Great essays tell big truths. A deeply reported piece in next month’s
Atlantic magazine does precisely that, and in a way devastating to the
Obama administration’s thinking on ISIS.
“What ISIS Really Wants,” by contributing editor
Graeme Wood,
is going to change the debate. (It ought to become a book.)
Mr.
Wood describes a dynamic, savage and so far successful organization
whose members mean business. Their mettle should not be doubted. ISIS
controls an area larger than the United Kingdom and intends to restore,
and expand, the caliphate. Mr. Wood interviewed Anjem Choudary of the
banned London-based Islamist group Al Muhajiroun, who characterized
ISIS’ laws of war as policies of mercy, not brutality. “He told me the
state has an obligation to terrorize its enemies,” Mr. Wood writes,
“because doing so hastens victory and avoids prolonged conflict.”
ISIS
has allure: Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are believed to have
joined. The organization is clear in its objectives: “We can gather that
their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for
genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable
of certain types of change . . . that it considers itself a harbinger
of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world. . . . The
Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast
numbers of people.”
The scale of the savagery is difficult to
comprehend and not precisely known. Regional social media posts “suggest
that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass
executions every few weeks.” Most, not all, of the victims are Muslims.[...]
He quotes Princeton’s
Bernard Haykel,
the leading expert on ISIS’ theology. The group’s fighters, Mr.
Haykel says, “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition,” and
denials of its religious nature spring from embarrassment, political
correctness and an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.” [...]
Mr. Wood’s piece is bracing because it is fearless—he is apparently
not afraid of being called a bigot or an Islamophobe. It is important
because it gives people, especially political leaders, information they
need to understand a phenomenon that may urgently shape U.S. foreign
policy for the next 10 years.
In sorry contrast, of course, are the Obama administration’s willful
delusions and dodges. They reached their height this week when State
Department spokesman
Marie Harf
talked on MSNBC of the “root causes” that drive jihadists, such
as “lack of opportunity for jobs.” She later went on CNN to explain:
“Where there’s a lack of governance, you’ve had young men attracted to
this terrorist cause where there aren’t other opportunities. . . . So
how do you get at that root causes?” She admitted her view “might be too
nuanced of an argument for some.” [...]
