ISIS has proclaimed itself to be is a new
state, and beyond that, a caliphate. Let's for now agree the caliphate part,
with its references to ascendant Islam, is at best aspirational.
But upshot ISIS does have has the money, arms
and territory to qualify as a state, esp. in a Middle East where old
definitions of statehood are in tectonic (I'd like to say quantum) flux.
ISIS is a state that has been carved out of
the destruction of the Iraqi state — brought about by American arms — and the
civil war in Syria.
There's a lot about ISIS I don't pretend to
understand. Its military expertise has been attributed to the well-trained
officer corp of Saddam Hussein's military. But those guys, like Saddam, were
secular, not Islamist, not al Qaeda. How to explain the fusion of their
training and discipline with the most vile and punitive sort of Sunni
fundamentalism? Is this a fusion of convenience, as I suspect? It seems to be
working, so far.
Nor do I understand what American goals are in
this confrontation. Obama says not only degrade but, "destroy ISIS".
If ISIS is a state, however upshot, you can't
destroy it from the air.
To destroy a state takes invasion. (Readers of
military history and especially, in this context, of Victor Davis Hanson, will
know what I mean.)
But American "boots on the ground"
are forbidden. After Vietnam.
After the invasion of Baghdad.
So where are those boots going to come from?
A combination of Saudi boots and Iranian
boots, though Saudi Wahabism and Iranian Shiism are like Islamic matter and
anti-matter.
Look, the United States has an astonishing
military. Our fighter planes are technological marvels. I do sometimes wonder
what it would be like to have my seatbelt — or whatever — fastened while these
jets do their thing above all known military hoops.
Still, what are we sending these military
marvels to do?
It's not enough for our cameras to point at
Islamist atrocity. The more we absorb and react to these images the more there
will be of them.
(NEW MEDIA PROVOKES AND DISABLES EVERY BIT AS
MUCH AS IT INFORMS AND ENABLES.)
What are we trying to accomplish?
Seems to me we are trying to accomplish the
reconstitution of an Iraq that is truly gone for ever.
The Sykes-Picot agreement after World War I
soldered Kurds, Shiah, and Sunnis into a state that until lately has been
called Iraq.
The Kurds are pushing toward their own
national entity. (see http://www.salon.com/2014/09/24/viggo_mortensen_on_lord_of_the_rings_and_playing_an_american_at_last/)
The Sunnis have broken loose from a broken
Iraq to their own entity, for now called ISIS. (Do you imagine that if we
"degrade" ISIS the impulse driving it will disappear and not take
other forms?)
And then we have Bagdad, which is to say, no
matter how much we pretty it up, the Shiite rump of an erstwhile Iraq.
What are we fighting for?
War draws me, unsettles me, as it does us all.
But since this war is going to go on for a
long time — as all the generals have said —I'm going to try to sign off on
it, and give it as little mind as I can.
It being a boring undefined and endless war.
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