With his speech on Wednesday condemning the Islamic State in newly stark, determined language, President Barack Obama now needs to step up his military campaign in equally dramatic fashion.
That does not--and should not--mean sending American ground troops or taking steps that give even the whiff of an American-led war.
Still, Obama described the Islamic State--an al-Qaida offshoot--in ways that demand further action and will later seem bizarre if they're followed by merely more of the same.
The radical jihadists of the Islamic State, he said, have "rampaged across" Iraqi and Syrian villages, "killing innocent, unarmed civilians" and subjecting women and children to "torture and rape and slavery." Their religious garb is a ruse, as they have "murdered Muslims, both Sunni and Shi'a, by the thousands" and massacred those of other faiths without qualm. Their declared ambition is "genocide." Their ideology is "bankrupt," offering their subjects nothing but "endless slavery to their empty vision and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior." And now they have beheaded an American journalist, an act that "shocks the conscience of the entire world."
All true. But the president of the United States shouldn't talk like this and then do nothing additional to extract the cancer. What is President Obama's plan for action? Here he turned vague. We "are taking the fight" to ISIS, he said, and will "do what's necessary to see that justice is done." But we're already taking the fight to ISIS, and it's an understatement to say this fight is about justice.
At one disturbing point, Obama indulged in sentimental rhetoric. "People like this ultimately fail," he said of the ISIS fanatics. "They fail because the future is won by those who build and not destroy." First, that isn't true. The annals of history show that destroyers beat builders often. Second, this sort of talk is dangerous: If you really believe there's some universal path to history, where good ultimately triumphs over evil, you can trick yourself into thinking it's all right to do nothing because, in the end, all will turn out well.
I don't think Obama really believes in historical idealism. He usually talks and behaves like an international realist. He well knows (and eloquently said, in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize address, of all places) that when builders do win out over destroyers, it's often because the builders fight back.
As Obama said in his speech, the thugs of the Islamic State have murdered Sunnis and Shiites; they are hated and feared by nearly all Arab and Muslim governments and militias in the region. So Obama (or the United Nations or European Union--any group will do) needs to bring all the enemies of ISIS into an explicit coalition.
If the jihadists of the Islamic State are as dangerous as Obama says they are (and the evidence suggests they are), then it's time to plow through diplomatic niceties and pursue the common interests of nations with which we otherwise might not get along. Yes, it's politically awkward, to say the least, for Obama to make common cause, even on this one issue, with Assad (a monster whom he once said "must go") and the mullahs of Teheran (most of whom regard America as the "great Satan"). But in World War II, Roosevelt and Churchill joined with Stalin to defeat Hitler. If they hadn't, Hitler would have won.
The net against the Islamic State should be widened further. A good model here is the 1990-91 Gulf War, in which President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker assembled a vast coalition to push Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait. Nearly every Arab country in the region--Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, even Syria--sent whole armored divisions or air wings. Many of them didn't do much in the war, but the important point was that they were there. Their presence demonstrated that this wasn't a war of Western imperialists against Muslim Iraq; it was a multinational war against aggression.
Bush and Baker considered this absolutely essential to the war. It's also essential today. That tends to be forgotten by the neocon hawks pushing Obama to send tens of thousands of U.S. troops back to Iraq to fight the Islamic State. First, the Iraqis don't want tens of thousands of Americans to return. Second, if the fight against the Islamic State looks like the revival of a U.S. war in Iraq, foreign jihadists will flood the place, and the new Iraqi government--which we're pressing to be inclusive--will back away.
The fighters of the Islamic State aren't ragtag hooligans, but they're not Hitler's Panzer Corps, they're not Saddam's Republican Guards, they're not even the Taliban. The fight isn't a cakewalk, but it doesn't have to be a huge struggle--if the Western politicians can get over their complexes about working with certain bad people in order to defeat even worse people.
Editorial on 08/22/2014