged.”

What the Loss of Ramadi Means for the United States

By Monday morning, Iraqi Shiite militias backed by Iran were seen gathering outside of the city. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s order to mobilize those militias was a risky move for the Iraqi government—Ramadi is a Sunni city in Anbar, a heavily Sunni region; the militias are Shiite.

“We were pushed into a corner,” an Iraqi government official told The Wall Street Journal. “This is not the first choice for many people in Anbar.”

It was also a development that American officials not only didn’t prefer, but evidently didn’t see coming a month ago, when a senior U.S. official told Foreign Policy it was unlikely that Shiite militias would fight the Islamic State in Anbar. The Iraqi government’s growing reliance on Shiite militias to fight ISIS has the potential to undermine American-trained Iraqi security forces. And the fall of Ramadi despite a U.S. air campaign aimed at blunting ISIS’s momentum shows the limits of the American strategy.

What Iran’s Role Means for the United States

Ramadi’s loss, and the mobilization of Shiite militias that has followed, also broadens Iran’s role in the conflict. The Iranian-backed militias include some of the same forces that American troops battled following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Their growing involvement in Anbar risks exacerbating the country’s dangerous sectarian tensions. The Daily Beast reported that Abadi’s modest efforts to shore up Sunni support in the province were undermined by Nouri al-Maliki, the country’s former prime minister, who enjoys close ties with Iran and the militias now joining the fight in Ramadi.

Meanwhile, the news from the city dovetailed with reports that Iran’s defense minister, Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan, had arrived for talks in Baghdad, just 80 miles east of Ramadi.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

John Gray just published an article in Laphram's Quarterly titled "The Anomaly of Barbarism":

The rise of ISIS is intensely unsettling to the liberal West, and not just because of the capacity the jihadist group has demonstrated to launch a mass-casualty terrorist attack in a major European city. The group’s advance confounds the predominant Western view of the world. For the current generation of liberal thinkers, modern history is a story of the march of civilization. There have been moments of regression, some of them atrocious, but these are only relapses into the barbarism of the past, interrupting a course of development that is essentially benign. For anyone who thinks in this way, ISIS can only be a mysterious and disastrous anomaly.

For those baffled by ISIS, however, it cannot be only ISIS that is mysterious. So too must be much of modern history. ISIS has brought with it many atrocious assaults on civilized values: the sexual enslavement of women and children; the murder of gay men; the targeted killing of writers, cartoonists, and Jews; indiscriminate slaughter at a rock concert; and what amounted to the attempted genocide of the Yezidi. All of these acts of barbarism have modern precedents, many of them in the past century. The use of sexual violence as a military strategy featured in ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in the 1990s; during Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971; in Nepal, Colombia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and many other conflict zones. The destruction of buildings and artworks, which ISIS has perpetrated at the ancient site of Palmyra among other places, has several twentieth-century precedents. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks razed churches and synagogues in Russia. Mao Zedong demolished large parts of China’s architectural inheritance and most of Tibet’s, while the Pol Pot regime wrecked pagodas and temples and aimed to destroy the country’s cities. In these secular acts of iconoclasm, the goal was to abolish the past and create a new society from “year zero”—an idea that goes back to “year one” of the calendar introduced in France in 1793 to signal the new era inaugurated by the French Revolution. Systematically destroying not only pre-Islamic relics but also long-established Islamic sites, the aim of ISIS is not essentially different.

Nor is ISIS so different in its methodical use of terror as a means of consolidating its power. In his “Hanging Order” telegram of August 11, 1918, Lenin instructed communists to execute refractory peasants by public hanging: “This needs to be accomplished in such a way that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know, and scream out.” From its beginning and throughout much of its existence, the Soviet state relied on fear for its hold on power. The show trials of the 1930s continued a Bolshevik pedagogy that inculcated obedience by way of spectacular terror. Yet the system endured for nearly three-quarters of a century, much of the time commanding a significant following in the West. No doubt the regime had flaws, some hideous, but these were regarded as inheritances from tsarist and Asiatic despotism. A more plausible view would be that Soviet crimes came chiefly from implementing a modern European tradition of using terror to remodel society, emerging with the Jacobins in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which Lenin avowedly followed. But this view was rarely considered.

For those who find the rise of ISIS baffling, much of the past century can only be retro*gression from modern life. Even the regime that committed a crime with no precedent in history must be regarded as an example of atavism: the Nazi state has often been described as having taken Europe back to the Dark Ages. Certainly the Nazis exploited a medieval Christian demonology in their persecution and genocide of Jews, but Nazism also invoked a modern pseudoscience of race to legitimate these atrocities. Invoking a type of faux Darwinism, Nazi racism could have emerged only in a time shaped by science. Nazism was modern not just in its methods of killing but also in its way of thinking.

This is not to reiterate the claim—made by Marxian theorists of the Frankfurt School—that modern scientific thinking leads, by some circuitous but inevitable route, to Nazism and the Holocaust. It is to suggest that when it is invoked in politics modernity is a figment. The increase of knowledge in recent centuries is real enough, as is the enlargement of human power through technology. These advances are cumulative and accelerating and, in any realistically likely scenario, practically irreversible. But there have been few, if any, similar advances in politics. The quickening advance of science and technology in the past few centuries has not gone with any comparable advance in civilization or human rationality. Instead, the increase of knowledge has repeatedly interacted with human conflicts and passions to produce new kinds of barbarism.

Using the most advanced technologies to demonstrate its transgression of civilized norms, ISIS is a peculiarly modern form of barbarism. Of course, the group exhibits distinctive features. The Paris attacks show that, more than any other jihadist group, ISIS has the capacity to meld urban terrorism and guerrilla warfare into a unified strategy. Any setbacks ISIS suffers on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq are likely to evoke further attacks on civilian populations in Western cities. ISIS distinguishes itself from other jihadist groups in publicizing its atrocities through the sophisticated use of electronic media. Applying techniques presented in a handbook, The Management of Savagery, published online in 2004, these atrocities implement a carefully planned strategy (one that has provoked criticism from Al Qaeda, from which ISIS emerged as a spin-off). Again, ISIS differs from other jihadist groups in its lack of specific demands. While Al Qaeda aimed to force the U.S. to withdraw from the Middle East, ISIS is dedicated to the destruction of the entire existing world order—a goal that suggests the group is more eschatological in its view of the world than its current jihadist rivals. None of these features go any distance toward showing that ISIS is other than modern. A transnational crime cartel, rapidly expanding apocalyptic cult movement, and worldwide terror network, ISIS could have emerged only in modern conditions of globalization.

Theories of modernization have a common form: only one type of society can truly meet the needs of a society based on continual scientific and technological innovation. The trouble is that these theories specify incompatible types of social and political order. The nineteenth-century sociologist Herbert Spencer believed that only laissez-faire capitalism could fit the bill. In contrast, Spencer’s one-time disciple, the sociologist Beatrice Webb, came to believe that a type of collectivism prefigured in Stalin’s Russia was the next stage in modern development. In our own day, both neoconservatives and progressives have accepted the view propounded by Francis Fukuyama that only “democratic capitalism” can satisfy modern needs—a prognostication that is likely to prove no better founded. Modernity in politics is a species of phantom, constantly elusive because it is continuously mutating.

A pursuit of this ghost has shaped the ruinous “war on terror.” The course of the Iraq war illustrates some of the consequences. The effects on the West, which included a colossal waste of resources and the rehabilitation by the Bush administration of the barbarous practice of torture, are by now well known. Less well understood is the fact that disaster in Iraq flowed not only from mistakes in policy (grotesque as some of these were) but also from the attempt to remake the country as a democracy. The state of Iraq was built by the British from provinces of the Ottoman Empire by applying a divide-and-rule strategy that meant Iraq’s governance could never be democratic. One of the state’s chief architects, the British colonial officer, archaeologist, and scholar Gertrude Bell, wrote: “I don’t for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority. Otherwise you’ll have a mujtahid-run theocratic state, which is the very devil.” Formulated some eighty years before the American-led attack, Bell’s analysis has been amply confirmed by events.

The invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in April 2003 destroyed the state of Iraq. Partly this was because of the policies of the occupying power, such as disbanding the Iraqi army in May 2003, a bizarre exercise that had far-reaching consequences. A more fundamental reason was the fact that the integrity of the state rested on Sunni hegemony, which the occupation undid. Iraq was a multiethnic and multisectarian state held together principally by force. Self-government for “the Iraqi people” was impossible, since nothing of the kind had ever existed. The only realistically imaginable outcome of regime change was the violent disintegration of the state.

Since the American-led invasion, three new states have emerged in Iraq: the Islamic State (as the territorial unit of ISIS is sometimes called), which is ruled according to ISIS’s extreme interpretation of Sunni Islam; a de facto Kurdish state in the north of the country; and a Shia state headquartered in Baghdad that operates in an expanded zone of Iranian influence in what remains of the historic state of Iraq. Of the three, only that of the Kurds can claim to be anything like the modern secular democracy that regime change was supposed to install. In most of Iraq, the result of attempting to install democracy has been to empower theocracy—just as Bell predicted.

Saddam’s Iraq was ruled according to the ideology of Baathism, a secular and modernizing creed in which a revolutionary vanguard uses the state to effect progress in society. Clear links can be traced between the destruction of Baathist Iraq and the rise of ISIS. Disbanding the army provided a source of recruitment for ISIS commanders, while the ensuing breakup of the state created zones of anarchy into which ISIS could expand. Without the American-led invasion of Iraq, ISIS would most likely not exist. The effect of regime change in Iraq was to destroy a modern secular despotism and empower a type of theocracy that is also modern. ISIS’s ideology is a version of Wahhabism, a highly repressive type of Sunni fundamentalism that developed during the eighteenth century in a region of what is now Saudi Arabia. Fundamentalism looks to the lost purity of an imaginary past; but in that they thrive in societies whose traditions are in disarray because of an encounter with new technologies and economic forces, fundamentalist movements are themselves essentially modern. Adopted as the official religion when the present Saudi state was founded in 1932 and promoted throughout the world in recent decades using the kingdom’s oil wealth, Wahhabist ideas have been a powerful means of recruitment to jihadist groups in societies where inherited patterns of life have been disrupted.

Drawing on the apocalyptic traditions of medieval Islam, ISIS exhibits many affinities with the millenarian movements that ravaged Europe in the late Middle Ages. That does not make ISIS a rerun of medieval beliefs and values, for modern history abounds with movements driven by apocalyptic myths. As Norman Cohn argued in his seminal study The Pursuit of the Millennium, twentieth-century totalitarian movements were fueled by secular versions of end-time myths. Cohn applied his analysis chiefly to Communism and Nazism, but later events suggest it can be applied more widely. From American flying-saucer cults to the bioterrorist Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, there have been many examples of movements that have reframed apocalyptic beliefs in ersatz-scientific terms. Though its eschatological beliefs are explicitly religious, ISIS is the latest example of a recurring modern phenomenon.

While much remains unknown, there is nothing mysterious in the rise of ISIS. It is baffling only for those who believe—despite everything that occurred in the twentieth century—that modernization and civilization are advancing hand in hand. In fact, now as in the past some of the most modern movements are among the most barbaric. But to admit this would mean surrendering the ruling political faith, a decayed form of liberalism without which Western leaders and opinion formers would be disoriented and lost. To accept that liberal societies may not be “on the right side of history” would leave their lives drained of significance, while a stoical response—which is ready to fight while being doubtful of ultimate victory—seems to be beyond their powers. With mounting bewilderment and desperation, they cling to the faith that the normal course of history has somehow been temporarily derailed.

It is chiefly this faith that has driven the West’s interventions in countries such as Iraq, Libya, and Syria. The decision to topple Muammar Qaddafi in 2011 has left Libya an anarchic hellhole fought over by rival jihadist groups, fueling flows of migrants into Europe—some of whom must surely themselves be jihadists. Yet the West has continued its efforts to engineer the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria—a project that would create anarchy on an even larger scale. Only in the wake of the Paris attacks have Western governments begun to accept that dealing with ISIS may require a coalition of forces that include Assad’s army and Russian air power. Even now they continue to insist Syria can be restored to its historic shape while being reconstituted as a democratic polity under the rule of “moderate forces.” Yet to the extent that such forces actually exist, they are small in number, divided among themselves, and incapable of fighting ISIS and Assad simultaneously. As in Iraq and Libya, regime change in Syria would inexorably produce the collapse of the state, with ISIS being a beneficiary of the resulting anarchy.

Assessed by reference to any kind of strategic rationality, the West has displayed unfathomable stupidity. To invade a country, dismantle its institutions, create a failed state, exit from the ensuing chaos, and then return with unending bombing campaigns is imbecility of an order that has few historical parallels. To persist in this behavior after so many catastrophes betrays something other than mere imbecility, however extreme. Behavior of this kind looks more like an extreme version of cognitive dissonance—an attempt to expel disastrous facts from the mind. In an obsessive effort to remake the world according to an idealized image of their own societies, Western leaders have renounced a sense of reality. Each attempt only reinforces the fact of their impotence. Obeying a kind of repetition compulsion, they have found themselves returning again and again to the intractable actuality they are so anxious to avoid.

The prevailing mode of liberal thinking filters out any fact that might disturb its tranquility of mind. One such fact is that toppling despots does not of itself enhance freedom. If you are a woman, gay, a member of a religious minority, or someone who professes no religion, are you freer now in Iraq, Libya, or most of Syria than you were under the dictatorship of Saddam, Qaddafi, or Assad? Plainly, you are much less free. Another uncomfortable fact is that tyrants are often popular. According to today’s liberals, when large numbers of people flock to support tyranny it cannot be because they do not want to be free. They must be alienated from their true nature as human beings. Born liberals, human beings become anything else as a result of social conditioning. Only cultural and political repression stands in the way of liberal values becoming a universal way of life.

This strange metaphysical fancy lies behind the fashionable theory that when people leave advanced countries to join ISIS they do so because they have undergone a process of “radicalization.” But who radicalized the tens of millions of Europeans who flocked to Nazism and fascism in the interwar years? The disaster that ensued was not the result of clever propaganda, though that undoubtedly played a part. Interwar Europe demonstrates how quickly and easily civilized life can be disrupted and destroyed by the impact of war and economic crisis.

Civilization is not the endpoint of modern history, but a succession of interludes in recurring spasms of barbarism. The liberal civilization that has prevailed in some Western countries over the past few centuries emerged slowly and with difficulty against the background of a particular mix of traditions and institutions. Precarious wherever it has existed, it is a way of life that has no strong hold on humankind. For an older generation of liberal thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Isaiah Berlin, these were commonplaces. Today these truisms are forbidden truths, which can no longer be spoken or in many cases comprehended.

Liberal civilization is not the emerging meaning of the modern world but a historical singularity that is inherently fragile. This is why it is worth preserving. Defending this form of life against ISIS requires a clear perception that the jihadist group is not an atavistic force that—with a little assistance from intensified bombing—will fade away with advancing modernization. If the threat is to be removed, ISIS will have to be defeated and destroyed.

The simpleminded reasoning that rejects any Western military action on the grounds that earlier interventions were counterproductive fails to take the measure of the challenge that ISIS now poses. The Paris attacks, which appear to have been a response to defeats in the field, show that the state that ISIS has created cannot simply be contained. Nor would containment be enough in ethical terms, since ISIS has demonstrated a capacity for genocide. But the aim must not be to replace ISIS’s theocratic totalitarianism with a replica of liberal democracy—a delusional project that has unleashed the forces by which we are now besieged. A functioning state that enjoyed a reasonable measure of local support and could keep the peace would be a sufficiently challenging objective for Western policy.

Whether the West is up to the task is unclear. The practical difficulties are formidable. After the fiasco in Iraq, putting large numbers of troops on the ground hardly seems possible for any Western government, while the regional powers that need to be part of any concerted military action—Turkey, the Kurds, the Saudis, and Iran—are pursuing their own goals and rivalries. Russia, too, has its own agenda. Everyone is threatened by ISIS, but no one has yet made fighting it their first priority.

The intellectual difficulties are greater, and possibly insuperable. For many in the West, the threat ISIS poses to their view of the world seems a greater disaster than the atrocities ISIS has committed and threatens to repeat. The bafflement with which the West approaches the group is a symptom of the senility of the liberal mind, a condition for which there is no obvious remedy. Perhaps what our culture lacks, in the end, is the ability to understand itself.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The Week's Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry just published an article titled "Inside the mind of jihadis":

In just a few short years, the Islamic State has accomplished a tremendous amount, carving out territory for itself out of valuable Middle Eastern real estate, building a quasi-state, wreaking a new level of havoc on the region, and launching far-flung and devastating terrorist attacks.

But what may be most striking about the Islamic State is more far-reaching than the atrocities of Raqqa, Dabiq, Mosul, Palmyra, or even Paris. It's that beyond the thousands and tens of thousands who have joined the Islamic State in the Levant, there are millions, perhaps even tens of millions, around the world who are inspired by ISIS's message. And as the Islamic State slowly grinds to military defeat at the hands of international coalitions in its heartland, it is those supporters, passive and active, who will write the next chapter of ISIS's story.

The Islamic State no doubt has its share of psychotics, sadists, and thugs who would be drawn at any opportunity to do mayhem. But it is incredibly naïve to believe that this can be the only explanation for the astonishing relative success of the group that Barack Obama once dismissed as a jay-vee team.

As with any enemy, the best way to defeat the Islamic State is to understand it. And to do that, the best place to start is a new book by Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers. This book gives us the best insight yet into what makes the Islamic State tick.

Wood, a national correspondent at The Atlantic and lecturer in political science at Yale, spent years from the streets of Cairo to London to the Philippines to Australia, interviewing supporters of the Islamic State and getting inside their heads. What results is a series of gripping, fascinating portraits. Wood's subjects have little cageyness towards him. Since everything is foreordained by Allah anyway, revealing your plans to a Western journalist won't change the outcome. Plus, Wood has the talented journalist's skill for interview and observation. He's an astute psychologist and a good writer to boot.

The book's implicit thesis, one which is both inarguably true and persistently denied by so many decision makers in the West, is that ideas have consequences. While the motives of any individual and group of people are always multifaceted and almost always include a good helping of interest-seeking and self-delusion, it is also impossible to deny that large sections of Islamic State members and supporters, from its leadership down to foot soldiers, make decisions on the basis of what they believe.

As the Islamic State keeps repeating over and over through its high-polish propaganda apparatus, it has a theology, and this theology has content, and an internal logic, that can be understood on its merits. Once this theology is understood, and once the proponents of this theology are actually listened to, and their actions watched, it becomes impossible to deny that this theology is a key cause (maybe not the cause, but a key cause) of the actions of the Islamic State, most of its leaders, and most of its supporters.

What's more — and this is the source of the willful blindness of elite policymakers and commentators towards the Islamic State — this theology does have Islamic roots. Bear in mind: This does not mean that the Islamic State is "Islam" or "true Islam," whatever those things mean. But it does mean that the Islamic State represents a version of Islam that is recognizably Islamic.

All Muslims agree on at least one thing, which is that Muslims should follow the example of the Prophet Muhammad. And the Prophet Muhammad did do many of the things that the Islamic State is most reviled for, such as waging absolute religious warfare, engaging in slavery, stoning adulterers, and so forth. Obviously, this does not mean that Islam can be boiled down to such violence. And indeed, historically Muslims have found many ways to recontextualize Muhammad's more problematic actions.

But around the world, there seems to be only two equally extremist views of the Koran. The first, held by Muslim fundamentalists, Islamophobes, and militant atheists, is that a sacred text like the Koran can have only one, literal interpretation, and that this literal interpretation and "Islam" are one and the same. The other, held by the sort of secular rationalists who decide Western policy and make commentary vis-à-vis Islamic groups, from Barack Obama to Ezra Klein to Reza Aslan, is that a sacred text is essentially content-free; texts are infinitely pliable, and believers have always found ways to interpret texts in ways that let them do what they wanted to do anyway, so it does not matter what the text says. In this latter view, the Islamic State exists because of psychosis and socioeconomic grievances, since the only thing people do with sacred texts is to take out of them what they brought in.

Both of these views are dead wrong.

So allow me to propose a third, more middle-ground view: A sacred text, like any text (think of Hamlet, or Plato's Republic, or the U.S. Constitution) admits of a range of interpretations, a menu, if you will. It's possible to interpret a text in a way that goes against its intent. But while it's technically feasible to make any text say anything you want with enough chutzpah or self-delusion, the actual content of the text itself will still present a range of options, and will make some options more plausible than others. You can interpret Hamlet as saying that the eponymous character was insane all along and the ghost of his father was a hallucination, or that he was never insane and faked insanity, or started out sane and then grew insane through the course of the play. Or you can interpret Hamlet as being about an Asian woman living in Argentina throwing a tea party. But it will be awfully hard to get traction with that last interpretation, at least compared to the far more plausible previous ones.

But here's the key thing: There is a menu of reasonable options through which to interpret the same text. There is no one right way to read Hamlet.

By the same token, the Islamic State might be picking the wrong options in the Islamic menu, but they're still picking from the Islamic menu. This is not a semantic point. It has real-world consequences. People who are drawn to the Islamic State are devout Muslims, and it is self-defeating to try to keep them out of radicalization by pompously lecturing them about how the Islamic State's ideology has no basis in Islam, when it is obvious that it does.

Wood, who ably takes the reader through the intellectual and theological genesis of the Islamic State, points out that a prominent "Letter to Baghdadi" signed by influential Islamic scholars and prominent figures, and making the case against Baghdadi's Caliphate on Islamic grounds, fails on several basic grounds of exegesis. The scholar Landau Tasseron notes that on many exegetical points, as Wood puts it, "the Islamic State's interpretations [of the Koran] are often more in line with historical and scholarly readings than those of the authors of the letter."

This is amateur hour. No doubt, many of those who would deny any link between the Islamic State and Islam do so out of an honorable desire to stem Islamophobia. But willful blindness is never a good idea, and especially when it leads those who would see the Islamic State defeated to shoot themselves in the foot.

But while the book does contain a helpful and fascinating overview of the Islamic State's theology, it is by no means a tract about "Islam" or a work of religious scholarship. It remains a book of journalism and its main appeal is the portrait of the characters therein, which always appear complex, and sometimes even likeable. Many of them are serious men who have done their research, come to genuine belief, and dedicated their lives to it. As Wood notes, radical Islamism disproportionately appeals to analytical, left-brain types (engineers are vastly over-represented among Islamic State recruits) who like worldviews with borders drawn in black and white. The book's characters show themselves at turns to be both human and repellent. As one reads, one wants less to direct a drone strike against them, and more to shake them out of their worldview around a cup of tea.

Wood keenly notes that even as many of ISIS's converts have tried to shed their original identities and subsume them into radical Islam, they still project those identities on it, as British jihadis wax lyrical about the welfare protections available under Shariah, which comes to sound like a sort of super National Health Service.

It's a great read. But more importantly, Wood's book reveals truths about ISIS that are hiding in plain sight — but that our leaders make themselves willfully ignorant of. They ought to read his book, too.

 

[dublinirish]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The BBC has uncovered details of a secret deal that let thousands of IS fighters and family members escape from Raqqa <a href="https://t.co/ASZfuHXeMN">https://t.co/ASZfuHXeMN</a> with <a href="https://twitter.com/Dalatrm?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Dalatrm</a> <a href="https://t.co/HczRXrsE9Z">pic.twitter.com/HczRXrsE9Z</a></p>— Quentin Sommerville (@sommervilletv) <a href="https://twitter.com/sommervilletv/status/930141781274046464?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 13, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[GoldenToTheGrave]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The BBC has uncovered details of a secret deal that let thousands of IS fighters and family members escape from Raqqa <a href="https://t.co/ASZfuHXeMN">https://t.co/ASZfuHXeMN</a> with <a href="https://twitter.com/Dalatrm?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Dalatrm</a> <a href="https://t.co/HczRXrsE9Z">pic.twitter.com/HczRXrsE9Z</a></p>— Quentin Sommerville (@sommervilletv) <a href="https://twitter.com/sommervilletv/status/930141781274046464?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 13, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

This is standard operating procedure in battles like this. Taking urban areas from an entrenched enemy is hard, dirty work, and typically gets a lot of civilians killed. By the time the battles are over the cities are usually shattered. Not as scandalous as it would seem.

 

[notredomer23]

This is standard operating procedure in battles like this. Taking urban areas from an entrenched enemy is hard, dirty work, and typically gets a lot of civilians killed. By the time the battles are over the cities are usually shattered. Not as scandalous as it would seem.

This, and it is not even news. This was widely reported when it was going on. It was largely facilitated by tribal leaders in the area. I am sure the US wasn't happy about it, but there is no way they were capturing those last few areas of Raqqa without this.

 

[BGIF]

This is standard operating procedure in battles like this. Taking urban areas from an entrenched enemy is hard, dirty work, and typically gets a lot of civilians killed. By the time the battles are over the cities are usually shattered. Not as scandalous as it would seem.

ISIS already had killed a lot of civilians when they invaded and more were killed in the fighting getting to this point. The article notes:

It came after four months of fighting that left the city obliterated and almost devoid of people.

Again. "... the city obliterated and almost devoid of people."

There's a 3 minute video (like below) showing Raqqa looking like Berlin, Cologne, or Warsaw in 1945. This 23 century year old city would be bulldozed except for the booby traps, IEDs, and such that are spread throughout the remains of the city.

Yes, it will save lives among the coalition fighters in and around Raqqa but it will take other lives in other cities where the ISIS vermin will migrate. They didn't lay down their weapons to take up the plow ... they are being relocated with arms and ammunition to other targets of opportunities.

Myopic.


Link to Raqqa video:

https://news.sky.com/story/british-...ht-islamic-state-died-in-raqqa-blast-11125023

 

[notredomer23]

ISIS already had killed a lot of civilians when they invaded and more were killed in the fighting getting to this point. The article notes:




Again. "... the city obliterated and almost devoid of people."

There's a 3 minute video (like below) showing Raqqa looking like Berlin, Cologne, or Warsaw in 1945. This 23 century year old city would be bulldozed except for the booby traps, IEDs, and such that are spread throughout the remains of the city.

Yes, it will save lives among the coalition fighters in and around Raqqa but it will take other lives in other cities where the ISIS vermin will migrate. They didn't lay down their weapons to take up the plow ... they are being relocated with arms and ammunition to other targets of opportunities.

Myopic.


Link to Raqqa video:

https://news.sky.com/story/british-...ht-islamic-state-died-in-raqqa-blast-11125023

If I remember correctly, ISIS was using the national stadium in Raqqa and the national hospital as mass human shields. They crammed 1000s of innocent Syrians and families of ISIS members in there so the Coalition wouldn't bomb.

Also, I would argue the effect of moving them somewhere other than Raqqa would result in less loss of life than had they remained in Raqqa. Sure, they are going somewhere, but ISIS's territory is all but gone, and they have no strongholds remaining.