The Washington Post publishes an opinion piece by Ramzi Mardini entitled “The Islamic State threat is overstated” which points out how the Obama Administration and much of the media is missing the fact that ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State is really just a few thousand well-armed murderous thugs and how we, in the West, shouldn’t get our collective panties in a twist over them, because the West has a history of misunderstanding the people we battle with in that region;
In his prime-time address Wednesday, President Obama said that U.S. airstrikes targeting militants in Iraq over the past month “have protected American personnel and facilities, killed [Islamic State] fighters, destroyed weapons, and given space for Iraqi and Kurdish forces to reclaim key territory. These strikes have also helped save the lives of thousands of innocent men, women and children.”
A more accurate assessment would be that U.S. military intervention has tremendous propaganda value for the Islamic State, helping it to rally other jihadists to its cause, possibly even Salafists who have so far rejected its legitimacy. Moreover, to the extent that the group poses any threat to the United States, that threat is magnified by a visible U.S. military role. Obama’s restraint in the use of military power in recent years has helped keep the Islamic State’s focus regional — on its efforts to establish an Islamic caliphate in the Middle East rather than on launching attacks against the United States. It’s only with the U.S. military’s return to Iraq and the prospect of U.S. intervention in Syria that the group’s focus has begun to shift.
Yeah, he goes on like that for a few hundred more words. From what I get from the piece is that if we wait long enough, they’ll peter themselves out and disappear from the face of the Earth with the help of the Iraqi, Iranian and Syrian governments. That we should just sit this one out. While I largely agree about what we “should do”, that isn’t in the cards.
First of all, Syria has been fighting ISIS along with Iranian support for years and the Iraqis are the forces they just beat to take Mosul. So, if we leave them to fight the war alone, it will be just another decade-long bloody struggle in the region which can’t do the region any good, nor will it come out good for us if we just sit back and cheer for one side.
Secondly, he misses the Big Point; that being that ISIS dissed President Obama. His withdrawal of troops from Iraq was one of his three major accomplishments and they’ve made it look like a bad idea. So, now they have to pay. It’s unfortunate that the horrid deaths of two more Americans there had to convince him of that, though. Also, he needs to convince Afghanistan (and the Taliban) that we aren’t going to abandon them when we abandon them next year, so that they can hold together their government after Karzai. Of course, he has to do something to erase the memory of Gerald Ford’s abandonment of South Vietnam.
So, I’m sorry, Mr. Mardini, but this president has to send American forces back to Iraq, if for nothing else, to demonstrate American commitment to the region and, eventually, the world, because despite your short-sightedness, the Islamic jihadists have a history of establishing a base from which they can strike the rest of the world, and not just recently – for the last forty years when the only real threat from the region at the time was the PLO. they might not be able to strike at the US and at Europe this year, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t next year. Killing them in Iraq is better than killing them at home, as if we haven’t heard that enough for the last decade or so.
