It’s getting hard out there for a dove. Those on the left grasping at tenuous logical straws to avert an escalation in the war on ISIS are finding themselves short on straws. The most prevalent and simultaneously least convincing reasoning for why it would be folly to fight ISIS on its home turf is the claim that the West would be giving this terrorist organization precisely what it wants.
Sure, more people are going to die, this thinking goes. There will be more attacks, and some of them might be of the spectacular sort the world witnessed in Paris last week. Even CIA Director John Brennan conceded that ISIS probably has plans in the works for further attacks on vulnerable “soft” targets in the West designed to produce the largest civilian body count. But whatever you do, “experts” say, don’t attack the Islamic State in its homeland in Syria and Iraq. After all, that’s precisely what they want!
This prescription fails to reassure, but who are we to question the “experts.”
“Terrorism is all about over-reaction, provoking an over-reaction,” State Department counter-terrorism coordinator Daniel Benjamin told Reuters. At the root of this notion, that fighting ISIS on the ground in its nascent caliphate is precisely what the terrorist organization wants, is a thorough understanding of ISIS’s fevered philosophy.
Authorities on the Islamic State told Reuters that an invasion would “risk backfiring by feeding the group’s apocalyptic narrative that it is defending Islam against an assault by the West and its authoritarian Arab allies.” As for ISIS’s narrative, one gets the impression that the terrorist proto-state is further emboldened and better able to recruit not by suffering battlefield setbacks but by conducting terrorist strikes abroad. In the last month alone, ISIS has attacked and killed hundreds in the skies over the Sinai desert, bombed civilian targets in Beirut and Baghdad, and executed coordinated terrorist attacks in two NATO capitals. It’s at least possible that allowing for “more mass casualty attacks in Europe and North America,” as the “experts” told Reuters, is a misguided strategy.
The idea that what ISIS truly wants is to set events in motion that result in an apocalyptic final battle between believers and kafirs in the Levant was popularized by Graeme Wood writing in The Atlantic. In his excellent study of precisely “what ISIS really wants,” he observed that the organization is motivated by the theological notion that a showdown between Muslim and infidel forces in the Syrian city of Dabiq will be prelude to the end times.
But Wood’s observation is not an admonition for the West to ignore at its own peril so much as it is a diagnosis of a fatal pathology that could lead to ISIS’s destruction. He notes that this organization’s fanatical attachment to this apocalyptic fantasy will almost surely lead this organization to cast aside strategic considerations if it were ever to confront a Western army in Syria.
One way to un-cast the Islamic State’s spell over its adherents would be to overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq now under caliphate rule. Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate and serve it. If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be routed, it might never recover.
Wood observes that the laws of unforeseen consequences are always at play, and there is little telling what might follow the destruction and dissolution of this nascent caliphate. Further, it is clear that ISIS is trying to provoke the West into a more robust response that quite possibly includes Western ground troops in Syria and Iraq. Given ISIS’s unhinged philosophical attachment to highly improbable prophecy, Western “experts” who grant undue deference to ISIS’s philosophy are being a little obtuse. They are less trying to understand the risks involved in further conflict in the Middle East and perhaps more seeking out a compelling rationale for disengagement. In the interim, as all the “experts” warn, more Western blood will run through the streets of the civilized world’s great cities. Does this seem like a rational security policy to anyone?
Maybe what this death cult wants is something with which they should be provided; namely, the opportunity to meet their foe on the battlefield of their choosing. This plague on mankind won’t be exorcized if only the West sets a good example for others to follow or declines to be goaded into a fight. Sometimes, an adversary can’t be mollified. Sometimes, you have to give them what they want.
