It’s harder to get to Pakistan’s nukes than all that. You don’t think they’re aware of the risk of their more sanity-challenged fellow Muslims getting at the nukes? LOL
And getting at Israel’s nukes? That is about as likely as monkeys flying out of my butt, building nukes, then turning them over to ISIS in return for a banana.
AIUI, there is precisely one country in MENA with nukes. I know you’re not suggesting that Daesh will take over Israel’s arsenal…so what other nukes are you talking about?
ETA: Didn’t refresh, sorry get lives.
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I’m all for know thy enemy. Step 1 is to disabuse folks of the notion that they are the 2nd incarnation of Hilter’s Panzer division. They aren’t. They don’t have tanks for one thing.
That said, the ideological requirement to control territory has imposed some discipline on the group. They generally keep on the experts who run the utilities and municipalities, as long as they understand who is in charge. Women physicians are put under Islamist restrictions, but mostly they respect professionalism. Cite: How ISIS rules. How ISIS Rules | Sarah Birke | The New York Review of Books
I see that 57% of the US supports ground troops against ISIS, up from 39% in September. Yeesh. Memo to my fellow countrymen: just because you chop off heads on You-tube doesn’t mean you are a first order security threat to the US. ISIS is not.
The American Public Is Becoming Ever More Rabid for War Against ISIS – Mother Jones
The US may parachute in and kick their asses anyway. That would be bad. Without careful public and private diplomacy the US could get caught in a Syrian 8 sided quagmire. And if we crush ISIS then somehow successfully extract ourselves from the Syrian/Iraqi civil war, we’re still fucked. Because most insurgencies don’t feel it necessary to hold territory. But that won’t stop us from using that one-off victory to justify a bazillion other invasions, with the full support of our resident chickenhawks and blow dried beard strokers.
Measure for Measure, surely you don’t mean to imply that the US has (or might ever engage in) ever engaged in a pointless war?!?!?! This is inconceivable!
Thanks, I’d be interested. I don’t have twitter.
No I think it does not clearly make such a point and it gives an impression falsely that the DAESH is based on an old traditional close reading of the religion, when in fact it is as Parker states something very different.
This is a good article.
So you think DAESH is to defeat the Israelis? How strange.
Pakistan is in the South Asia, it is not the middle east.
I don’t know enough about the region, the culture, or the geopolitical situation to say anything truly definitive, but I strongly suspect that, when the dust finally settles, the main contribution ISIS will make to world history is finally giving people another greatly villainous group to compare their political opponents to. The internet denizens of 2115 toss around “ISIS” like the current ones throw around “Nazis”.
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No I do not think so. In twenty years they will be as known as the khmers rouges are now. It is completely without basis to think they will have the impact in history of the nazi regime. they control no great industrial or urban area and despite the impressive looking color maps, they control only small habitable territories - I think many americans have no sense of the geography and the climate and they see the naively colored maps and do not understand it is only strips of land controlled.
I was trying to understand what was being referred to by “countrieS in the region”, and those are the closest nuclear powers to ISIS, unless maybe you count some of the former Soviet republics, which may have some free-floating, semi-unaccounted-for nukes.
Here you go, no Twitter necessary: https://storify.com/AthertonKD/isis-s-rejection-of-modernity-is-hyper-modern
Key points:
[ul]
[li]Agreeing that religion is important to ISIS, but questioning whether political and other variables aren’t equally if not more important to how they behave and why they behave that way[/li]
[li]Taking issue with the Wood’s assertion that all interpretations of Islam are equally legitimate (and what many read Wood as implying which is that less extreme versions of Islam are just watered down versions of the real thing), because some interpretations are clearly further from the mainstream, and less supportable in either texts or tradition[/li]
[li]Noting (my point too) that ISIS isn’t trying to be medieval at all–it is distinctly modern and pursuing distinctly modern goals using a distinctly modern theology[/li][/ul]
Curious how you can say this, especially since you’re citing Hamid’s twitter criticisms, considering in that same twitter string Hamid says that Wood’s essay is “excellent”, “fascinating,” and a “rare, genuine must-read.”
It’s true that Woods ignores political variables, but his essay is in response to claims, including Obama’s, that ISIS is somehow “un-Islamic.” It seems like Hamid and others in mainstream Islam would love to disassociate themselves from ISIS, and in the sense that ISIS has abandoned centuries of refinement within the Muslim world, that’s their right. But Woods makes the case that thinking about ISIS as un-Islamic is either wrong or at the very least, counter-productive, and I don’t see Hamid making much of a case against that.
Outside the world of partisan debate, people who disagree often think other people’s work is still excellent and a must-read. These are two frequent Atlantic contributors that know each other from before this interaction. And Hamid is sympathetic with some of what Wood has to say. That doesn’t mean that Hamid agrees with Wood’s arguments.
It’s not wrong to think of them as un-Islamic–as Hamid points out!–in the sense that they are far outside the mainstream of Islam. We can say they are un-Islamic in the same way that murdering abortion doctors goes against Christian teachings.
And it isn’t counter-productive at all. ISIS loves nothing more for than for the West to see this conflict as a War against Muslims, or a War against Islam. This was Al Qaeda’s express propaganda goal. Messaging against this is helpful. And I doubt there is any military or diplomatic strategy that is altered by the belief that ISIS either is or is not “un-Islamic.”
Woods seems to be making the argument that ISIS’ strength depends primarily on the existence of the caliphate, and that the caliphate can’t exist without territory. Unlike Al-Qaeda, which can go underground “like cockroaches” and therefore can’t necessarily be stamped out with traditional boots-on-the-ground military force, Woods suggests that ISIS can be stripped of it’s power by retaking the land that they’ve claimed. That alone makes it a different enemy than AQ or other terrorist organizations with political goals. Woods even suggests that the US land an army at Dabiq and wait for ISIS to come meet their prophetic destiny. Such a military strategy, if reasonable, could only be proposed after understanding ISIS’ very Islamic motivations.
You’re conflating the importance of understanding ISIS’s appeal and behavior with the importance of understanding whether ISIS’s theology is, in fact, Islamic. They are quite different issues. We can seek to understand their appeal and their behavior, while not furthering their own propaganda by incorrectly asserting that they are acting pursuant to mainstream Islamic beliefs.
Beyond that, this is a very good example of why it is a bad idea to analyze complex organizations as if they are stupid religious zealots. Putting a bunch of U.S. troops in Dabiq would be an awful military strategy.
If they can; see post #96.
Isn’t it though?
Again, it depends on what we mean by “Islamic.”
What people mean when they call ISIS un-Islamic is that it’s theology is contrary to mainstream Islam. That’s all. It is exactly the way we might call the murder of abortion doctors un-Christian. This does not mean that their theology isn’t rooted in the Quran or doesn’t share some aspects of mainstream Islam, or doesn’t participate at all in Islamic tradition.
I get why people are upset by this. Conservatives and New Atheists think this is some kind of PC campaign run amok. But it isn’t. It is an attempt to counter ISIS’s incorrect narrative that they represent the most faithful reading of Islamic texts, and to shield mainstream Muslims from the inevitable Western overreaction.
. . . Mormons, Adventists, JWs, Christian Scientists . . .
Thanks RP, you’ve given me some stuff to think about.
I see the need to shield mainstream Muslims from backlash, and I see the need not to feed ISIS’ propaganda machine, but at the end of the day it certainly seems that ISIS is Islamic in a way that Al-Qaeda and other terrorists groups are not. I think understanding their motives is helpful, and that includes understanding how they interpret the teachings of Islam. If, after learning that, we then all have to say “But this interpretation of Islam isn’t really Islamic,” I guess I’m just left scratching my head. But maybe I’m just being too literal.
In any case, I found Woods’ article informative and enlightening.