There is a tension at the heart of President Barack
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 the Islamic State's
emergence has triggered in the Arab-Muslim world and "searching and
destroying" the extremist group 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 as
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 civilisation that has broken down.
Arab civilisation, 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
civilisation."
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 Islamic State
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 the Islamic State.
"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 mindset?"
The Lebanese Shiite
writer Hanin Ghaddar in an essay in August on Lebanon's Now website
wrote: "To fight the IS 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 the US to an air-campaign-only against Islamic State 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 organising
themselves across Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish lines - the very act of overcoming
their debilitating sectarian and political differences that would be required
to defeat the Islamic State on the ground - is the necessary ingredient for creating
any kind of decent, consensual government that could replace the Islamic State
in any self-sustaining way.
The tension arises
because the Islamic State 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 the militant
group and the Syrian regime at the same time. Iraq, 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 the
Islamic State from the air - I'm glad we have hit these psychopaths in Syria -
but only Arabs and Turks can destroy the Islamic State on the ground. Right
now, Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stands for authoritarianism,
press intimidation, crony capitalism and quiet support for Islamists, including
the Islamic State. He won't even let US forces use our base in Turkey to
degrade the Islamic State 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 the extremists in
Syria, but rule out ground troops? This is a civilisation in distress, and
unless it faces the pathologies that have given birth to an Islamic State
monster in its belly, any victory we achieve from the air or ground will be
temporary.
New York Times
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