The Barbarians Within Our Gates. By Hisham Melhem. Politico, September 18, 2014.
The ISIS within. By Hanin Ghaddar. NOW Lebanon, August 22, 2014.
Friedman:
There
is a tension at the heart of President Obama’s campaign to confront the Islamic
State, and it explains a lot about why he has so much trouble articulating and
implementing his strategy. Quite simply, it is the tension between two vital
goals — promoting the “soul-searching” that ISIS’s emergence has triggered in
the Arab-Muslim world and “searching and destroying” ISIS in its strongholds in
Syria and Iraq.
Get
used to it. This tension is not going away. Obama will have to lead through it.
The
good news: The rise of the Islamic State, also known and ISIS, is triggering
some long overdue, brutally honest, soul-searching by Arabs and Muslims about
how such a large, murderous Sunni death cult could have emerged in their midst.
Look at a few samples, starting with “The Barbarians Within Our Gates,” written
in Politico last week by Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief of
Al-Arabiya, the Arabic satellite channel.
“With
his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State,
President Obama ... is stepping once again — and with understandably great
reluctance — into the chaos of an entire civilization that has broken down.
Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is
more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism — the extremism of
the rulers and those in opposition — than at any time since the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire a century ago.
“Every hope
of modern Arab history has been betrayed,” Melhem added. “The promise of
political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity
heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays — all has given
way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion
of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. ... The jihadists of
the Islamic State, in other words, did not emerge from nowhere. They climbed
out of a rotting, empty hulk — what was left of a broken-down civilization.”
The
liberal Saudi analyst Turki al-Hamad responded in the London-based Al-Arab
newspaper to King Abdullah’s call for Saudi religious leaders to confront ISIS
ideology: How can they? al-Hamad asked. They all embrace the same
anti-pluralistic, puritanical Wahhabi Sunni ideology that Saudi Arabia
diffused, at home and abroad, to the mosques that nurtured ISIS.
“They
are unable to face the groups of violence, extremism and beheadings, not out of
laziness or procrastination, but because all of them share in that same
ideology,” al-Hamad wrote. “How can they confront an ideology that they
themselves carry within them and within their mind-set?”
The
Lebanese Shiite writer Hanin Ghaddar in an essay in August on Lebanon’s Now website
wrote: “To fight the I.S. and other radical groups, and to prevent the rise of
new autocratic rulers, we need to assume responsibility for the collective
failures that have produced all of these awful tyrants and fanatics. Our media
and education systems are liable for the monster we helped create. ... We need
to teach our children how to learn from our mistakes instead of how to master
the art of denial. When our educators and journalists start to understand the
significance of individual rights, and admit that we have failed to be
citizens, then we can start hoping for freedom, even if it is achieved slowly.”
Nurturing
this soul-searching is a vital — and
smart — part of the Obama strategy. In committing America to an
air-campaign-only against ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq, Obama has declared
that the ground war will have to be fought by Arabs and Muslims, not just
because this is their war and they should take the brunt of the casualties, but
because the very act of their organizing themselves across Shiite, Sunni and
Kurdish lines — the very act of overcoming their debilitating sectarian and
political differences that would be required to defeat ISIS on the ground — is
the necessary ingredient for creating any kind of decent, consensual government
that could replace ISIS in any self-sustaining way.
The
tension arises because ISIS is a killing machine, and it will take another
killing machine to search it out and destroy it on the ground. There is no way
the “moderate” Syrians we’re training can alone fight ISIS and the Syrian
regime at the same time. Iraqis, Turkey and the nearby Arab states will have to
also field troops.
After
all, this is a civil war for the future of both Sunni Islam and the Arab world.
We can degrade ISIS from the air — I’m glad we have hit these ISIS psychopaths
in Syria — but only Arabs and Turks can destroy ISIS on the ground. Right now,
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stands for authoritarianism, press
intimidation, crony capitalism and quiet support for Islamists, including ISIS.
He won’t even let us use our base in Turkey to degrade ISIS from the air.
What’s in his soul? What’s in the soul of the Arab regimes who are ready to
join us in bombing ISIS in Syria, but rule out ground troops?
This is
a civilization in distress, and unless it faces the pathologies that have given
birth to an ISIS monster its belly — any victory we achieve from the air or
ground will be temporary.
