Standoff by Bill Schneider

Author:Bill Schneider
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The Islamic State Challenge

In 2014 President Obama dismissed the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (or ISIS) as “jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.” Then they grabbed huge swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq, terrorized the local populations, and committed grisly murders of Americans. The public sees ISIS as bloodthirsty fanatics who must be eliminated by force. Despite the public’s revulsion against ISIS brutality, Americans ruled out the use of US ground troops. And the president promised not to dispatch any. Americans are okay with air strikes, intelligence support, and military aid to local militias.22 We want to fight this war by technology and by proxy. With no US casualties.

Who are our allies in this fight? And can we trust them to fight ISIS and not one another? That is exactly the political thicket Americans will not tolerate. They want to win a clear-cut military victory, destroy ISIS, and go home. During the 2016 Republican presidential campaign, Texas senator Ted Cruz vowed to “carpet bomb ISIS into oblivion.” Donald Trump said he would “knock the shit out of ’em” and then “take the oil.” As we learned in Vietnam and Iraq, the public doesn’t trust unreliable foreign allies or wish to get involved in other countries’ civil wars.

Benjamin Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, captured the sentiment of the nation’s establishment perfectly in 2013 when he made this point to the New York Times during the debate over Syria: “One thing for Congress to consider is the message that this debate sends about US leadership around the world: that the US for decades has played the role of undergirding the global security architecture and enforcing international norms. And we do not want to send a message that the United States is getting out of that business in any way.”23

The problem is that many Americans want to send that very message. A Pew poll taken for the Council on Foreign Relations in December 2013 found that a majority of Americans (52 percent) endorse a radically alternative view to that of the establishment: namely, that the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own.” That was the highest level of isolationism measured in nearly fifty years.24

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