Obama’s Self-Defeating Fight with ISIS. By Caroline Glick. Jerusalem Post, September 16, 2014. Also at CarolineGlick.com.
Glick:
Glick:
The
United States has a problem with Islamic State. Its problem is that it refuses
to acknowledge why Islamic State is a problem.
The
problem with Islamic State is not that it is brutal. Plenty of regimes are
brutal.
Islamic
State poses two challenges for the US. First, unlike the Saudis and even the Iranians,
IS actively recruits Americans and other Westerners to join its lines.
This is
a problem because these Americans and other Westerners have embraced an
ideology that is viciously hostile to every aspect of Western civilization.
Last
Friday, Buzz Feed published a compilation of social media posts by Western
women who have left Chicago and London and other hometowns to join IS in Syria.
As
these women’s social media posts demonstrate, the act of leaving the West and
joining IS involves rejecting everything the West is and everything it
represents and embracing a culture of violence, murder and degradation.
In the
first instance, the women who leave the West to join IS have no qualms about
entering a society in which they have no rights. They are happy covering
themselves in black from head to toe. They have no problem casting their lot
with a society that prohibits females from leaving their homes without male
escorts. They have no problem sharing their husband with other wives.
They
don’t mind because they believe that in doing so, they are advancing the cause
of Islam and Allah.
As the
women described it, the hardest part about joining the jihad is breaking the
news to your parents back home. But, as one recruiter soothed, “As long as you
are firm and you know that this is all for the sake of Allah then nothing can
shake you inshalah.”
Firm in
their belief that they are part of something holy, the British, American and
European jihadistas are completely at ease with IS violence. In one post, a
woman nonchalantly described seeing a Yazidi slave.
“Walked
into a room, gave salam to everyone in the room to find out there was a yazidi
slave girl there as well… she replied to my salam.”
Other
posts discussed walking past people getting their hands chopped off and seeing
dead bodies on the street. Islamic State’s beheadings of American and British
hostages are a cause for celebration.
Their
pride at the beheadings of James Foley and others is part and parcel of their
hatred for the US and the West. As they see it, destroying the US and the West
is a central goal of IS.
As one
of the women put it, “Know this Cameron/ Obama, you and your countries will be
beneath our feet and your kufr will be destroyed, this is a promise from Allah
that we have no doubt over…. This Islamic empire shall be known and feared
world wide and we will follow none other than the law of the one and the only
ilah!” These women do not feel at all isolated. And they have no reason to.
They are surrounded by other Westerners who joined IS for the same reasons they
did.
In one
recruitment post, Western women were told that not knowing Arabic is no reason
to stay home.
“You
can still survive if you don’t speak Arabic. You can find almost every race and
nationality here.”
The
presence of Westerners in IS, indeed, IS’s aggressive efforts to recruit
Westerners wouldn’t pose much of a problem for the US if it were willing to
secure its borders and recognize the root of the problem.
But as
US President Barack Obama made clear over the summer, and indeed since he first
took office six years ago, he opposes any effort to secure the US border with
Mexico. If these jihadists can get to Mexico, they will, in all likelihood,
have no problem coming to America.
Even if
the US were to secure its southern border, it would still be unable to prevent
these jihadists from returning to attack. The policy of the US government is to
deny the existence of a jihadist threat by, among other thing, denying the
existence of the ideology of Islamic jihad.
When
President Barack Obama insisted last Wednesday that Islamic State is not
Islamic, he told all the Westerners who are now proud mujihadin that they
shouldn’t worry about coming home. They won’t be screened. As far as the US is
concerned their Islamic jihad ideology doesn’t exist.
Whereas
every passenger arriving in the US from Liberia can be screened for Ebola, no
one will be screened for exposure to jihadist thought.
And
this brings us to the second problem IS poses to the US.
As a
rising force in the Middle East, IS threatens US allies and it threatens global
trade. To prevent its allies from being overthrown and to prevent shocks to the
international economy, at a minimum, the US needs to contain IS. And given the
threat the Westerners joining the terror army constitute, and Washington’s
unwillingness to stop them at the border, in all likelihood, the US needs to
destroy IS where it stands.
Unfortunately,
there is no reason to believe that the US is willing or able to either contain
or defeat IS.
As US
Maj. Gen. (ret.) Robert Scales wrote over the weekend in The Wall Street
Journal, from a military perspective, IS is little different from all the
guerrilla forces the US has faced in battle since the Korean War. Scales argues
that in all previous such engagements, the outcomes have been discouraging
because the US lacks the will to take the battle to the societies that feed
them or use its firepower to its full potential out of fear of killing
civilians.
Clearly
this remains the case today.
Moreover,
as Angelo Codevilla explained last month in The Federalist, to truly dry up the
swamp feeding IS, it is necessary to take the war to its state sponsors – first
and foremost Turkey and Qatar.
In his
words, “The first strike against the IS must be aimed at its sources of
material support. Turkey and Qatar are very much part of the global economy…
If…the United States decides to kill the IS, it can simply inform Turkey,
Qatar, and the world it will have zero economic dealings with these countries
and with any country that has any economic dealing with them, unless these
countries cease any and all relations with the IS.”
Yet, as
we saw on the ground this weekend with US Secretary of State John Kerry’s
failed mission to secure Turkish support for the US campaign against IS, the
administration has no intention of taking the war to IS’s state sponsors,
without which it would be just another jihadi militia jockeying for power in
Syria.
And
this leaves us with the administration’s plan to assemble a coalition of the
willing that will provide the foot soldiers for the US air war against Islamic
State.
After a
week of talks and shuttle diplomacy, aside from Australia, no one has committed
forces. Germany, Britain and France have either refused to participate or have
yet to make clear what they are willing to do.
The
Kurds will not fight for anything but Kurdistan.
The
Iraqi Army is a fiction.
The
Iraqi Sunnis support IS far more than they trust the Americans.
Egypt,
Saudi Arabia and Jordan will either cheer the US on from a distance, or in the
best-case scenario, provide logistical support for its operations.
It
isn’t just that these states have already been burned by Obama whether through
his support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and
Muammar Gaddafi. And it isn’t simply that they saw that the US left them
hanging in Syria.
They
see Obama’s “strategy” for fighting IS – ignoring the Islamic belief system
that underpins every aspect of its existence, and expecting other armies to
fight and die to accomplish the goal while the US turns a blind eye to Turkey’s
and Qatar’s continued sponsorship of Islamic State. They see this strategy and
they are convinced America is fighting to lose. Why should they go down with
it?
Islamic
State is a challenging foe. To defeat it, the US must be willing to confront
Islamism. And it must be willing to fight to win. In the absence of such
determination, it will fight and lose, in the region and at home, with no
allies at its side.
