“Is This So Hard To Understand?”: Why Calling ISIS Islamic Only Plays Into Its Hands
If you want to help ISIS and Al Qaeda, then call them Islamic. That’s one of my big takeaways from this week’s White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), which I attended on Wednesday.
Speakers at the CVE summit, which featured counterterrorism experts, elected officials including the Mayor of Paris, law enforcement, and Muslim leaders, offered a few reasons for this proposition. First, it’s simply inaccurate. As President Obama said as the closing speaker of the day, ISIS and Al Qaeda “no more represent Islam than any madman who kills innocents in the name of God represents Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or Hinduism.” Obama also offered a sentiment very similar to the NRA mantra: Religion doesn’t kill people, people kill people.
I understand that some will dismiss that as political correctness. Well, maybe then these reasons will move those people. As Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) put it at the summit, ISIS wants us to believe its actions are based in Islam because it frames the conflict as a religious war between the West and Islam. This then enables these terror groups to claim they are the defenders of Islam, thus, assisting them in raising funds and attracting recruits.
But there’s another point raised subtly by some, including Obama, and more explicitly by Jordanian counterterrorism expert Suleiman Bakhit, whom I spoke to one on one, that has received little to no coverage in our media. ISIS and Al Qaeda not only want people in the Muslim world to think their actions are based on Islam, but they want Westerners to as well. Why? Because they hope that people will retaliate against Muslims living in the West for Al Qaeda and ISIS’ actions. If these Muslims are then subject to demonization, hate crimes or worse, the terrorists can tell Muslims: “See, the West hates Islam! That is why you should join us to fight them.”
Bakhit, who was also a participant at the CVE summit, interestingly mentioned the film The Battle of Algiers as instructive in understanding Al Qaeda and ISIS. This is the second time an expert has mentioned this film in this context, the first being Rula Jabreal a few weeks ago.
For those unfamiliar with this classic 1967 film, it tells the story about Algeria’s fight for independence from France in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. The Algerian National Liberation front (FLN) engaged in terrorist activities against the French. While FLN leaders knew they could not defeat the French military, they hoped that the French authorities would respond in a brutal and barbaric way against the Algerian population as a whole. Why? Because it would likely stir up more support for the independence movement by the masses of Algerians who were not part of the FLN. And that’s exactly what happened, with Algeria wining its independence a few years later.
ISIS and Al Qaeda understand they can’t defeat the West militarily, but they can, with as few as two people as we saw with attack on Charlie Hebdo, increase anti-Muslim sentiment across the West. In turn the increased alienation of some in the Muslim community from mainstream society makes it easier to recruit and radicalize.
That ties into the most common theme heard at the summit, namely that the lure of ISIS and Al Qaeda is to offer people on the fringes of society an opportunity to be a part of something. They use social media and peer-to-peer recruiting effectively by preying on the economically disadvantaged and marginalized, offering them self worth, similar to gangs. That, not any promises connected to the principles of Islam, was the key to ISIS and Al Qaeda’s recruiting success.
Another big take away was that while the summit was billed as a look at all violent extremism, in reality over 90 percent of the discussion focused on Muslims. But as the ADL’s Oren Seagal explained on one panel, in last 10 years, non-Muslim terrorism has killed far more Americans. I made that very point in my article earlier this week previewing the summit.
This approach can cause an inadvertent but tangible backlash to the Muslim community as Linda Sarsour, a Muslim American leader in New York City, correctly pointed out. Sarsour told me via email that by primarily focusing on Muslims, the summit “gives the green light to local and federal law enforcement agencies to subject us to unwarranted surveillance.”
Muslims clearly want to counter terrorism and overwhelmingly want to play a role with the government in preventing radicalization of anyone from our community—even though statistically we are talking maybe 150 people who have traveled to the Middle East from the United States to join ISIS, yet that is still uncertain. But trust is the key for this relationship to work. That very point was made by law enforcement and Muslim American leaders that had joined forces in three cities—Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Boston—as part of the federal government’s pilot program to counter radicalization.
Even President Obama noted “that engagement with communities can’t be a cover for surveillance” because “that makes it harder for us to build the trust that we need to work together.”
And Obama did his part to engender more trust with the Muslim community. He acknowledged that Muslims have been a part of the fabric of our nation since its inception and that many have served as police officers, first responders, and soldiers.
Obama also addressed anti-Muslim bigotry, mentioning the horrible murders of three Muslim American students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina last week. And in a particularly poignant moment, the President read a Valentine’s Day Card sent to him from a young Muslim girl named Sabrina who wrote, “I enjoy being an American. But I am worried about people hating Muslims…If some Muslims do bad things, that doesn’t mean all of them do…Please tell everyone that we are good people and we’re just like everyone else.”
Will the CVE Summit yield any results in countering radicalization? Will it cause a backlash against American Muslims? Time will tell. But the one thing I’m certain is that if you want to help ISIS and Al Qaeda, then by all means call them Islamic. If you want to defeat them, call them what they are: terrorists.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, February 19, 2015
“Paying For Bush’s 2003 Invasion Of Iraq”: Decision To Launch An Unwarranted Invasion Is Directly Responsible For The Chaos Today
As President Obama struggles to deal with the crisis in Iraq, it’s useful to remember who gave the world this cauldron of woe in the first place: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Their decision to launch a foolish and unwarranted invasion in 2003, toppling Saddam Hussein and destroying any vestige of the Iraqi state, is directly responsible for the chaos we see today, including the rapid advance of the well-armed jihadist militia that calls itself the Islamic State.
Bush has maintained a circumspect silence about the legacy his administration’s adventurism bequeathed us. Cheney, however, has been predictably loud and wrong on the subject of, well, just about everything.
“Obama’s failure to provide for a stay-behind force is what created the havoc we see in Iraq today,” Cheney told CNN last month. “When we left, Iraq was a relatively stable place. We defeated al-Qaeda, we had a coalition government in place.”
Cheney predicted “the history books will show” that Obama bears much responsibility for squandering the peace and stability that the Bush administration left behind. If so, they will have to be books that don’t go back very far.
Let’s review what actually happened. The U.S. invasion toppled a Sunni dictatorship that had ruled brutally over Iraq’s other major groups — the Shiite majority and the ethnic Kurds — for decades. It seems not to have occurred to anyone planning the invasion that long-suppressed resentments and ambitions would inevitably surface.
The leader of that “coalition government” Cheney mentioned, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, turned out not to be a Jeffersonian democrat. Rather, his regime acted quickly and shamelessly to advance a Shiite sectarian agenda — and to marginalize Sunnis and Kurds.
What followed, predictably, was anger and alienation among the disaffected groups. The Kurds focused largely on fortifying their semi-autonomy in the northeast part of the country. Sunni tribal leaders twice cast their lot with violent Sunni jihadist forces that stood in opposition to the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad — first with al-Qaeda in Iraq and now with the Islamic State.
Obama opposed the U.S. invasion and occupation from the beginning. He was nominated and elected president largely because of his pledge to end the war. He withdrew all U.S. troops only after Maliki refused to negotiate a viable agreement to leave a residual force in place.
Could Obama have found a way to keep more of our soldiers in Iraq if he really wanted to? Perhaps. But this would have required trusting Maliki, who has proved himself a far more reliable ally to the terrorist-sponsoring government of Iran than to the United States. And anyway, why would U.S. forces be needed to keep the peace in the “relatively stable” democratic Iraq of Cheney’s hazy recollection?
As I write, Maliki has barricaded himself inside Baghdad’s Green Zone and is refusing to leave office, despite that Iraq’s president has named a new prime minister. The United States has joined with respected Iraqi leaders to try to force Maliki out, but he holds enormous power — he is not only prime minister but also heads the Iraqi armed forces and national police.
Rewind the clock. If there had been no U.S. invasion, Iraqis surely would have suffered grievously under Saddam’s sadistic rule. But at least 110,000 Iraqis — and perhaps several times that many — died violently in the war and its aftermath. Is it likely that even the bloodthirsty Saddam would have matched that toll? Is it conceivable that the Islamic State’s ad hoc army would have even been able to cross the Syria-Iraq border, much less seize huge tracts of territory and threaten religious minorities with genocide?
Even after the invasion, if the U.S. occupation force had worked to reform the Iraqi military rather than disband it, there would have been a professional army in place to repel the Islamic State. If Maliki had truly acted as the leader of the “coalition government” that Cheney describes, and not as a glorified sectarian warlord, Sunnis likely would have fought the Islamic State extremists rather than welcome them.
Why is Obama intervening with airstrikes in Iraq and not in Syria, where the carnage is much worse? My answer would be that the United States has a special responsibility to protect innocent civilians in Iraq — because, ultimately, it was our nation’s irresponsibility that put their lives at risk.
Obama’s cautious approach — ask questions first, shoot later — may or may not work. But thanks to Bush and Cheney, we know that doing things the other way around leads to disaster.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 11, 2014
“Don’t Be Bashful!”: Anyone Here Miss Dick Cheney? Neither Do I
As Iraq ruptures into fragments, none other than Dick Cheney has shambled forth to blame Barack Obama.
“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong so much at the expense of so many,” the former vice president huffed in a Wall Street Journal column, blind to the irony of his own toxic self-righteousness.
No American political figure in recent history has been dead wrong as consistently as Cheney, or as loath to admit it.
It was he and George W. Bush who set in the motion the catastrophe now unspooling in Iraq. The decision to invade was peddled to Congress and the American people with a campaign of myth making that Cheney still refuses to disown.
Long after Bush was forced to concede that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and long after U.S. intelligence agencies affirmed that Saddam Hussein had no connection to al Qaeda, Cheney continued to promote these discredited scenarios to justify his own hyperbolic cheerleading for the war.
Remember, this is the same arrogant boob who predicted that U.S. troops would be welcomed as “liberators.”
It took nine years and a new administration to finally get our ground forces out of that sad and awful mess. Now Cheney is pathetically trying to elevate his lowly place in history by attacking Obama for letting Iraq go to pieces.
In truth, the collapse began March 19, 2003, the day we started the “shock and awe” bombing.
Hussein was a rotten guy who ruled with an iron first, but he had no tolerance for jihadist terrorists. Eleven years ago, al Qaeda steered clear of Iraq. Today the country is overrun by al Qaeda-inspired insurgents, leaving the United States at a far greater risk than before.
Thank you, George and Dick.
Unlike his retired vice president, Bush has shown the calm decency — and good sense — not to stir foreign-policy debates. Cheney’s whining and jeering only serves to remind Americans of his own disastrously bad judgment and needy ego.
The hero’s legacy that Cheney craves for himself belongs instead to those men and women who were sent by his administration to fight in Iraq.
Cheney himself never served in uniform, having avoided Vietnam by securing numerous draft deferments. His appetite for war arose later in his life, when he was no longer at personal risk, and has followed him into his spiteful old age.
His views on Iraq have provoked mass public eye-rolling. It would be hard to find someone with less credibility, or someone more callous to the sacrifices that have already been made.
Beyond the $2 trillion-and-counting price tag, the cost of the Iraq invasion and occupation has been enormous.
Officially: 4,486 American soldiers died in combat there, and 32,226 were wounded in action. The unofficial toll is much higher — nearly a million veterans of the war have sought medical or psychological treatment at VA hospitals since their return.
The exact number of Iraqi civilians killed during the long conflict is impossible to determine, but estimates start at 115,000 — and still there’s no peace. The country is being split by ancient religious feuds that were barely held to a simmer during the U.S. occupation.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has resisted U.S. pressure for him to include Sunnis in the government, and now he’s paying the price. His hold is so weak that many Iraqi troops (the ones we spent billions to train) dropped their guns and surrendered immediately to the insurgents.
Cheney’s op-ed column, written with his daughter Liz, dishonestly blasts Obama for abandoning Iraq. Actually it was Bush, Cheney’s own boss, who signed the agreement requiring all U.S. troops to be gone by 2011.
And it was still too long.
Obama won the White House campaigning on a promise to end the war, which he did. No one who’s been paying attention to the Mideast seriously expected peace and harmony to ensue. Only the Iraqis can fix Iraq.
Surprisingly, the two opining Cheneys didn’t call for a brand-new invasion. Liz probably talked the old man out of it. Brushed the crumbs off his bathrobe. Sent him upstairs for a nap.
Note to future presidents: Whatever advice Dick Cheney offers, do exactly the opposite and you’ll never go wrong.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, June 24, 2014
“Obama To Iraq, Your Problem Now”: Ultimately It’s Up To The Iraqis, As A Sovereign Nation, To Solve Their Problems
In his State of the Union address, in January, President Obama said, “When I took office, nearly a hundred and eighty thousand Americans were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, all our troops are out of Iraq.” It was a boast, not an apology. The descent of Iraq into open civil war in the past week has not, to judge from his remarks on Friday, fundamentally changed that view. He did grant that it was alarming that the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, “a terrorist organization that operates in both Iraq and in Syria,” had made what he delicately called “significant gains” in Iraq. (That is, it has taken control of more than one city.) He said that he wasn’t entirely surprised—things hadn’t been looking good in Iraq for a while, and we’d been giving the government there more help. “Now Iraq needs additional support to break the momentum of extremist groups and bolster the capabilities of Iraqi security forces,” he said. After all, as he put it, “Nobody has an interest in seeing terrorists gain a foothold inside of Iraq.” But there were limits: “We will not be sending U.S. troops back into combat in Iraq.”
Speaking from the South Lawn, Obama argued that this was not just a matter of what the American people would accept, or the limits of our capacity to make sacrifices for humanitarian goals. It’s more that he doesn’t see the point. As he sees it, after all our investment of lives and money—“extraordinary sacrifices”—the Iraqis have not been willing to treat each other decently, and until they do our air strikes won’t help. “This is not solely, or even primarily, a military challenge,” he said, and went on:
Unfortunately, Iraqi leaders have been unable to overcome, too often, the mistrust and sectarian differences that have long been simmering there.… We can’t do it for them. And in the absence of this type of political effort, short-term military action—including any assistance we might provide—won’t succeed.… So the United States will do our part, but understand that ultimately it’s up to the Iraqis, as a sovereign nation, to solve their problems.
The Iraqis, from Obama’s perspective, have all too many problems that are not his. The hesitation here is the sense that the problems are ours, too: we did invade the country, setting off an upheaval in which, alongside American losses, an even greater number of Iraqis were killed. But the Administration, as Dexter Filkins has written, has been thoroughly frustrated with the government of Nuri al-Maliki, which is dominated by members of the country’s Shiite majority, and has moved against its Sunni population. It is not a simple matter, if it ever was, of the people we really like (and who like us) against the ones who don’t. (Try factoring in the role of ISIS in fighting the Assad regime, in Syria, and our possible shared interests with Iran in Iraq, and you’re left with a chalkboard of squiggly equations.) One question to emerge from our wars is our susceptibility to a certain sort of blackmail by regimes we support: without me, there is Al Qaeda and chaos. When Andrea Mitchell, of NBC, asked Senator John McCain, who had been railing against the Obama Administration’s decision to withdraw troops in Iraq, whether Maliki could really be persuaded to change his ways, McCain replied, “He has to, or he has to be changed.” How that would be accomplished was, as always in Iraq—a land we seem to associate with the granting of wishes—left unclear.
Obama talked about intensive diplomacy; he mentioned all the options his military planners were looking at, and suggested that he’d take his time looking at them. He called this moment a “wake-up call” for the Iraqi government: “As I said before, we are not going to be able to do it for them.” And then, in case anybody had missed the point:
We’re not going to allow ourselves to be dragged back into a situation in which while we’re there we’re keeping a lid on things and, after enormous sacrifices by us, as soon as we’re not there, suddenly people end up acting in ways that are not conductive to the long-term stability and prosperity of the country.
Last year, Obama sat down for several interviews with David Remnick, the editor of this magazine, in which he made clear how profoundly he did not want to be dragged. Remnick wrote, of their conversation, “I pointed out that the flag of Al Qaeda is now flying in Falluja, in Iraq, and among various rebel factions in Syria; Al Qaeda has asserted a presence in parts of Africa, too.”
Obama replied, “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” Given that ISIS now controls cities in Iraq and trenches are being built around Baghdad, “jayvee” may not have been the word that he was looking for; it strikes one as a severe underestimation. Looking at the rest of what Obama said, though, it seems that the analogy he was looking for was just out of the frame: “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.” It’s a matter of kind, not capacity: if Albert Pujols puts on a Lakers uniform, that doesn’t make him Kobe Bryant.
Speaking with Remnick, Obama applied that notion specifically to Iraq: “Let’s just keep in mind, Falluja is a profoundly conservative Sunni city in a country that, independent of anything we do, is deeply divided along sectarian lines. And how we think about terrorism has to be defined and specific enough that it doesn’t lead us to think that any horrible actions that take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist Islamic ideology are a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.”
In other words, the horribleness of what is happening can be granted; so can the extreme Islamism of those horrible actors. That still doesn’t, per se, make it “a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.” (And those two elements—the threat and the wading—are clearly linked in the President’s calculations.) Obama, in his interview with Remnick, went on:
You have a schism between Sunni and Shia throughout the region that is profound. Some of it is directed or abetted by states who are in contests for power there. You have failed states that are just dysfunctional, and various warlords and thugs and criminals are trying to gain leverage or a foothold so that they can control resources, populations, territory… . And failed states, conflict, refugees, displacement—all that stuff has an impact on our long-term security. But how we approach those problems and the resources that we direct toward those problems is not going to be exactly the same as how we think about a transnational network of operatives who want to blow up the World Trade Center. We have to be able to distinguish between these problems analytically, so that we’re not using a pliers where we need a hammer, or we’re not using a battalion when what we should be doing is partnering with the local government to train their police force more effectively, improve their intelligence capacities.
“Failed states, conflict, refugees, displacement—all that stuff has an impact on our long-term security”; but brutally meandering wars, and all that stuff that goes with them, have an impact, too. When Remnick asked Obama if he was “haunted by Syria,” the President replied that he was “haunted by what happened,” but added, “I am not haunted by my decision not to engage in another Middle Eastern war.” Last month, in a speech at West Point, “haunted” was the word Obama chose when talking about his surge of troops in Afghanistan: “I believe America’s security demanded those deployments. But I am haunted by those deaths. I am haunted by those wounds.”
It cannot be absent from the President’s calculations that, just two weeks ago, he had to accept the resignation of General Eric Shinseki—a man he clearly liked and admired, not least for his insistence, a decade ago, that the enterprise in Iraq would be a bit trickier than George W. Bush let on—because of the dysfunction of the Veterans Administration. We’d never got around to adapting the V.A. to the needs of young men and women whose lives had been shaped and, in too many cases, shattered by their service in Iraq and Afghanistan. All Obama could say was that he’d brought them home. That was all, really, he wanted to say.
By: Amy Davidson, The New Yorker, June 13, 2014
“Beware Simple Solutions On Iraq”: Anyone Who Tells You Different Is A Dangerous Fool
With the situation in Iraq growing more grave by the hour, we’re going to be hearing a lot from the gang of cretins who brought us the Iraq War in the first place, who will now be emerging to tell us that it was all a splendid American victory until Barack Obama came along and screwed the whole thing up. (I can’t wait to see what Bill Kristol has to say when he appears on ABC’s This Week on Sunday.) More than anyone else, we’ll be hearing endlessly from President McCain, a man so uninformed he is unaware that ISIS, the group now controlling large parts of the country, is not actually the same thing as Al Qaeda. (“Al Qaeda is now the richest terrorist organization in history,” he said after ISIS raided the bank in Mosul.) But reporters and TV bookers are beating a path to his door, so important is it that the American people hear his wise counsel.
If there’s one thing you should keep in mind as this develops, it’s that anyone who says there’s a simple solution to the problem of Iraq is a dangerous fool. The people who started the war there thought that we didn’t need to understand the complexity of any situation in the Middle East—indeed, that the very desire for understanding was evidence of intolerable weakness. What was necessary was George W. Bush’s “moral clarity,” in which there are good guys and bad guys, and if there’s a bad guy we just have to be strong and go get ‘im.
It was 11 years and one month ago that Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” and declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” He went on to say, “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more.”
It was true that terrorist networks would be unable to acquire weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime. They would also find themselves unable to acquire a unicorn army from the Iraqi regime, or a cache of magic beans. What they would acquire, however, was a breeding ground for their ideology in a place where no amount of American blood and funds could create the thriving, stable democracy Bush and his allies imagined.
I don’t pretend to know how to solve this problem, or even if we can contribute anything but marginally to its solution. (In his statement about it today, President Obama worked hard to tamp down expectations about what we might accomplish.) But what I do know, and what anyone should be able to see, is that the situation in the Middle East today is inordinately complex. (Consider that our most important ally in helping prop up the Maliki government and defeating ISIS is none other than our friends in Tehran.) There will be lots and lots of people assuring the public that no, it’s actually quite simple: We just need to be strong and decisive. You know—like George W. Bush. And we know where that got us.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 13, 2014
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