How Has ISIS Impacted The Zeitgeist Of The Islamic World?

Just about everyone who has paid even a passing familiarity with current events in the United States has some awareness of ISIS, the extremists Islamic State formed by Sunni Arabs in Northern Iraq and Eastern Syria about three years ago rapidly gaining control of vast amounts of territory in a brief time using ruthlessly brutal tactics. Its atrocities are well known.

But, however much ISIS has been part of the U.S. consciousness (enough that a totally unrelated store in Denver named after the eponymous Egyptian goddess was regularly vandalized until it took down its sign), it has been ever present in the consciousness of people in neighboring Iraq, Turkey and Syria, and has more generally shared center stage with other developments on the international stage in much of the Islamic world since its very earliest days.

I have a pretty good idea about what kind of impact ISIS has had on public opinion and intellectual and political thinking in "the West" in the past few years. Maybe that is worthy of a post on another day. But, I really have no idea what intellectual, cultural and political impact ISIS has had in the Islamic world.

Certainly, some people have been inspired by ISIS, especially in the early days with it secured lots of foreign fighters and foreign funds to support it.

But, surely that has not been the only response. Surely, many people potentially in its path of expansion of feared that it will bring war, restrict their freedom, and destroy their economy, however much they do not love the regime they are currently under. Surely, many people see this expression of Islam as heretical and corrupt and an ill omen for the larger Islamic world where it or similar movements might spread - even Wahhabi Saudi Arabia has condemned it publicly and offered limited military assistance to opposing it.

On the whole, who has it tended to encourage more ISIS-like views of Islam and who has it tended to push in the other direction as a counter-reaction? Which has been the more common reaction? 

Has it brought other divisions within Islam, or at least Sunni Islam, closer together allied against it? Or has it driven wedges between Islamic factions?

What impact has it had on groups like the Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, loyalist theocratic forces in Iran, the ruling party in Turkey, and the political factions that insisted on giving Sharia law constitutional force in the new constitutions of Afghanistan and Iraq in their views about incorporating Islam in political life? Less specifically, how has it influenced political theory in the Islamic world?

Has it had an impact on how Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan view the Taliban?

As an outsider, it is very hard to find reliably information on any of these things, even though it is something that hundreds of millions of people around the world in many different countries are living on a daily basis. Questions like these remind me just how incomplete my sources of data about the world really are even in an age when information has never been more easily available.

End Near In War On ISIS?

After nine months, the Battle of Mosul has finally resulted in victory of Iraqi allied forces, and the titular capital of ISIS territory, Raqqa may fall soon as well. ISIS has suffered massive losses of soldiers, military equipment and facilities. Its cash flow from oil and other ventures is dwindling.

ISIS has lost 60% of its land since January 2015, with its holdings now reduced to a territory the size of Belgium. 

"Losing control of the heavily populated Iraqi city of Mosul, and oil rich areas in the Syrian provinces of Raqqa and Homs, has had a particularly significant impact on the group's ability to generate revenue[.]"

In Syria, ISIS has lost most of the territory to the north and western edge of its range that it controlled a year and a half ago. So far, most of the victories in Syria have not gone to Syria, which continues to lack control over much of its territory in an ongoing civil war with multiple factions that has produced a massive refugee crisis, but to rebel factions in its civil war.

Iraq seems to be doing a better job of reclaiming control of its territory, and it is mostly the Iraqi government together with Iraqi Kurds that are doing so. In Iraq, ISIS controls only two isolated blobs of territory along the Euphrates Valley, one near Mosul and one near Kirkuk (these two areas appear to be the current military priority for Iraqi lead forces at this point) and one small stretch of territory along the Tigris River near the Syrian border. 

Almost all of ISIS territory in both Syria and Iraq combined is largely cut off from access to the outside world. It has no ports, no aircraft or airports it can use, no border with Turkey, and no access to the main highways across the desert. 

The opponents of ISIS (does it have any sovereign friends?), who are mostly part of a U.S. led international coalition of forces, with particularly large Iraqi and Kurdish components, meanwhile, are continuing to attack its limited military and economic resources can to painstakingly slowly regain the territory that ISIS seized in the blink of an eye. Its opponents have complete control of the air space, advanced weapons, seemingly unlimited budgets for their troops, and greater numbers of troops. 

It may be largely a slow war of logistics and attrition at this point, but ISIS certainly seems to be losing it.

What Is Mostly Likely To Lead To A Use Of Nuclear Weapons Right Now?

Tyler Cohen posts on some plausible scenarios in which nuclear weapons might be used in the near future with the caveat putting "aside dirty bombs from terrorists and the like."

After analyzing the situation, he plausibly discounts the likelihood of nuclear weapon being used in a Pakistan-India conflict, but does identify two scenarios which a nuclear exchange might take place:

1.  North Korea threatens to use nuclear weapons if its demands are not met, its bluff is called, and it nukes a second tier Japanese city. He reckons that North Korea would fear retaliation if it attacked China, and might not want to bomb fellow Koreans in South Korea. Fear of retaliation and fear of a technical dud that would reduce its credibility might also discourage a strike on the U.S.

2. I'll let Cohen set out his second scenario:

[T]he United States and China are fighting a naval battle in the South China Sea, or perhaps further north, as part of a limited exchange, not a full war. The United States is about to win the battle, and the Chinese leadership fears a military or other Party-based coup in response. So they use nuclear weapons, perhaps tactical nukes, to turn the tide in the battle and save their skins. They figure the U.S. won’t respond with a full-blown nuclear war. (America, if it lost a comparable naval battle, is more likely to just turn tail and run, at least in the short run.) . . .   

My core model, by the way, is that political leaders are rational in the loose sense. So if you are looking for instances of possible nuclear weapons use, consider cases where politicians might be facing relatively dramatic “career-ending” events if they lose a smaller-level struggle.

There are some scenarios that Cohen doesn't consider that I think are also plausible: 

1. Suppose that Iran has come to the verge of having usable nuclear weapons and has rhetoric suggesting that it would use them against Israel. Israel might strike preemptively with its own nuclear weapons.

2. Trump uses nuclear weapons in a less than rational decision to deal with ISIS or Islamic terrorism more generally. This could take the form of a nuclear weapon on Raqqa, its capitol, or could involve the threat frequently invoked in right wing rhetoric of bombing Mecca.

3. There is a non-negligible possibility that China could use its own nuclear weapons against North Korea. As I've noted previously at this blog, there is no one who would ally with North Korea in a military conflict with China, China has a variety of internal reasons to demonstrate its military clout for internal political reasons, and North Korea's leader has no sense that he has bounds on his own conduct that can't be crossed so he could easily go overboard in provoking China at some point. For example, if North Korea threatened credibly to use nuclear weapons against "someone" and then refused to clarify that China wasn't on the list of potential someone's even if it was far from the top of North Korea's target list, China might make a preemptive strike against North Korea.

I do think that a Trump Presidency reduces the likelihood of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States over expansionary actions by Russia in the Pacific, or sparring between patrols in neutral territory between Russian and U.S. forces. Trump and Putin are on good enough terms that they would negotiate to resolve the situation and that Trump would back off from the defense of its allies if Russia tried to reclaim territory in Eastern Europe. This may be good news for the future of the survival of the planet, but this news is bleak if you are a newly independent Eastern European nation and want to stay independent. 

Indeed, in a nutshell, the circumstances where a nuclear exchange might occur involve situations where the logic of mutual assured destruction (MAD) that prevented a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War have broken down. The party using a nuclear weapon might plausibly imagine that they will not be nuked off the planet if they do so, and might even imagine that using a nuclear weapon was the only way to defend itself from an imminent nuclear attack from the target.

Thirteen General Features Of Revolutions

1. Revolutions almost always involve a regime whose legitimacy has been undermined in some way.

There are lots of reasons to be unhappy with a regime, but only undermined legitimacy will provoke a revolution.

Fights for legitimacy capture ancient instinct driven responses in people that go back all of the way to our hunter and gatherer days. We are hard wired to respond to leadership disputes in very particular ways.

Even very, very bad regimes (e.g. North Korea during its worst famines, Albania) won't face revolutions if the regime's legitimacy and authority is not seriously subject to question.

There is a myth that revolutions are caused by mismanagement of government, but, in general, that is not true. It takes not just disagreements on matters of policy and/or bad results, but a perception that the current regime is insane or controlled by outside conspirators or has engaged in impermissible corruption against its purported values, to make a regime or leader ripe to be replaced.

Regimes are more vulnerable to revolutions when the regime is not well established yet, are more vulnerable where they is a succession dispute or disputed election, are more vulnerable to revolution when ideas like "democracy" delegitimize the hereditary or other basis of the existing regime, are more vulnerable when regime leaders appear to defy or disregard the basis (religious, legal, or otherwise) that justifies their authority.

2. Revolutions are normally led by secondary elites in the existing regime.

To present a viable alternative to the status quo there need to be people who are suitable to serve as leaders of a new regime, particularly if they have been somehow slighted relative to their perceived entitlement. Even if the mass of the revolution is run by the masses, the revolution will usually be lead by young military officers, university students, union leaders, religious leaders, or disaffected aristocrats who won't be getting inheritances because they are younger children.

For example, when new political parties that turn out to be viable are formed and replace some existing major political party, the leadership of the new political party almost always includes experienced politicians of repute who have defected from their prior political party affiliations.

3. Revolutions need to create a sense of identity in the revolting population.

An ethnic or "national" identity can be particularly effective in this regard but isn't the sole available identification. Revolutions basically harness tribal instincts and are most effective when a "tribe" feels like it doesn't have any meaningful way to receive a fair shake through the status quo. One of the reasons that ISIS was able to take so much land so quickly in Iraq and Syria was that neither the Iraqi government, nor the Syrian government, both of which were dominated by non-Sunni Arab factions, seemed to provide a meaningful voice for Sunni Arabs.

It doesn't really matter if the policy differences for the "oppressed" tribe are really all that substantive, indeed symbolic differences are probably more powerful. Instead, what matters is an appearance of having no advocates for your "tribe" in the current regime.

Social class, if clearly enough delineated and felt by people can form a basis for a revolution, but if it is divorced from an ethnic identity, it is less likely to. For example, even though the economic interests of whites in Appalachia and blacks in the United States have lots of similarities, the lack of a shared ethnic identity has prevented them from forming viable coalitions with each other in the past few decades.

Even an oppressive caste or slavery system can be quite stable, so long as the legitimacy of the system is not cast into doubt, the oppressed "tribe" has no one to lead them from the elite, or it is hard for the oppressed population to see itself as not part of the same social and political system as their oppressors.

Religious affiliations can be a powerful way to create a sense of "tribal" identity and a source of crystalized sense of membership in an ethnicity which often tracks religious affiliation anyway, although these are hardly the exclusive means by which this can be accomplished.

4. Revolutions need a spark.

It can be almost anything - a woman refusing to take her designated place on a city bus, a single incident of police brutality, or an incident that victimizes a member of the revolting tribe that is viscerally humiliating or disgusting in a way the causes other to feel empathy.

But, without a triggering spark that creates a unified emotional reaction, the masses that need to rise up in a coordinated matter won't be able to mobilize. Contrawise, a good spark can trigger the early phase of a revolution even without much organization on the part of would be leaders, although it will only keep burning instead of puttering out if the other elements of a successful revolution are present.

5. Revolutions need to be mishandled by those in power.

If the existing regime can find a way to promptly defuse the revolutionary movement, it will die. Crushing early revolutionaries without mercy can also be effective if this successfully creates the appearance among the revolting populace that they are hopelessly outmatched. Thus, the regime must either demonstrate that it doesn't deserve to be the subject of a revolution (or that there are viable alternatives like political campaigns through ordinary channels to a revolution), or convince potential revolutionaries that it is hopeless to try, or both.

6. Revolutions need resources.

Successful revolutions, unlike unsuccessful revolutions that start but don't follow through, need a logistical basis of funds and personnel. It can be foreign or domestic.

Economics can drive this by creating a class of overqualified and underemployed people with the time necessary to commit to the cause and little to lose. A failure to co-opt almost everyone who is competent to lead a revolution or even simply to work in it as a follower, is a common failing of a regime that creates conditions ripe for revolution. For example, a lot of Islamic revolutionary action is driven by huge numbers of young unemployed men with theology degrees in Saudi Arabia in large families who have no way to prove their own worth and lots of time on their hands, freedom and a sense of privilege.

The labor movement thrived when competent people were kept out of management by accident of birth, and deflated when more meritocratic grounds for advancement plucked the most qualified potential union leaders into the ranks of management, both directly by depriving unions of resources and indirectly by creating a perception of opportunity that those who advanced from lesser conditions by virtue of merit created when they filled leadership positions.

A subset of this is religious backing. Religions thrive when they provide a cultural center for a threatened or oppressed culture, and wither organizationally when their creeds merely replicate the status quo establishment position. People back religions actively and with resources because they think this support is necessary for their culture to survive.

7. Revolutions need to inspire self-sacrifice.

Some of those personnel need to perceive the cost as just enough for it to be heroic to die for it, or at least to take great risks of ruin for it beyond personal advantage. Unless some key figures in the revolutionary movement see their efforts as advancing the greater good of a worthy cause, the revolution will fail.

Religiously based revolutions are often good at inspiring self-sacrifice, but religious revolutions have no monopoly on this and fear of a theocracy from a regime can be just as effective in many cases at inspiring this. Still, there needs to be something that some true believers can sincerely hold onto as being worthy of self-sacrifice without question.

8. Revolutions can easily fall into stalemate mode.

The more time passes, the less likely the insurgency is to be resolved finally for either party. Many revolutions and coups are swiftly successful or fail just as swiftly; but very long standoffs where the revolutionaries don't have the capacity to replace the regime in the near future, but the regime doesn't have the capacity to end the insurgency are common and can last for decades. Even 5% or 10% of the population that is absolutely convinced that the current regime is illegitimate is enough to keep a revolution going indefinitely, but that is not enough support to bring about a change in control. Regimes don't need mass agreement with their policies to succeed, but they need nearly uniform (certainly more than 99%) belief in their legitimacy to avoid a prolonged and difficult to manage insurgency.

9. Revolutions need to convince people that their conditional support will pay off.

While every revolution has die hard supporters on each side, lots of people are contingent and conditional supporters of whichever side that they perceive will prevail who are trying to act in their own best interests in a confusing time.

The appearance of a likelihood of success can dramatically chance the tides of an uprising, as the recent attempted coup in Turkey illustrated. The President's ability to access mass media and convince people that he was alive and in control caused lots of people to mobilize in support of his regime and to remain silent as he ruthlessly consolidated control.

The perception that you can win is as importance as the reality. This is why control of communication channels is so important during revolutions - it affects people's perceptions.

10. A revolution's leaders need to have enough of a vision to act decisively until things settle down.

A revolution, should it achieve temporary control has a brief honeymoon period, like any new regime, during which it has to show that it is in control and bringing about sweeping change that benefits the winners of the revolution and justified the cause. An appearance of incompetence, corruption, or lack of direction and vision and change, can open the door to a swift and successful counter-revolution by old regime elements who can show that they know what they are doing and what needs to be done, while disavowing the most abhorrent acts or individuals of the old regime.

11. Revolutions can happen at any scale.

A revolution can involve changes in group leadership at any level that is or can be made to become sovereign (i.e. accountable to no one above them in all material things in the near term) from a group of cast aways on an isolate or group of POWs in a camp, all the way up to whole nations or even groups of nations.

But, revolutions do not generally happen at any level that is less than sovereign, because subordinate units in a hierarchy that don't claim to be sovereign can almost always have any legitimacy or succession dispute resolved by those who are higher up in the hierarchy that it is a part of.

12. Revolutions tend to come in waves.

A strategy sufficient to undermine the legitimacy of one regime will often have a contagion effect and spread to other similar regimes (a la Arab Spring, the Revolutions of 1848, the Revolutions of the late 1800s that removed monarchies, created national identities and drove Latin American independence movements, the Communist wave of revolutions, the post-colonial independence movements).

These larger waves provide intellectual fuel to undermine legitimacy, economic and personnel support and training, a model for creating tribal identity, and by the success of the early versions of the attempt give hope for those following them that it is viable.

This hope is often misfounded as the homegrown version of the revolution is often more solidly organized, well planned, and tuned to local conditions to an extent often not recognized (unless the general approach is revised substantially for local conditions as Mao did for Stalinism). But, it still creates hope and people often don't look very critically at the prior revolutions about which they are often ill informed anyway in deciding to make conditional and contingent commitments to the revolution that are critical to its success.

13. Revolutionary Leaders Often Lose Control

This is point thirteen for a reason. Revolutions rarely go as planned. Revolutions can get ugly, and revolutions can be hijacked by people who hold different ideologies or by pure opportunists. The initial revolutionary regime is often not the last. Instead, cycles of unstable revolutionary governments until one sticks are common.

For example, the Russian and French revolutions cycled rapidly over periods of days and weeks. The U.S. soon replaced its confederation with the 1789 constitution. The Glorious Revolution was short. China's Republic lasted only a generation. Rome cycled rapidly through political upheavals.

Most 20th century revolutionary regimes cycled quickly through more than one regime before stabilizing.

45,000 ISIS Fighters Killed Since 2013?

U.S. intelligence believes that since September 2015 ISIL appears to have lost 25,000 fighters in combat (mainly in Syria, Iraq and Libya). . . . about 45,000 ISIL fighters have died since 2013. It’s believed that ISIL currently has only about 20,000 fighters available, mostly in Syria and Iraq. There are a few thousand more in northern Libya, eastern Afghanistan and Egypt. In all five countries ISIL is under heavy attack.

From Strategy Page.

Air strikes, about 75% delivered by U.S. forces, have been pivotal in destroying ISIS military equipment and bases.

Of course, ISIS (a.k.a. ISIL a.k.a. Daesh) have also inflicted horrific casualties on its targets.

For example, today's paper notes that the Associated Press with the help of local reports and satellite imagery has identified 72 mass graves of people killed by ISIS in which 5,000 to 15,000 people are buried, including almost all members of one tribe in the region, and large numbers of members of the Yazidi religion whom ISIS has attempted to genocidally exterminate.

ISIS has lots significant amounts of territory during the campaign from its peak, but the Syrian part of the conflict is profoundly complex with many players who have mixed loyalties.  Also many of the predominantly Sunni Arab people subject to ISIS rule are skeptical that the Shi'ite controlled and Iran allied Iraqi government is a desirable alternative.  People without good alternatives keep fighting for their side until a good alternative materializes, even if they are clearly outmatched and will suffer many casualties as a result.

Why ISIS Rose And What It Will Take To Defeat It

Vox offers a (very long) one sentence description of what drove the emergence of ISIS.  Broken down, it notes that:

* After the end of British, French, and Ottoman imperial rule in the early to mid-20th century, Arab leaders failed to establish anything like stable democratic societies. Instead, they imposed unpopular and brutal military dictatorships that prevented any real sense of national unity developing and squandered the region's economic potential.

* The Middle East's progressive and democratic parties failed, due to a combination of incompetence and interference, to put together a viable alternative to these regimes.

* This created a large population of people in the Middle East who were disenfranchised and looking for a new form of politics. During and after the Cold War, Islamism rose to fill that void: It appealed to an identity and a set of values that many in the Middle East shared and understood. This was part of a global revival of different forms of identity politics.

* Some governments — like Saudi Arabia's quasi-monarchy, quasi-theocracy — had an interest in helping spreading a fairly hard-line version of Islam, as it shored up domestic legitimacy. Radical Islamism also got a boost from foreign powers, as things like US support for Iran's brutal shah and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created understandable resentment that radicals were well-positioned to support.

* More recently, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring threw the Middle East's normal geopolitical order into chaos, creating a vacuum in which sectarianism (encouraged by a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia) became a powerful force. ISIS flourished in this kind of religiously polarized chaos, bringing us to the point we're at today.

This is on the right track although I would differ in some particulars and in context and emphasis.

1.  The vast majority of post-colonial regimes in the world experienced coups and/or devolved into dictatorship or undemocratic one party regimes.  Many of these countries are still in that political state and those have have emerged from that state generally did so only after many decades of non-democratic governance.  The Middle East's experience in this regard was the norm and not the exception.  Post-colonial regimes with continuous democratic government for at least part of the former colonial territory following independence, such as India, were the exception and even many of those exceptions (such as India from which Pakistan seceded in a bloody event followed by a subsequent split of Pakistan itself) still experienced a great deal of trauma in their early days.

2.  An important part of the fundamentalist and Islamist revival seen in the Middle East in the late 20th century was related to rising literacy levels which allowed members of the general public who had previously had access to the Koran and other religious texts only mediated through formally trained religious officials and scholars who delivered this information subject to many traditional glosses and interpretations of "hard passages" now receiving those texts unbound by traditional readings of these passages.

3. The Iraq War, with the acquiescence and even encouragement of U.S. and allied occupying troops, led to the dramatic ethnic and religious segregation of a society whose previous regime had suppressed ethnic tensions and produced a multi-cultural melting pot especially in urban areas.  After the war, Sunni and Shiite populations were overwhelmingly segregated after being motivated to do so at gunpoint.  Exiled Sunnis from urban areas often ended up dispossessed, bitter, angry and hating other ethnicities and the West in what is now ISIS territory.

4. The Syrian civil war was encouraged by the West during the Arab Spring period, particularly after its intervention in Libya and condemnation of the regime's tactics, but fear of conflict from Russia prevented the West from following through by supporting rebels who were more deserving of our support.

Now What?

The really essential point of all of this analysis is pretty simple.  In order to defeat ISIS, the people who are ruled by it need to have a better alternative.  We haven't offered them that and until they have an alternative they are stuck with supporting ISIS even if they greatly dislike that regime.

Rump Iraq have become Shiite dominated and verges on hostile towards Sunni Arabs, so rejoining Iraq is not a viable alternative.

Rump Syria is governed by a dictator who has bombed his own people, used chemical weapons against them, and ruthlessly "barrel bombed" markets and other civilian targets in areas that he does not control and is also supported mostly by members of the politically favored (in Syria) Alawite sect which is heterodox and hostile in the eyes of Sunni Arabs.

Other Arab Spring secular or at least not radical Islamist movements have completely failed to be effective.

There is really no existing grass roots "resistance" of note in ISIS territory of which we are aware.

In my view, the best alternative that can be quickly organized and have credibility with the people now ruled by ISIS is to either annex that territory to the Kingdom of Jordan, or to make ISIS territory a Jordanian protectorate.  In principle, Lebanon, Turkey or Saudi Arabia could also fill that role, but none of them are as well suited to the job and as acceptable to the West as Jordan.

A self-governing republic, in theory, would be better.  But, in practice, the constitutional monarchy in Jordan has been more successful at creating a tolerable state for its citizens than any of the nations which tried to form self-governing republics in the region.

Iraq and Syria do not deserve to have territory that they were unable to hold returned to them.  Iraqi Kurdistan deserves independence.  There are some border areas that might best be returns to Syria or Iraq or a new independent Iraqi Kurdistan, but basically, the territory of ISIS now makes sense as a new political unit even though the regime that rules that territory is an abomination.

In the longer run, if the world community wants less developed countries to have more palatable political systems, it needs to develop models that are capable of functioning serviceably in those countries for prolonged periods of time with the human capital that is available in those countries. The initial effort to impose Western political institutions, courts and legal codes built up over many centuries and supported by a very different pool of government officials and politicians and lawyers and the like educated and trained to fill those roles within institutional cultures groomed over time failed.  Those institutions and arrangements didn't meet local needs with local people, and almost inevitably collapsed as a result.  The rare exceptions, like India, were countries where an indigenous middle class was already in place and filling a large share of all governmental posts at the time that independence was achieved.

In the area of political development, the best has been the enemy of the good and has produced widespread catastrophe.  In contrast, countries that postponed full independence and spent additional decades developing its self-governance capacity as a territory, protectorate or province of a developed country, have generally prospered greatly compared to comparable countries that gained independence right away.

No one is suggesting that any independent countries that are managing for better or worse should be restored to colonial status.  But, where independent republics have become failed states, as Syria and Iraq have in ISIS territory, there is no sovereign republican regime to respect.

If we do not take action to fill the political vacuum because we are "angels", fools will rush in and impose far inferior arrangements that local residents and the world will be stuck with indefinitely.

One cannot remove a regime without replacing it with another.  And, so, we urgently need to find a replacement regime for ISIS before we can hope to make any progress in our attacks upon it.  So long as the people ruled by ISIS are cornered and have no alternative, they will continue to support the ISIS regime no matter how much they dislike it, because they have no other choice.

Daesh?

Following the Nov. 13 terror attacks in Paris, the French and U.S. presidents, as well as the U.S. secretary of state, attributed the attack to "Daesh" instead of Islamic State.

The terror group hasn't changed its name, but Western politicians are finally using the term our Middle Eastern allies have always used and prefer we do as well.

We should stop using "Islamic State," "ISIS," and "ISIL" and call them Daesh. For several reasons.

Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the terror group's self-declared banner — "al-Dowla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham." That translates in English to "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant." The Levant refers to countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean. Those under their occupation in places like Mosul and Ramadi are severely punished and permanently maimed if they don't use the full title. The terrorists consider it an affront and insult to be referred to as Daesh. That's reason enough to use the term.

This summer I was sternly corrected during a conversation about the situation in Iraq. I was speaking Arabic but thinking like an American, and used the term "al-Dowla al-Islamiya." My friend Emad, a former Iraqi army major who fought side-by-side with U.S. forces and who is now a U.S. citizen, said, "Mitch, you must never, ever use the terms 'Islamic' or 'state' to describe them. You just gave them legitimacy by saying those words. They are assassins and mercenaries. They are neither Islamic nor are they a state. They are far worse than anything you or I fought against when we were there."

From here.

Language Log has audio clips of the pronunciation of Daesh and the term is discussed in the comments here.  More in depth analysis and commentary here.

The thing that makes "Daesh" a particularly odd bird linguistically is that unlike Indo-European languages where acronyms are commonplace, Arabic apparently rarely uses the device of forming acronyms which are then used as words.

I'm also ambivalent about the virtues of using an English acronym as opposed to an Arabic acronym that refer to the same words in the respective languages.  And, while their opponents may not wish to grant ISIS legitimacy to a group they see as assassin's and mercenaries, I'm not sure that using an Arabic acronym that contains the words "Islamic State" really conveys that more clearly than an English acronym that contains the same words.

Also, the reality on the ground is that ISIS is an organized group of people who control a large swath of contiguous territory and rule over people in that territory to the exclusion of any other sovereign, which pretty much satisfies the definition of "state" no matter what you choose to call it.  I'm generally against propaganda that crosses over the line of being counterfactual.

And, while ISIS may be beyond manners, deliberately choosing an identifier for someone or something because the person or thing identified really dislikes that choice of language is juvenile and can complicate future diplomacy which will probably be necessary in some form or another.

The Friday The Thirteenth Massacre In Paris And Its Root Causes

A few thoughts on the multiple terrorist attacks on Friday evening in Paris.

France

* Some news reports state that it took three hours for police to enter the scene at the rock concert hall where terrorists with assault rifles killed and wounded a majority of the victims of this attack.  Law enforcement learned that the rules are different in hostage situations where there is an active shooter sometime around the time of the Columbine shooting in Colorado.  The French need to learn that lesson now.  This is the one respect in which the official response in France can be seriously faulted.

* It is striking that most of the attacks last Friday and back in January, were concentrated in just one or two Parisian neighborhoods, presumably due to their symbolic power.

* It is too early for police gathered evidence to reliably confirm that this attack was actually conducted by ISIS, but since ISIS claimed responsibility after the fact, it is legitimate to strike back against ISIS whether its claim of responsibility was true or not.

* The French military's experience fighting Islamist insurgents in Algeria, insurgents in Mali, and Boko Haram in the African Sahel, should serve it well should it choose to go beyond its bombing raid on the ISIS capitol on Sunday to some sort of ground campaign against ISIS.

* Some analysts are arguing that the strikes in Paris may be a response to military defeats in Iraq.  It is an interesting theory, but I'm not convinced.  There have also been hints, for all intents and purposes no more credible than rumors yet, that the train terrorist attack thwarted by off duty U.S. servicemen may have been planned by the same person or group that conducted the latest round of terrorist attacks, and perhaps also the earlier round of attacks in January.

* The terrorists in the latest massacre have spurred France to action and made it afraid in a way that it hadn't been until now.  But, ultimately, this massacre was a bee sting to a nation that is still secure and powerful and has integrated much of its Muslim population into its society.  One of the "good guy" martyrs in the January attacks was a French Muslim cop.  Yes, at least one attacker this time was a Syrian refugee and others had been foreign fighters in Syria.  Others were French citizens, but only a small number of insurgents lurk among a million or more loyal French Muslim citizens of recent immigrant heritage.

* The risk of mistakes from rash action here to France are greater than the risk of taking only more thoughtful action.  France has suffered a horrible tragedy, but even including the deaths and injuries it has suffered from terrorism in its crime statistics, it has still experienced much less homicide and violence than gun drenched Americans suffer in every ordinary year.  This is true despite the fact that its politics of general strikes, and extreme union tactics, are much more extreme and violent than American politics (or perhaps, the certainty that violence won't cross critical thresholds makes other street political action possible).

* France can't predict and stop every terrorist incident.  But, snatches of intelligence released in the news suggest that it isn't totally oblivious to the real risks either.  It has room to improve its anti-terrorist efforts while maintaining a human and democratic free society, even if it can never be perfectly successful.  But, it isn't starting from nothing either.  France needs to remember the importance of preserving its soft power, which the U.S. has too often forgotten to do in its long running war on terrorism.

The Middle East and Its Neighbors

* Neither Syria nor Iraq have capable without outside assistance of asserting de facto control over large swaths of their own territories, despite the inferior military equipment of ISIS.  They haven't even managed to do so with a coalition of powers led by the U.S. providing airstrikes and recent Russian intervention on behalf of the Baathist regime on the ground and from the air.

* Half of the population of Syria has been displaced, and many millions are refugees - some nearby in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, others making their way to Europe and beyond.  Thousands of refugees have died on the way, with losses particular high among those trying to travel by boat across the Mediterranean.

* Also, keep in mind that before its civil war, Syria had been home to millions of Sunni Arab refugees, mostly from predominantly Shiite areas of Iraq.  Many of them are now twice displaced.

* Who can fault the refugees for fleeing this horrible situation? On one side they have ISIS.  On the other they have an undemocratically selected rump Baathist regime that has used chemical weapons on its people, indiscriminately bombed its own cities and towns with airplanes, and dumped crude "barrel bombs" from helicopters on marketplaces full of its own people.  Only a reign of terror has allowed the regime to hold onto what it continues to control.  Food supplies are scarce.

* In part, the economies of Jordan and Lebanon may in the end be helped as much as hurt by the influx of newcomers.  Human capital matters more than physical capital.

* A significant share of Syria's territory is held by neither the rump Baathist regime nor ISIS.  The varied rebel forces holding this territory are not as bad as ISIS, but some of them are only a little better.

* The most optimistic development in the situation has been the development of grass roots civil society organizations doing their best to meet local needs in the face of insurmountable armed opposition from multiple sides.  Purported governments in exile formed from leaders of early rebel movements seem largely irrelevant at this point, however.

* The first of the Arab Spring revolutions, in Tunisia, seems to have resulted in a fragile but improved democratic government.

Libya's regime was deposed with our help in a campaign of bombing orchestrated by Hillary Clinton, but the nation is divided between competing successor regimes and order has not been fully restored.
Egypt had a revolution and a brief elected government, but an Army coup, fearful of the intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood backed winning coalition has put itself and its puppet back in charge.  It increasingly looks like a Russian aircraft crash leaving Egypt was bombed by ISIS.

To some extent our actions, particularly in Libya, led on Syrians to revolt too, although Russian opposition to outside intervention played a major part as well.

* Yemen's ugly and mostly ignored civil war had little to do with Arab Spring and it was a fragile democracy for a while, but its civil war is ongoing and all of the sides hate the U.S.  In hindsight, unifying North Yemen and South Yemen was a horrible idea that sowed the seeds of the current horrible civil war there.

* Saudi Arabia and the other Arabian oil monarchies are officially anti-ISIS.  But, there is good reason to suspect that non-regime factions in these affluent societies are fueling ISIS and other Islamic radical movements worldwide from the 9-11 attackers, to the Taliban in Afghanistan, to foreign fighters and funds that keep ISIS and other affiliates of it worldwide afloat.  Saudi Arabian involvement in Yemen's civil war has perpetrated indiscriminate attacks that have killed many civilians there and its motives in that conflict should be questioned.

* Iran has played the turmoil well.  The U.S. has neutered its Afghan neighbor to the East and its Iraqi neighbor to the West.  It has secured eased sanctions with a deal on its nuclear program.  U.S. actions segregated Iraq religiously leaving most of the Iraqi territory on the Iranian border firmly in the hand of provinces which have much smaller non-Shiite minorities and rump Iraq controlled by a civilian government that is a good friend of Iran.  Rise of ISIS is not unrelated to the religious and ethnic segregation that occurred as a result of U.S. occupation of Iraq following the Iraq War which fanned extremism and ethnic nationalism there, and ISIS has shifted focus away from Iran's wrongdoings.  Iran's homegrown political system has also emerged from years of international sanctions as a resilient Islamic democracy, which while not up to Western standards of human rights and electoral fairness, is still a state where elections do matter, rather than a dictatorship or one party state.  Its theocratic leadership has filled the role of a transitional constitutional monarch, with real power and a final say over key issues, but delegating considerable power to elected civilian leaders.

Iran has also quietly backed the Baathist regime in Syria, by encouraging fights among other factions there, and continued to back its anti-Israeli militias in Lebanon.

* Turkey hasn't necessarily improved its situation, but has managed to maintain domestic order and avoid mistakes that could have left it worse off.  On the whole it is managing the situation as well as could be expected.

* If there are any "good guys" in the conflict who can fairly be said to share of goals for the most part for the region, it is the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds and the Yazidi people whose genocide our intervention prevented with Kurdish assistance.  Despite Turkish discomfort with their Kurdish minority, and rump Iraq and rump Syria's insistence on preserving the pre-conflict status quo, the Kurds are long overdue for payback for their efforts and have among the most functional civilian self-governments in the region, as well as being one of the most "liberal" Islamic ethnic groups in the region by Western standards.  Why should U.S. diplomats insist that the Kurds remain subjected to the ineffectual, openly Shiite biased, and Iran-aligned rump Iraqi government whose military prowess has been pathetic as well, as opposed to being a sovereign states which is how they are acting in fact?

A Kurdish national homeland in the region would be a bastion of stability, democracy and tolerance compared to its neighbors (apart from Turkey).  And, unlike most of the other factions in the Middle East, the Kurds aren't obsessed with anti-Israeli or anti-American fervor.

* Israeli-Palestinian conflicts have gone on as usual, with periods of more and less intense conflict and no end in sight, despite all of the static in the region.

* Afghanistan is still at war with the Taliban, fourteen years after the U.S. intervened decisively in the Afghan civil war that it has almost won against it.  The related insurgency in Pakistan's frontier provinces is also still ongoing.  The U.S. installed regime in Afghanistan seems capable of holding onto control, but it has a fragile grip and is still fighting a low level civil war than flares up occasionally in parts of the country.  Those areas where the regime remains in control aren't always much to write home about, but the Taliban controlled area and the places where the fighting remains hot seem to be much worse.

Europe

* The refugee situation has made the Syrian civil war "Europe's problem" whether it likes it or not.

* In some ways Europe is well equipped to receive Muslim immigrants.  As a result of the Holocaust, most of Europe's Jews were either killed or fled to Israel or the U.S.  Most countries in Europe are secular leaning but historically Christian with significant Muslim minorities already.  In Germany, Muslim minorities are heavily Turkish.  In France, there are many Algerian Muslims.  In the U.K., there are many Pakistani Muslims.  Spain and Italy already had significant numbers of North Africans.  Even Scandinavia has taken in a significant minority of Muslim immigrants.  Integrating a large new wave of Muslim immigrants into their societies is not an entirely new problem for them.

* Countries like the U.K. and Germany are spending on the order of $1,000 per month per refugee per year to meet their needs, and there have been serious discussions of ways to shift the burden that nations closest to the border are facing.  Winter is coming and the need may increase.  European countries have mostly stepped up to the moral challenge of making a serious effort to treat refugees humanely, despite the growing unpopularity of this stance.

* Europe is also much more dependent upon Middle Eastern oil than the U.S. is, especially now that Russian intervention in the Ukraine has caused the rest of Europe to rule out reliance of Russian resources.

The Big Historical Arc

* Arab Spring has increasingly looked more like Europe in 1848, a round of European revolutions against monarchs that failed.  All of the Middle Eastern and North African monarchies remain secure with dissent there promptly crushed, even Jordan which is burdened with something like half a million refugees.  The only revolution that has tentatively left its people better off was the first in Tunisia.  Egypt has gone sidewise.  Libya has as much bad news as good and is neither a win nor a loss.  Syria was a disaster.

* The post-World War I settlement that defined the boundaries of the modern Middle Eastern nation states, as modified by the post-World War II creation of Israel, is in a state of piecemeal, but seemingly inevitable collapse.

* It is time for the U.S. to abandon the increasingly untenable dream of maintaining that settlement and time instead to imagine a new, more robust and stable alternative that can secure the backing of the people of the Middle East as they are today.

* The West has the military and economic might to obliterate ISIS, Boko Haram, and many other Islamist radical groups around the world, and to force Syria's war criminal led Baathist regime to capitulate and step down.  It has not yet decided that it is worth the cost in blood and treasure and a long term, locally resented colonial commitment to do so.  But, it is important to recognize that lack of fortitude, focused commitment to the cause, and ruthlessness is central to the reason that these groups can be effective enough to survive.  The costs may not be worth the benefits of doing so, because ultimately, no situation will be stable until it is accepted as legitimate by the local citizens.

A Strategy In The War On ISIS?

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is ultimately a theocratic dictatorship, and like almost all dictatorships past and present, the security of its rulers is insured by an elite military force lavished with resources and chosen for its loyalty.  In the case of ISIS, this is an elite brigade of about 4,000 troops called the "Shield of Islam" which is heavy with foreign fighters of whom the Chechens are particularly feared.

Apparently, the behind the scenes strategy of the U.S. and many of its allies in the air power and special forces oriented fight against ISIS is to destroy the Shield of Islam on the theory that if this unit that plays a central role in securing the authority and power base of the regime is destroyed or experiences major desertions, that the regime too will soon fall.

This may or may not work, but it is the most sensible strategy I've heard yet.  It shows real promise of felling the ISIS regime.

But, it does have one serious problem.  What if it succeeds?

We still have no back up plan for when the regime collapses.

There does not appear to be any serious organic resistance movement within ISIS controlled territory that could be installed as the legitimate government of these territories if ISIS were to collapse from the top down.

We have not offered the people now ruled by ISIS no alternative regime to offer them but the rump regimes of non-Kurdish, non-Sunni Iraq, and loyalist Syria which perpetrates horrors on its own citizens in a truly gruesome civil war that has displaced half of the nation's population.

Given those choices, people now ruled by ISIS may be willing to tolerate the abominations imposed by ISIS on that theory that the ISIS regime, like the theocracy in Iran, may eventually moderate itself, and that ISIS at least offers them a nation-state and some measure of self-determination, rather what appears to them to involve perpetual subordination to factions that hate them in a multi-ethnic state.

Non-Kurdish Sunni Arabs in Iraq and Syria have no interest in being ruled by regimes controlled by Shiites or Kurds.  This didn't work out for them in either Iraq or Syria in the recent past, and neither the rump regimes in these countries, nor the U.S. and its allies, have given them any reason to hope for better if ISIS collapses.  A substantial minority of Sunni Arabs in both places are exiles from Shiite and Kurdish dominated areas of Iraq who were driven out in U.S. tolerated ethnic cleansing campaigns by paramilitary sectarian private militias during the Iraq War.  The memory is lost to no one.  And, Iraq demonstrated dramatically in the fall of Ramadi, that Shiite Iraqi troops are not willing to risk their lives, even when they vastly outnumber their opponents, to reclaim Sunni Arab territory populated by people whom they presume will be disloyal to Iraq if Iraq could have managed to hold this city.

* * * *

As an aside, another truly remarkable development also related to the Chechens who figure so prominently in the Shield of Islam brigade that imposes the iron hand of the ISIS regime on its people and territory and other troops, has taken place.

Russia went to the mat in a brutal counterinsurgency against Chechen rebels not so long ago.  But, rather than decapitate the Chechen insurgency, they identified one of the strongest rebel sympathizing moderate political leaders and cut a deal with him.  In exchange for loyalty to Russian and to Vladamir Putin personally, they could get autonomy and earn respect as the Russian leader's bulldogs in disputes foreign (such as the "covert" Russian war in Eastern Ukraine), and domestic (e.g. assassinating and intimidating political opponents).  Significant emigration of Islamist Chechens to be fighters in Iraq and Syria for ISIS has been tolerated as a safety valve that gets these militants out of Russia for the time being, even though the rump Syrian regime that they are, in part, fighting against has in principle been a long time Russian ally.

As a result, one of the most powerful internal military adversaries of Russia has been transformed almost overnight into one of Russia's most loyal forces.  The toughest Chechen soldiers who just a decade ago were sworn enemies of Russia now sincerely proclaim their willingness to die to advance the whims of Vladamir Putin.  This is arguably the biggest military about face since the Emperor of Japan signed the Treaty ending World War II and irrevocably shifted his countries alliances from the World War II axis powers to the World War II allied powers, particularly, the United States.  It is the story of the new hit movie "Minions" of a cadre constantly seeking the most powerful evil villain to support and readily changing loyalties when their old leader fails, without all the cuteness and dance numbers.

Arguably, Vladamir Putin's strategy to deal with the Chechen rebels is exactly the opposite of the one that rumor has it (as reported earlier in this post) the U.S. and its allies are employing against ISIS.  Rather than trying to sever its head, which might lead anarchy (as efforts to kill drug cartel leaders have in Mexico), Russia's military suppressed every other aspect of the Chechen rebel organization while leaving a leader of their movement strong enough to negotiate a dirty armistice that would work on terms tolerable to each side.

* * * *

As I see it, the official objective to put Iraq and Syria back together again the way that they were before ISIS declared its existence is a lost cause.  That ship has sailed, although some critical oil fields and territory on the margins might be reclaimed.

Sunni Arabs, mathematically, are always going to be a minority in a multiethnic Iraq, since Shiites have a pure majority of the Iraqi population.  Years of the government by the consensus of a multiethnic triumvirate of Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds in Iraq failed dismally during the years when we tried to impose it in order to preserve the territorial integrity of the pre-Iraq War Iraq.  Moreover, our own complicity in the ethnic segregation of Iraq during the Iraq War has destroyed almost all of the once numerous multiethnic communities of Iraq and inflamed hatred between Iraq's various religious sects.  Even if a non-sectarian multi-ethnic regime to replace Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq could have worked had it been promptly implemented in the first hundred days or so of the Iraq War, by the time we left Iraq this option was no longer viable.

If we want stability in this part of the Middle East without a costly indefinite Western occupation fighting a never ending counterinsurgency operation, there is really no good alternative to a traditional, relatively ethnically and religiously homogeneous, nation-state of some kind for Sunni Arabs in this region.

This means that there are basically three alternatives that we could offer to the people now ruled by ISIS to inspire them to replace the status quo:

1.  Negotiate a treaty with a senior ISIS leader with the power to control the regime under which the sovereignty of ISIS over most of its territory would be confirmed, in exchange for discontinuing its most repugnant practices, and allowing for the safe exile of minority religious populations and other asylum seekers whose security cannot be safely entrusted to the Islamic state.  If necessary, kill other senior ISIS leaders with the guidance of the deal maker, to remove opposition to the plan.

2. Promise to, and do establish ISIS territory in Iraq and Syria, with minor adjustments at the margins, as a protectorate of the most friendly available Sunni Arab regime that is willing to step up to the job, such as the King of Jordan or Turkey, if the people allow the ISIS regime to be crushed.  The protectorate country would need to be willing to rapidly deploy an occupying army into ISIS territory if the ISIS regime collapses to minimize any period of chaos between regimes.

3. Use an overwhelmingly large multinational force of ground troops to retake and occupy all ISIS territory as quickly as possible, and then to establish a Sunni Arab regime to our liking there that secured buy in (in exchange for political power) from local power brokers on the model of Afghanistan which handed out control of provincial capitals, local governments and legislative posts to former warlords and their allies.  Presumably, Sunni tribal leaders would play a prominent role in the new regime.

In either case (2) or case (3) above, once a civilian regime has been installed and reached a basic level of functionality, and counterinsurgency actions have subsided, there is good reason to think that the foreign military presence could be then greatly reduced.

We have not won the war against ISIS until an alternative for the Sunni Arabs that is accepted as legitimate exists, and there is really no way to do that without carving up Iraq and Syria, neither of which are capable of maintaining their own territorial integrity without massive outside military intervention on behalf of regimes that have  done nothing to show that they deserve to be propped up in this manner with outside military resources.

What Is The End Game In The War Against ISIS?

The Status Quo in the Fertile Crescent

ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, aka ISIL, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) has transformed the political reality of the Fertile Crescent.

In Iraq, all of the inhabited territory to the north of Baghdad that is not controlled by the Kurdish regional government that had de facto control of Kurdish Iraq even before the Iraq War and has its own military forces, despite its official subordination to the Iraqi government, is controlled by ISIS.  These areas have long been majority Sunni Arab, the ethnic group that controlled the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein and a close ally of the Baathist regime of Syria which was controlled by crypto-Shiite Alawites.  But, in the U.S. led Iraq War the Baathist regime in Iraq was deposed and replaced with an elected government dominated by Iraq's majority Shi'ites, mostly from the Southeast, and favorably inclined towards Shi'ite controlled Iran, although Kurdish and Sunni participation was maintained, at least for show. Also, during the Iraq War and subsequent U.S. led occupation of Iraq, ethic violence broke out and led to the massive increase in ethnic segregation in the country.  Sunnis fled the majority Shiite Southeast and Shiite neighborhoods in the capitol mostly heading to the Sunni majority north that resisted U.S. led occupation most fiercely; Shiites and Kurds fled to Sunni majority regions in the North, to regions where their ethnic groups held majorities.  Smaller minorities hunkered down in their local communities when they could.

ISIS have forcibly displaced or killed many of the people who were not Sunni Arabs who remained, particularly smaller ethnic communities in the north, and have tried, with only slight success, to take cities and oil refineries in Kurdish areas.

ISIS controls most of the inhabited territory of Syria to the east of its coastal mountain range outside greater Damascus, and most of the Tigress and Euphrates river valley to the north of Baghdad, as well as some towns in Iraq's largely uninhabited empty quarter in Southwest Iraq.

The remainder of Syria's territory is controlled by the Baathist, one party dictatorship that controlled the country for decades.  But, when people marched in the streets to demand political reforms in the Arab Spring that began in Tunisia producing regime change there, and spread to Libya and Egypt where it also produced regime change, the Syrian protests gave rise to a civil war.

Early in the Syrian civil war, the U.S. refrained from intervening with air power as it had in Libya, in part, because it didn't want to cross Russia (which is now preoccupied in its military and political efforts to reclaim the Ukrainian province of Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine), and in part, because it feared that the Islamist rebels opposed to the Baathist regime would triumph in the civil war (as ISIS now has in Eastern Syria).

After Syria bombed its people indiscriminately with aircraft and used chemical weapons on its own people, earlier in this civil war, the U.S. and its Western allies have ceased to recognize this regime of war criminals as legitimate and have more or less openly backed some of the rebel factions that oppose it in an ongoing Syrian civil war that has resulted in immense numbers of deaths and serious injuries, and many more refugees.

This Syrian Baathist regime has largely ruled Lebanon as a tributary state for most of that time period, and southern Lebanon has also been a base for Hezbollah fighters launching missile attacks against the Golan Heights and other areas in northern Israel, without formal Lebanese support, but Lebanon has not vigorously suppressed Hezbollah fighters either.

Meanwhile, in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip are effectively Palestinian colonies, with local self-government with U.N. humanitarian support that intermittently backs armed attacks on Israel and the abolition of the Israeli state.  But, Israeli forces are militarily superior, have instituted tight border controls to shut down Palestinian terrorist attacks in Israel proper, has embargoed the Palestinian region from international travel and trade, and has when push comes to shove, militarily and legally supported illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank that threaten to demographically and economically overcome the Palestinian population there and make the West Bank an area that is in substance Israeli and Jewish.

Israel mounted a major military campaign in the Gaza Strip this summer to reassert military control over the region, to close tunnels under the border between Gaza and Israel, and to bring to a halt a campaign of rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel.

Recent Events

Campaigns of ethnic cleansing, religious persecution, genocidal mass murders and rapes of civilians, taunts at the U.S. and U.K. by the high profile beheading of several of their citizens, and the kidnapping of many Turkish citizens with the threat that they will be killed if Turkey intervenes, has made the ISIS regime intolerable.

So, the U.S. has intervened with air strikes against ISIS in both Iraq (with the Iraqi regime's permission) and in Syria (without consulting the Baathist regime).  The U.S. seeks to support non-ISIS Syrian rebels, Kurdish militias and Iraqi military forces on the ground against ISIS.

The U.S. claims that it has also discovered an anti-Western terrorist organization gaining power in the liminal area near Aleppo that is between areas controlled by ISIS and the areas controlled by the Baathist Syrian regime, which it has bombed.

What Is The End Game?

It is certainly within the realm of possibility, even probability, that the U.S. and its allies will be able to destroy the ISIS regime in Syria and Iraq.  But, it remains far from obvious that once that goal is achieved, that Iraq and Syria should be put back together again.

The Kurdish regional government in Iraq doesn't need or want to be under the Iraqi government's rule, and does so only because international politics make it expedient at the moment, and because the central government has granted it de facto near total autonomy.

A triumphant U.S. coalition in Syria will be loath to hand over a Syrian majority that was oppressed by the Syrian Baathist regime and rose up against it with U.S. support to a reconstituted Syrian government, particularly because the Baathist regime is showing no signs that it will be successfully removed from power.

The Sunni Arabs of northern Iraq gave into the ISIS regime's rise to power because they feel marginalized by the dysfunctional new Iraqi central government that is openly Shi'ite and allied with Iraq's historically Iranian nemesis, rather than just because they fear the ruthless tactics that ISIS has employed to cow people into submission.  They will not be eager to reinstate the central Iraqi region of control and their sense of identity with ethnic compatriots in Eastern Syria has been heightened by the ISIS regime in a manner that goes beyond the particular kind of Islamic State that ISIS has sought to impose.

Creating a new more moderate democratic state with more respect for human rights and international expectations for the conduct of a sovereign in the territory now controlled by ISIS may be a more viable end game than trying to restore the pre-ISIS boundaries of Iraq and Syria, which neither government was able to maintain control of on their own.

Or, perhaps, this territory ought to become a protectorate of, or annexed to, some better behaved Sunni Arab state in the region, such as Jordan, rather than letting Islamist leaning majorities reinstate ISIS via the ballot box.  The coalition against ISIS shouldn't be above rewarding states in the region like Jordan's constitutional monarchy (with a balance between elected and hereditary power similar to England ca. 1700 CE), that best exemplifies their vision for a future Near East, while punishing those, like the incompetent, dysfunctional and demagogue run Southeastern Iraq dominated rump regime, or the war criminal led Syrian Baathist dictatorship.

It is hard to see that rule of ISIS as a Saudi Arabian protectorate would be any great improvement over ISIS.  We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that merely because we can buy cooperation from Saudi Arabia with weapons, oil purchases and the like, and because Saudi Arabia can maintain control of its own territory, that it medieval regime can ever really be a true ally that shares our vision of the future for the region.  Saudi Arabian elites were behind 9-11, funded the Taliban in Afghanistan, and drive Islamic terrorism worldwide, despite the efforts of the absolute monarchy there to distance itself from them.

Turkey is another possible protectorate ruler for the region, and is even closer geographically and has more resources to do so, as well as being a full fledged Republic and more moderate than any other predominantly Muslim country in the region.  But, its long standing conflict with Kurdish insurgents in its own country, and apparent lack of interest in intervening militarily on the ground in ISIS territory, casts doubt on its suitability in this role.

Quite frankly, Jordanian annexation of the West Bank, and Egyptian annexation of the Gaza Stripe, as a means of resolving the "Palestinian problem", also makes sense.

Perhaps, in a reversal of roles, rump Syria could be turned over, either via annexation, or as a protectorate, to Lebanon, which has historically been multi-ethnic and has greater affinity and similarity to rump Syria than any other state in the region.

Perhaps we should strive towards a future Near East in which:
(1) Syria is removed from the map,
(2) Palestine ceases to have a political identity of its own,
(3) the Syrian coast and greater Damascus are annexed by Lebanon,
(4) Jordan annexes the West Bank, ISIS controlled territory and Sunni regions in Southwest Iraq,
(5) Egypt annexes the Gaza Strip,
(6) the Kurdistan regional government is granted sovereignty as a Kurdish state, and
(7) rump Iraq is reconstituted as a predominantly Shi'ite state of Sumer rather than a multiethnic Iraq.

These redrawn boundaries in the Middle East, might be more governable than those that existed prior to the ISIS crisis, where political regimes that have behaved well would be rewarded and where those who have behaved badly would be permanently ended.

Egypt would be better a restraining local militants in the Gaza Strip than Israel or the local authority in Gaza, and would provide Gazans with long overdue access to the outside world.  Jordan would similarly be better at restraining local militants in the West Bank and provide them with long overdue access to the outside world, a role that they already fulfill to some extent.

Jordan would be more capable of securing some sort of meaningful acceptance of their legitimacy than a Shiite dominated, incompetent civilian regime in Baghdad, or actively hostile regime in Damascus, while preventing the emergence of an Islamic State, in ISIS territory and Southwest Iraq, and maintaining so level of tolerance for ethnic minorities.  Its king can rule with clarity, while its emerging genuine parliament can provide a path for transition to a more democratic regime for a people not yet socialized enough to be ready for full fledged democracy.

A civilian government for Shiite Southeastern Sumer would be more humanly possible to run without the need to maintain a fragile Shiite-Sunni-Kurdish-minority ethnicity coalition, and with less territory to control and few people actively opposed to the regime and taking up arms against it.

Lebanon's regime provides a better model for how coastal Syria ought to be governed than the Syrian Baathist regime.

The Kurds have long had their house in order and the existence of a Kurdish state might encourage relocation of Kurds elsewhere to it rather than trying to fight local insurgencies.  Running the Kurdish state would also be easier without Iraqi central government concerns to consider.