On “60 Minutes,†the president faulted his spies for failing to predict the rise of ISIS. There’s one problem with that statement: The intelligence analysts did warn about the group.
Nearly eight months ago, some of President Obama’s senior intelligence officials were already warning that ISIS was on the move. In the beginning of 2014, ISIS fighters had defeated Iraqi forces in Fallujah, leading much of the U.S. intelligence community to assess they would try to take more of Iraq.
But in an interview that aired Sunday evening, the president told 60 Minutes that the rise of the group now proclaiming itself a caliphate in territory between Syria and Iraq caught the U.S. intelligence community off guard. Obama specifically blamed James Clapper, the current director of national intelligence: “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,†he said.
Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama’s interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,†the former official said.
Theodore Dalrymple turns his invariably-jaundiced eye in the direction of Britain’s homegrown homicidal Islamist fanatics.
With the downfall of the Soviet Union, Marxism lost almost all of its appeal for hormonally disaffected young men of the West, leaving them bereft of significance and purpose. Except for one group among them, they now had only a potpourri of causes (sexism, racism, the environment, etc.), none of which quite met the need or filled the gap.
The group excepted, of course, was the Muslims. Islam was waiting in the wings with a ready-made ideology. Nature hates a vacuum, especially in young men’s heads, which are all too easily filled with quarter-baked ideas. Islamism is so stupid, so preposterous and intellectually nugatory, and so appallingly catastrophic in its actual effects, that it makes one almost nostalgic for the days of Marxism. At least Marxism had a patina of rationality, and most of its adherents (in the West at any rate), while not averse to violence in the abstract, were willing to postpone the final, extremely violent apocalypse to some future date and did not believe that by blowing themselves up or cutting people’s throats they would ascend directly to the classless society or meet Marx in his pantheon. You could be a martyr in the Marxist cause, but only on the understanding that death was final. The best you could hope for was that, after the final victory of the proletarian revolution, you would have a postage stamp issued in your memory. This does not have quite the same attraction as an everlasting orgy in a cool desert oasis while everyone else is roasting eternally in Gehenna (no bliss is quite complete without someone else’s agony).
The other great advantage of Marxism, from the point of view of national security, was that it was not dominated by ethnic minorities (as Islam is, give or take some converts), so that, however vehement the language of Marxism or its imagined solutions to the world’s problems, its organizations were easy to infiltrate. The observed and the observer shared the same general culture; there was no foreign and unfamiliar tongue to learn; and though it had its jargon, it was easy to master. Moreover, very few young men in the West went off to join Marxist insurgencies around the world or posed a threat to their own countries when they returned. They preferred support in theory to participation in practice, certainly after World War II. Only the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War attracted Marxists to real combat.
But the sheer stupidity of a belief that is incompatible with the most obvious reflections on current reality and on history is, alas, no obstacle to its spread; and Islamism has been able to inspire, if that is quite the word, hundreds or thousands (no one knows exactly how many) of young Muslims from Europe, and a few from North America, to fight for Islamist causes in the Maghreb, the Sahel, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Among them are thought to be about 700 from Britain, the largest contingent of any Western country. Though France has a Muslim population twice as big as Britain’s, its jihadist contingent is estimated to be about half the size of Britain’s.
The South London accent and intonation of the apparent killer of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and David Haines, and the manner of the murders, have shocked and horrified people in Britain. Very little is known of the man, not even his ethnic origin: In London, a third of whose population was born abroad, there are so many possibilities, even among Muslims. But his joy in his own brutality, his sadistic delight in doing evil with the excuse that it was for a supposedly holy cause, in inflicting such a death under the illusion that it was a duty rather than a crime, was obvious. His “faith†allowed him to act out the fantasy of every dangerous psychopath dreaming of revenge upon a world that was not good enough for him and that otherwise failed to accord him the special notice or place that he thought he merited.
Michael J. Boyle, an assistant professor of Political Science at LaSalle, in the New York Times, wags his finger, and sermonizes against describing beheadings and mass murder as “immoral” because that might lead to US actions which could trouble his conscience.
Boyle provides a perfect example of the kind of liberal double-think which insists that murderous foreign barbarians are always entitled to complete immunity from morality, the Geneva Convention and other international law, and the rules and customs of war, but any American responses must always be subjected to microscopic ethical analysis and found to be free from any and all contamination by self-interest, world-wide disapproval, collateral damage, or potential untoward consequences of any kind before they can be regarded as licit and be supported by the pure of heart. The enemy is always immune to judgement, but the United States is always in the position of Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinner in the hands of an angry God.”
The beheading of American journalist James Foley by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, has rightly provoked global condemnation of the insurgent group and its horrific tactics. Yet it has also led to a disturbing return of the moralistic language once used to describe Al Qaeda in the panicked days after the 9/11 attacks.
In an eerie echo of President George W. Bush’s description of the global war on terrorism as a campaign against “evildoers,†President Obama described ISIS as a “cancer†spreading across the Middle East that had “no place in the 21st century.†Secretary of State John Kerry condemned ISIS as the face of a “savage†and “valueless evil,†while Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, called the group “barbaric.â€
There is no question that ISIS has committed thousands of grave human rights violations against civilians in Iraq and Syria, and that many of its most gruesome acts, like the execution of Mr. Foley, constitute war crimes. Anyone with a conscience is disgusted by their brutality toward not just Mr. Foley but the thousands of Iraqi and Syrian civilians whom they have killed, raped and even buried alive.
It is natural to want to condemn this organization and to do so in harsh language that fully expresses our revulsion over its tactics. Indeed, condemning the black-clad, masked militants as purely “evil†is seductive, for it conveys a moral clarity and separates ourselves and our tactics from the enemy and theirs.
But if the “war on terror†has taught us anything, it is that such moralistic language can blind its users to consequences. Describing a group as “inexplicable†and “nihilistic,†as Mr. Kerry did, tends to obscure the group’s strategic aims and preclude further analysis. …
he Obama administration should be very careful about lapsing into language about “destroying†the cancer of ISIS without thinking through, and articulating publicly, exactly what that would mean. The strategic drift produced by this moralistic language is already noticeable, as an air campaign first designed to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe has morphed into an effort to roll back, or even defeat, ISIS.
The Obama administration needs to ensure that the just revulsion over Mr. Foley’s murder and ISIS’ other abuses does not lead us down an unplanned path toward open-ended conflict. The language of good and evil may provide a comforting sense of moral clarity, but it rarely, if ever, produces good policy.
Bob Ellis is an illustrious Australian playwright, screenwriter, journalist, filmmaker, and political commentator. Ellis has attracted a great deal of international attention (and incredulity) for his hyper-sophisticated remarks yesterday wondering why there should be so much outrage over the beheading of James Foley by a representative of ISIS. If Joffrey Baratheon can have Ned Stark beheaded, after all…
Queen Elizabeth I, an English hero, beheaded her female cousin. Henry VIII, a popular English monarch, beheaded two of his wives. William Shakespeare, a popular playwright, beheaded no more than eighty of his major characters, including Macbeth, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Buckingham, Thomas More and twenty-four of Titus Andronicus’s sons. Charles Dickens, a popular novelist, beheaded his most admired character, Sidney Carton. The Simpsons, a popular television series, beheads in its Halloween specials eight or nine people a year, and in its subseries Itchy and Scratchy hundreds of others. The Simpsons is watched by hundreds of millions of children. And no complaint has been laid. Beheadings occur routinely in Game of Thrones. And no complaint has been laid.
Why then all the fuss? Why especially profess such shock at airbrushed images in which there is no horror at all and serve only, I guess, as Rorschach blots or shadow-puppet silhouettes of imagined beheadings or severed heads?
The only possible observation is that decadence, deracination, and over-exposure to left-wing BS damages the brain and anesthetizes natural human sensibilities, making some people unable to distinguish between contemporary reality and fiction.
Walter Russell Mead delivers, what Andrew Sullivan calls, “a majestically sweeping indictment of everything [P]resident Obama has achieved in foreign policy over the last six years.”
One wishes we had a Republican President right now if only because when a Republican is in the White House, the media and the chattering classes believe they have a solemn moral duty to categorize and analyze the failures of American strategy and policy. Today that is far from the case; few in the mainstream press seem interested in tracing the full and ugly course of the six years of continual failure that dog the footsteps of the hapless Obama team in a region the White House claimed to understand. Nothing important has gone right for the small and tightly knit team that runs American Middle East policy. Most administrations have one failure in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking; this administration has two, both distinctly more ignominious and damaging than average. The opening to the Middle East, once heralded by this administration as transformative, has long vanished; no one even talks about the President’s speeches in Cairo and Istanbul anymore, unless regional cynics are looking for punch lines for bitter jokes. The support for the “transition to democracy†in Egypt ended on as humiliating a note as the “red line†kerfuffle in Syria. The spectacular example of advancing human rights by leading from behind in Libya led to an unmitigated disaster from which not only Libya but much of north and west Africa still suffers today.
Rarely has an administration so trumpeted its superior wisdom and strategic smarts; rarely has any American administration experienced so much ignominious failure, or had its ignorance and miscalculation so brutally exposed. No one, ever, will call this administration’s Middle East policies to date either competent or wise—though the usual press acolytes will continue to do what they can to spread a forgiving haze over the strategic collapse of everything this White House has attempted, as they talk about George W. Bush at every chance they get.
Now, from the ruins of the Obama Administration’s Middle East strategy, the most powerful and dangerous group of religious fanatics in modern history has emerged in the heart of the Middle East. The rise of ISIS is a strategic defeat of the first magnitude for the United States and its allies (as well as countries like Russia and even China). It is a perfect storm of bad policy intersecting with troubled times to create the gravest threat to U.S. and world stability since the end of the Cold War.
The mainstream press and the professional chatterboxes of the news shows need to set aside their squeamishness at poring over the details of a major strategic failure by a liberal Democrat. The rise of ISIS/ISIL is a disaster that must be examined and understood. How could the U.S. government have been caught napping by the rise of a new and hostile power in a region of vital concern? What warning signs were missed, what opportunities were lost—and why? What role did the administration’s trademark dithering and hairsplitting over aid to ISIS’s rivals in the Syrian opposition play in the rise of the radicals?
The Iraqi army has 250,000 troops; its enemy, the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (ISIS), somewhere around 7,000, but the Iraqi Army has been losing. To understand why such a large army is so ineffective, one should read the classic 1999 essay by Colonel Norvell B. De Atkine.
Most Arab officers treat enlisted soldiers like sub-humans. When the winds in Egypt one day carried biting sand particles from the desert during a demonstration for visiting U.S. dignitaries, I watched as a contingent of soldiers marched in and formed a single rank to shield the Americans; Egyptian soldiers, in other words, are used on occasion as nothing more than a windbreak. The idea of taking care of one’s men is found only among the most elite units in the Egyptian military. On a typical weekend, officers in units stationed outside Cairo will get in their cars and drive off to their homes, leaving the enlisted men to fend for themselves by trekking across the desert to a highway and flagging down busses or trucks to get to the Cairo rail system. Garrison cantonments have no amenities for soldiers. The same situation, in various degrees, exists elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking countries—less so in Jordan, even more so in Iraq and Syria. …
The social and professional gap between officers and enlisted men is present in all armies, but in the United States and other Western forces, the noncommissioned officer (NCO) corps bridges it. Indeed, a professional NCO corps has been critical for the American military to work at its best; as the primary trainers in a professional army, NCOs are critical to training programs and to the enlisted men’s sense of unit esprit. Most of the Arab world either has no NCO corps or it is non-functional, severely handicapping the military’s effectiveness. With some exceptions, NCOs are considered in the same low category as enlisted men and so do not serve as a bridge between enlisted men and officers. Officers instruct but the wide social gap between enlisted man and officer tends to make the learning process perfunctory, formalized, and ineffective. The show-and-tell aspects of training are frequently missing because officers refuse to get their hands dirty and prefer to ignore the more practical aspects of their subject matter, believing this below their social station. A dramatic example of this occurred during the Gulf war when a severe windstorm blew down the tents of Iraqi officer prisoners of war. For three days they stayed in the wind and rain rather than be observed by enlisted prisoners in a nearby camp working with their hands.
