As Congress debates yet another authorization to use force in the Middle East, Americans remain divided on how to proceed. On one side, many Americans believe that, while weak, Obama's limited approach to intervening in the fight against ISIS is the proper course of action. After all, we have already blundered into three wars there in the last 25 years, none of which ever led to the securing of any lasting strategic objective. Committing to yet another war, especially one of the size and scope necessary to actually defeat ISIS, is unpalatable to most of us.
On the other side are the traditional hawks. They predictably want a broader resolution, enabling President Obama (and the next President) to wage a massive war, using ground troops, to secure an undeveloped objective over a period of decades. The arguments in favor of this approach are emotional and underwhelming. ISIS is an evil group, there is no doubt about that. But there is something unseemly about choosing to fight one evil group over the others just because it is, in our judgment, a little more evil. Saddam Hussein gassing the Kurds, for example, was pretty evil. Yet we left him in power for another decade.
The fact is, the war in the Middle East is just another sad chapter in a region of the world filled with millennia of sad chapters. Radical ideologies are nothing new in the Levant region. Unfortunately, neither are the brutal tactics currently being used to achieve dominance over the region. While it is true that American policy in the Middle East is partly responsible for the current crisis, it is exceedingly naive to believe that 50 or so years of Western intervention is the principal cause of a 1600 year old Islamic civil war. American policy is nothing more than the excuse du jour for another group of violent extremists to recruit young men to their cause. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether they are Sunni or Shia. They both hate America, and they only use America to the extent that they can gain an advantage over each other.
The hawks also argue that, if America is not part of the final resolution to the ISIS problem, then our influence in the Middle East will be diminished. This is outmoded thinking. American influence in the Middle East is entirely based on military and financial support. America is not ideologically aligned with any government in the region, except Israel, and even that relationship is strained. Our so called "allies" in the region have no loyalty to us beyond our ability to keep their governments wealthy and in power. That is not a sustainable model, which has been made painfully clear to us over the last 20 years with the rise of Al Qaeda and other groups who get their financial support from those same allies.
Finally, it is also possible that ISIS will win, consolidate power, and then successfully export terrorism and carnage to the United States and Europe. This is the most compelling argument in favor of fighting another war in the Middle East. We have already seen these sorts of attacks in France and Denmark, and we should make no mistake that ISIS is a threat that we should take seriously. If given the opportunity, there is no doubt that they would kill as many Americans as possible. They would like nothing more than to behead our neighbors in our own neighborhoods and televise it on the internet. But, to believe that the solution is to wage another limited war against radical Islam is to ignore the utter failure of the last 20 years. Our strategy of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqis and Afghanis failed. It failed so miserably in fact that the Taliban will soon be back in charge in Afghanistan and ISIS emerged out of the thin desert air the second we withdrew from Iraq. Using limited warfare to win the hearts and minds of the people in that region has been a spectacular waste of time, lives and money. It is no wonder that the American people, in their collective wisdom, are decidedly against another major conflict. There is a way to defeat radical Islam in the Middle East, but this is not it.
President Obama's approach, whether by accident or by design, has forced the regional powers in the Middle East to begin to defend themselves. It is horribly sad that last week ISIS murdered Coptic Christians on video for the world to see, but it is not our fault, and the Coptic Christians are Egyptian, not American. As a result of their actions, ISIS has now provoked the largest, most powerful country in the Middle East. The Egyptians are now motivated to destroy ISIS and have vowed to do so. The immolation of a Jordanian pilot has provoked a similar response from Jordan. In another example, the radical Shia group that just organized a coup in Yemen is not going to be friendly to the U.S. But, they also hate Al Qaeda, Sunni radicals like ISIS, and have already been engaged their own war against those groups. Delay and inaction has in fact forced other muslims to act to defend themselves and their own positions in the region. ISIS is now vastly outnumbered by better organized, better equipped militaries in Jordan, Egypt and Iran. They will fight to the death, but at least this time it will not be Americans dying in the desert for a bunch of people who have no use for us anyway.
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