An article in The Atlantic makes a disturbing kind of argument for why the US should not destroy ISIS:
Apparently the kind of terrorism that’s hardest to fight is the kind that ferments at home.
And what makes it ferment? In both the Boston Marathon and the Fort Hood cases, the attackers seem to have been driven by the perception that the U.S. is at war with Islam, as evinced (in their minds) by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So, if homegrown terrorism is fostered by the perception that the U.S. is at war with Islam, what should we do to counter that perception? Here’s what I don’t recommend: Declare war on an entity that calls itself the Islamic State, enmeshing yourself in combat that will last for years.
Every word of this is uninformed and stupid. Muslims are depicted as people on the verge of freaking out and becoming terrorists whenever a bizarre fantasy visits them. There is also this unhealthy need to see oneself as the center of the universe which has become really pathological among the people in this country. The terrorists of ISIS can’t tolerate modernity and want to go back to the Middle Ages. They said that a gazillion times. They would attack anybody who is dealing with modernity better than they are (and that’s pretty much everybody else.) The US is not causing ISIS’s actions or existence. Just like the US isn’t causing Putin’s actions in Ukraine. Just like the US didn’t invade the Iberian Peninsula back in 711, unlike my Freshman-level students have suggested time and again.
The US absolutely has to destroy ISIS. In the world of the crumbling nation-states, a state has to find a legitimating principle in something. If the nation-state is being destroyed by the fluidity of life in our technological society, the new form of state can only gain legitimacy through protecting citizens from fluid, mobile threats that know no borders. Today, the US needs to prove its chops, so to speak, as a functioning post-national state. And I hope it will.
Clarissa's Blog 
Agree. Good.
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So, do you support USA putting soldiers on the ground, like it did in Iraq? If bombing from air won’t be sufficient.
And, naturally, even most careful bombing will lead to dead people, including children, like Israel’s bombing of Gaza. What would USA do, if instead of Gazans’ pictures, world newspapers begin publishing “those children were killed by USA”?
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First of all, let’s avoid the “it’s just like” thing. You know how I hate it.
” What would USA do, if instead of Gazans’ pictures, world newspapers begin publishing “those children were killed by USA”?”
– What do you mean “if”? Like this would be something new or whatever? The US is the world’s “shadow”, to use a psychoanalytic term. Most individual Americans throw fits when this role is disputed.
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\\ – What do you mean “if”? Like this would be something new or whatever?
I have never heard of anti-USA demonstrations in Europe before, but it may change with huge Muslim immigration into EU. Or not?
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The US absolutely has to destroy ISIS. In the world of the crumbling nation-states, a state has to find a legitimating principle in something. If the nation-state is being destroyed by the fluidity of life in our technological society, the new form of state can only gain legitimacy through protecting citizens from fluid, mobile threats that know no borders. Today, the US needs to prove its chops, so to speak, as a functioning post-national state. And I hope it will.
So we will be fighting the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs” forever, which most Americans think of in terms of legitimating the military-industrial complex, if at all. I wonder how climate change figures into this since it precisely the kind of threat no nation can really fight on their own.
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“I wonder how climate change figures into this since it precisely the kind of threat no nation can really fight on their own.”
– Exactly! The new state form will have to fight “threats without borders” (my term), such as:
a) transnational terror organizations;
b) climate catastrophes;
c) epidemics.
“So we will be fighting the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs” forever”
– Nothing lasts forever and neither will this state-form.
“which most Americans think of in terms of legitimating the military-industrial complex”
– If there is one thing in no need of legitimization it’s the military industry. Or any industry. Or any military. OK, 3 things.
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What’s with the Clorox ad?
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Uri’s new column is exactly about the approaching demise of the nation-state, Arab world, Scotland and ISIS. Loved it!
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1411131986
What do you think?
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‘I have never heard of anti-USA demonstrations in Europe before…’
Before what? To my certain knowledge there have been anti USA demonstrations in the UK since the 1950’s. I can’t speak for the rest of Europe.
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I also know of the anti-US demonstrations in the UK as far back as the 1950s. They were numerous and famous.
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El must have a short memory; there were anti-US demonstrations all over the industrialized world at the start of the Iraq War 10 years ago.
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Including in the US (actually I wasn’t there at that time – I’m thinking of the first US-Iraq war)
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USA should not have created ISIS.
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First, the USA created the skies, then the earth, then all manner of animal and bird…
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Iran hints at being ready to help against ISIS, if USA lets it keep as many atomic centrifuges as they wish.
(From http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4573200,00.html )
A columnist thinks:
US President Barack Obama must be careful not to “degrade and destroy” ISIS in Iraq and Syria to the point of helping Iran and its axis of evil step into the vacuum that would be created and establish its own Islamic Shiite caliphate spreading from Lebanon through Syria and Iraq to Iran itself.
This would be a serious threat to the moderate Sunni countries like Jordan, and the Persian Gulf states, and eventually to Israel and the West. Replacing the threat of a radical Islamic Sunni caliphate with the threat of a radical Islamic Shiite caliphate is shortsighted and could be a catastrophic strategic mistake to be regretted for generations to come.
…
ISIS must be contained through US air attacks and not be allowed to expand its territorial boundaries to Jordan and Lebanon. But Iran must be contained too by adding crippling economic sanctions to suffocate it economically till they dismantle their nuclear weapons program and curtail their military presence in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4572782,00.html
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