Overwrought over ISIS
Peter Eisenstadt
September, 10
This, from the New York Times this morning. ISIS has created “perhaps the most turbulent moment for the Middle East since the split centuries ago between Sunnis and Shiites. “ The usually level-headed Daniel Kurtzer, former US ambassador to Egypt and Israel added, ““I don’t think there has been anything like this since the 7th century.” Really?
Have Ambassador Kurtzer or the reporters for the New York Times ever heard of Genghis Khan and the Mongols, Tamerlane, the Crusades, the Ottoman Turks, the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, World War I, the Iran-Iraq War, the two American invasions of Iraq, and the various wars, on which I am not expert enough to list, of the Fatimids, the Mamuluks, the Ayyubids, and so on, etc?
I don’t mean to minimize the threat posed by ISIS. It certainly is a profound challenge in many ways, and perhaps, as has been suggested, the greatest challenge to the post-World War I European division of the Middle East into its current nation-states in a century. But ISIS is a relatively small fighting force. I can’t see it expanding successfully into Shiite controlled areas. It seems to be hated by all the players in the area, from Iran and Saudi Arabia, to Turkey and the United States. I think it will self-destruct, or be contained. Both Kerry and Obama have in recent days compared ISIS to a cancer, arguing that it can’t be controlled, only destroyed. But why can’t it be contained? Why is it different, say, from North Korea? We won’t be able to answer the question by likening it to cancer, ebola, or other maladies. (And of course, through our immune system, we contain, rather than destroy threats to our physical well-being but that is another story.) Our goal, in the current situation should be not to search for far-fetched historical or medical comparisons or metaphors, but to see ISIS as it actually is, a small bloodthirsty army of Islamic militants, murdering journalists, Shiites, Yazidis, or anyone else in their way, who took advantage of the power vacuum in Syria and Iraq to create a statelet.
Our path to war in Iraq was paved with puffed up descriptions of this sort, exaggerating threats to unreal proportions, making arguments about a war’s existential necessity, and then promptly and irrevocably blundering in. Please, New York Times and Ambassador Kurtzer, let us have a rational discussion about ISIS. Perhaps, or perhaps not, some sort of military intervention is called for. But such ridiculously over the top apocalyptic language will not help us in the calm, cool deliberations we need. Whatever ISIS is, it is not the most destabilizing development in the Middle East since the 7th century, or even over the past century. (My candidate: the discovery of oil in Persia in 1908.) Or even in the 21st century, where the US invasion of Iraq in 2002 remains the mother of recent Middle East destabilizing, a nightmare, from which, as the growth of ISIS shows, we are still trying to awake.