Before long the same administration that declared the fighting in Iraq over several times will claim victory over ISIS. The timetable for its push against the Islamic State appears to have less do with the victimized Christians and Yazidis who have been prevented from coming here as refugees in favor of Syrian Muslims than with the Clinton presidential campaign. Like Obama’s declarations that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were over, the announcement that ISIS has been defeated will be premature.
It is based on a profound misunderstanding and misreading of Islamic terrorism.
Long before its current string of defeats, ISIS had begun evolving into another Al Qaeda; a multinational alliance of Jihadists scattered around the world. Bombing Mosul isn’t hard, but try bombing Marseille, Brussels or London. There is no doubt that the ability of ISIS to temporarily establish a caliphate allowed it to build a network that could carry out terror attacks from New York to Miami to Nice to Munich. But it would be dangerous to assume that losing Iraq and Syria will stop ISIS.
ISIS doesn’t matter. The idea of ISIS does. And the idea of ISIS is Islamic supremacism.
The organization we think of ISIS has transformed and rebranded countless times. Even now our leaders vacillate between calling it ISIS, ISIL or, more childishly, Daesh, while it dubs itself the Islamic State. We have been fighting it in one form or another for over a decade. It would be unrealistically optimistic to assume that the war will end just as this old enemy has shown its ability to strike deep in our own cities.
The bigger error though is to think that we are fighting an organization. We are fighting an idea. That is not to contend, as Obama does, that we can debate it to death. It is not the sort of idea that argues with words, but with bullets, bombs and swords. But neither does it just go away if you seize a city.
Al Qaeda in Iraq not only survived the death of Zarqawi, but it became even more dangerous under Baghdadi. It would be risky to assume that ISIS will die with him. Instead it may very well grow into a new phase of Al Qaeda, one that ties together some of the world’s deadliest Islamic terror groups into a network that is decentralized enough that it will not suffer from Al Qaeda’s leadership fatigue.
The rise of Islamic terrorism has been an incremental process in which new groups learn from the mistakes of the old and supersede them. If ISIS does recede into a localized oblivion, reemerging only on occasion to suicide bomb something or someone in Baghdad, then a deadlier and even more effective group is likely to take its place. Each group will move one step closer to realizing the caliphate.
To break the cycle, we must confront the idea of the caliphate at the heart of Islamic terrorism.
ISIS is not un-Islamic. It is ruthlessly and uncompromisingly Islamic in that, unlike its predecessors in the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, it makes the fewest compromises to civilizational sensibilities. Its goals are the same as those of every Islamic political organization, including those dubbed moderate. It seeks to restore and enforce an Islamic system in every part of the Muslim world before moving on to conquer and subjugate the non-Muslim world. If this were merely some fringe belief held by a tiny minority of extremists, then it could be bombed to pieces in some Syrian or Iraqi backwater.
But it’s the driving force of Islam. That’s why it won’t go away. No amount of appeasement will banish it.
Taking in more Muslim settlers, pressuring Israel and letting the Muslim Brotherhood colonize our foreign policy won’t do it. We’ve tried it and it actually makes Islamic terrorism much worse.
When the announcement is made, the usual suspects will pat themselves on the back for having defeated ISIS by mobilizing a Muslim coalition. But it wasn’t Obama who mobilized a Muslim coalition. The coalition, such as it was, mobilized them. Obama provided useful support to Islamic state sponsors of terror, such as Iran and Turkey, assorted Islamic Jihadists on the ground, some blatantly associated with Sunni and Shiite terror groups in their internal Jihadist conflict with ISIS over who will fight us.
The “allies” we are aiding today will be the ones bombing us tomorrow.
And that is why claiming credit for beating ISIS accomplishes nothing. ISIS is an expression of an Islamic impulse encoded in the Koran. Islamic groups differ in the tactical expression of that impulse. ISIS was nastier and uglier than most of the Islamic terror groups we had dealt with before this. Though even it found its Boko Haram affiliate in Nigeria occasionally a little too much to stomach.
If ISIS vanishes from the world stage, Islamic terrorism will be easier to dismiss. Or so the thinking goes. The Islamic State was better at viral videos than the media that tried to whitewash Islamic terror. It was hard to ignore. But a scattering of Islamic terror groups around the world will be forgotten by the public.
History suggests that’s wishful thinking.
Islamic terrorism has shown no signs of receding. Growing Muslim populations, both at home and in Muslim settlements in the West, and the increase in travel and communications, the infrastructure of globalism, spread it from the most backward to the most advanced parts of the world. Wealthy and unstable Muslim countries, rich in oil but poor in power, finance its spread through mosques and guns.
These are the ingredients that give us ISIS or any other combination or letters that stands for Islamic terror. To do anything meaningful about it, we would have to reverse the decline of the West.
Islam originally spread into a vacuum created by civilizational decline. Civilizational decline is why it is rising once again. An obscure local terror group eventually turned into ISIS by filling a power vacuum. Even as Obama performs another touchdown dance, some other group will be making that same journey. Its mission will be the familiar one of replacing our civilization with its own.
Until we come to terms with this civilizational struggle, we will go on fighting endless wars in the sand and coping with endless terror attacks in our own cities because we have failed to recognize the nature of the enemy. We are not fighting an acronym, whether it’s ISIS or ISIL; we are fighting an Islamic State.
This is a war to determine whether the future will belong to the West or to Islam.
It is based on a profound misunderstanding and misreading of Islamic terrorism.
Long before its current string of defeats, ISIS had begun evolving into another Al Qaeda; a multinational alliance of Jihadists scattered around the world. Bombing Mosul isn’t hard, but try bombing Marseille, Brussels or London. There is no doubt that the ability of ISIS to temporarily establish a caliphate allowed it to build a network that could carry out terror attacks from New York to Miami to Nice to Munich. But it would be dangerous to assume that losing Iraq and Syria will stop ISIS.
ISIS doesn’t matter. The idea of ISIS does. And the idea of ISIS is Islamic supremacism.
The organization we think of ISIS has transformed and rebranded countless times. Even now our leaders vacillate between calling it ISIS, ISIL or, more childishly, Daesh, while it dubs itself the Islamic State. We have been fighting it in one form or another for over a decade. It would be unrealistically optimistic to assume that the war will end just as this old enemy has shown its ability to strike deep in our own cities.
The bigger error though is to think that we are fighting an organization. We are fighting an idea. That is not to contend, as Obama does, that we can debate it to death. It is not the sort of idea that argues with words, but with bullets, bombs and swords. But neither does it just go away if you seize a city.
Al Qaeda in Iraq not only survived the death of Zarqawi, but it became even more dangerous under Baghdadi. It would be risky to assume that ISIS will die with him. Instead it may very well grow into a new phase of Al Qaeda, one that ties together some of the world’s deadliest Islamic terror groups into a network that is decentralized enough that it will not suffer from Al Qaeda’s leadership fatigue.
The rise of Islamic terrorism has been an incremental process in which new groups learn from the mistakes of the old and supersede them. If ISIS does recede into a localized oblivion, reemerging only on occasion to suicide bomb something or someone in Baghdad, then a deadlier and even more effective group is likely to take its place. Each group will move one step closer to realizing the caliphate.
To break the cycle, we must confront the idea of the caliphate at the heart of Islamic terrorism.
ISIS is not un-Islamic. It is ruthlessly and uncompromisingly Islamic in that, unlike its predecessors in the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, it makes the fewest compromises to civilizational sensibilities. Its goals are the same as those of every Islamic political organization, including those dubbed moderate. It seeks to restore and enforce an Islamic system in every part of the Muslim world before moving on to conquer and subjugate the non-Muslim world. If this were merely some fringe belief held by a tiny minority of extremists, then it could be bombed to pieces in some Syrian or Iraqi backwater.
But it’s the driving force of Islam. That’s why it won’t go away. No amount of appeasement will banish it.
Taking in more Muslim settlers, pressuring Israel and letting the Muslim Brotherhood colonize our foreign policy won’t do it. We’ve tried it and it actually makes Islamic terrorism much worse.
When the announcement is made, the usual suspects will pat themselves on the back for having defeated ISIS by mobilizing a Muslim coalition. But it wasn’t Obama who mobilized a Muslim coalition. The coalition, such as it was, mobilized them. Obama provided useful support to Islamic state sponsors of terror, such as Iran and Turkey, assorted Islamic Jihadists on the ground, some blatantly associated with Sunni and Shiite terror groups in their internal Jihadist conflict with ISIS over who will fight us.
The “allies” we are aiding today will be the ones bombing us tomorrow.
And that is why claiming credit for beating ISIS accomplishes nothing. ISIS is an expression of an Islamic impulse encoded in the Koran. Islamic groups differ in the tactical expression of that impulse. ISIS was nastier and uglier than most of the Islamic terror groups we had dealt with before this. Though even it found its Boko Haram affiliate in Nigeria occasionally a little too much to stomach.
If ISIS vanishes from the world stage, Islamic terrorism will be easier to dismiss. Or so the thinking goes. The Islamic State was better at viral videos than the media that tried to whitewash Islamic terror. It was hard to ignore. But a scattering of Islamic terror groups around the world will be forgotten by the public.
History suggests that’s wishful thinking.
Islamic terrorism has shown no signs of receding. Growing Muslim populations, both at home and in Muslim settlements in the West, and the increase in travel and communications, the infrastructure of globalism, spread it from the most backward to the most advanced parts of the world. Wealthy and unstable Muslim countries, rich in oil but poor in power, finance its spread through mosques and guns.
These are the ingredients that give us ISIS or any other combination or letters that stands for Islamic terror. To do anything meaningful about it, we would have to reverse the decline of the West.
Islam originally spread into a vacuum created by civilizational decline. Civilizational decline is why it is rising once again. An obscure local terror group eventually turned into ISIS by filling a power vacuum. Even as Obama performs another touchdown dance, some other group will be making that same journey. Its mission will be the familiar one of replacing our civilization with its own.
Until we come to terms with this civilizational struggle, we will go on fighting endless wars in the sand and coping with endless terror attacks in our own cities because we have failed to recognize the nature of the enemy. We are not fighting an acronym, whether it’s ISIS or ISIL; we are fighting an Islamic State.
This is a war to determine whether the future will belong to the West or to Islam.
Comments
Haven't finishing reading the whole article, but been thinking about what to do about Islam earlier today. These religious wars tend to go on interminably, ending in exhaustion and devastation. The 30 Years War comes to mind as a good European example, except the Islamic wars seem to go on for much longer.
ReplyDeletewell spoken but the ultimate enemy isn't islam, but in your words - "civilizational decline"
ReplyDeleteCheck this out - a koran satire...
ReplyDeletehttp://pigallah.blogspot.com/
You have two choices in the Arab Muslim world: totalitarianism and total anarchy. Pick one and soon enough the pendulum will swing back to the other.
ReplyDeleteWhat will replace ISIS? If she wins the White House, it will be the HISS, Hillary's Internal Secret Service, or “"Protection Squadron,” otherwise known as the Schutzstaffel. Headed up by Huma Abedin. Its distinctive insignia will not be SS, but a Muslim Brotherhood crescent.
ReplyDeleteYou nailed it, Daniel. Islam has always ratcheted through the world by attacking weakness, then consolidating their conquest by dhimmitude and genocide. Subject populations are indoctrinated from the cradle.
ReplyDeleteBesides Islamic intransigence and Western Civilizational decline, I'd add our historic cowardice in confronting the root of the situation. All the West suffers from exaggerated, largely unearned guilt from the Crusades, Colonization, Slavery, etc.
We confront impending doom from Islam, a morally and militarily vastly inferior foe. Our only option is preemptory massive attack at the heart of Islam.
ABSJ1136
>>Islamic wars seem to go on for much longer.
ReplyDelete1,300 years and counting.
"It is based on a profound misunderstanding..."
ReplyDelete"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."
How long must we pretend the powers that be are simply muddled and not culpable?
He gets our attention with his analysis, but provides no solution b/c the solution, frankly, is untenable. How do you defeat a minority of hundred of committed fighters in every major Western city when our political culture can't abide dealing with them in an effective way? The answer is you can't. The 2nd element in this is the Left 'wants' the West on the ropes. Why the Left wants that is an age-old question. They've never wanted capitalism and democracy to succeed of course, and usually subvert it at every turn with a host of plausible excuses. Which leaves us where in terms of defeating jihadists in Western cities committed to our destruction, as they receive cover from Leftist traitors? It can only mean we have to start fighting both the Left and the jihadists. We probably can't do both at the same time, yet if we focus on the Left first then our culture will slide under the waves of terrorism long before we defeat the Left. And the same the other way round.
ReplyDeleteSo we have to fight both together. Which means we'll have to fight in part extra-judicially. Which means targeted assassinations of the worst Leftists. They're traitors anyway, so it makes little sense worrying about the morality of it. We won't survive if they continue their subversion. They'll destroy our ability to fight, which is their goal, and they're more than half-way to that already. Look at how much damage Obama has done to the US military, by design.
Germany's ability to reverse things will be gone within a couple years. A million migrants in 2016. A million more apparently in 2017. How many hundred thousands in 2015. Then most bring in 5 or 6 or 7 via family reunification. How many more millions is that, in just the next 2 or 3 years. By 2020 it's quite plausible Germany's 80 million citizens will have 20 million Muslims. And long before that the terror attacks will ramp up to weekly or daily. And Germany knows all this, this is what the leftist government wants. Same as the USA & Sweden & Britain & Canada & Australia.
So we have to fight the Leftists who are doing this. And at the same time we need to fight the terrorists through laws and the squeeze play when conservatives get back in power. But it's a tall order, and has at best a 30% chance of success. The Left has been cunning and effective in playing our destruction.
Here we go again. We are at war; check. Our enemy is Islam; huh? WTF? One quarter of the population of the World? Why don't you try and define the "enemy" a little less broadly? Does 75% of the World's population realize it has an enemy in Islam? No, but even if it did, they would not fight this "enemy"; they'd expect Israel and the West, closest targets, to do the fighting and sacrificing.
ReplyDeleteIt's true. Anyone doubt it?
If we are going to have to fight, we have to agree on who needs to be defeated to end the threat. I have stated my opinion before, that the enemy is not the "Joe-sixpacks" of Islam, but the "holy" men that demand they die for their "religion". Would making that smaller group the focus of war not make the job easier, or do all "holy" men have to be protected?
Making that particular career-path less popular would certainly seem to be a worthy tactic in war.
DP111 ..
ReplyDeleteMy view, long held, is that we need to have a separation from the Islamic world. As a start one needs to take them at their own words, and agree wholeheartedly that there is indeed a dar ul islam and a dar ul harb, and for the good of humanity, infidels and Muslims alike, it is better to live apart in respective houses..
It is a sad fact that Muslim presence anywhere leads to discomfort of other already established communities. Soon the established community will leave or forced out by Jihad by mob violence, and yet another region becomes dar ul islam.
Muslim nations, left to their own devices, unable to export their excess population, an ever deteriorating infrastructure, increasing poverty and diminishing military power, will have no alternative but to reform Islam. And even if they do not, they will not be a menace to the safety and security of the rest of the world, for the simple reason that they will not have access to harvest infidel lives.
Harsh as this is, it is the most humane way to progress. What frightens me is that we are moving towards a new world war that is quite unlike previous world wars. This world war will be a civil war ie a global civil war - the very worst type imaginable. Else we are looking forward to a Three Conjecture scenario leading to deaths on an unprecedented scale.
Separation leaves hope for the future for everybody. Islam will collapse quite quickly in historic terms if it is unable to expand (that is after all its main reason), and thus release the 1 billion souls in its enslavement.
Politically impossible at the moment? - Yes. Yet precedents are there in recent history, where exchanges of populations were considered the only way to secure a reasonably peaceful outcome.
Tackling isis is a must but the lurking demographic bomb will remain. Bringing down the Soviets left academia and Holywood commies unchecked because they weren´t a menace any longer¡ See now, they are about to replace the intellectual stutterer in chief with a she-devil…
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