The main reason for the rise of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi is that Washington is losing influence over events in the Middle East. So forces hostile to the US are entering the power vacuum. [icopyright one button toolbar]
Regaining control requires wining more friends among neighboring nations and peoples. Giving primacy only to American military power produces fear or fawning, not friendship.
Most of the world’s people accept President Barack Obama as “the leader of the free world”. Yet, few agree to be Obama’s allies and accept sacrifices under his leadership to destroy the terrorists although most would like to see them dead.
In this sense, the center is not holding. Washington seems unable to keep it together in the confrontation with the Islamic State and similar diehard terrorists, who are the most fateful menace of our time to human dignity and peace.
Killing terrorists is necessary but cannot bring reconciliation if shorn of hope for the cowed people coerced to give them shelter.
That hope is about restoration of dignity and safety to their daily lives. It is not only about economic uplift and freedom of expression.
Washington spends tens of billions on military interventions but very little on earning the trust of local peoples. A few will always be diehard hostiles but the majority simply wants to keep its children safe from tyranny.
Now, the key questions are whether Washington is losing control because the fatigue of American voters with Middle Eastern chaos is holding Obama back.
Or whether Obama is a strong man of action rather than an intellectual incapable of using enough force against enemies, or hammering the heads of local politicians aggressively enough, or allowing his military to kill terrorists on a large enough scale.
Or, whether the real reasons stem from Washington being out of touch with both the people Obama wants to help and his would-be allies.
Terrorists are pushing the US to wits end. Instead of dying out, they have grown and flourished beyond the imagination of the best Western intelligence experts since the US began its “war on terror”.
Many around the world agree that Obama has a responsibility to act forcefully when an entire community, such as the Yazidis, faces genocide. Even more if terrorists opposed to scientific rationality, modern lifestyles and economic globalization try to establish a State pledged to expansionist global terrorism.
It is remarkable that some 15,000 terrorists with perhaps 100,000 civilian sympathizers are holding at bay the most powerful military that humankind has ever seen, composed of the US and its stalwart European NATO allies.
The Islamic State’s precursors – Al Qaeda and the Taliban — also have outwitted that awesome combine at least since 2001 in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Inebriated by apparent impunity, terrorists kidnap and hold Americans to ransom or behead them at will.
Destroying them now will take much more than American high-tech bombs, satellite surveillance, armed drones and guns that fire thousands of bullets per second.
Their resilience can no longer be masked by occasional assassination of their leaders – such as the justice done to Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – because eager replacements wait in the wings.
Individual terrorists may be destroyed but terrorism, their way of life, thrives.
Terrorism can grow only when its perpetrators obtain safe haven among ordinary civilians through a combination of brute coercion and persuasion, using idealistic arguments about religion or nationalism.
Therefore, the only effective counter to terrorism is deep cooperation among tens of countries to deny safe havens for terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere. Killing terrorist leaders can help but safe havens cannot be eliminated in a sustainable manner only by military responses.
Above all, eliminating the safe havens requires that people tyrannized by terrorists turn against their oppressors despite life-threatening risk. To dare to do so, they need full faith that the US and many others will help them, stand by them and not let them ever be crushed.
That faith is the only reliable path to eliminating safe havens because it will empower local people to take the necessary risks. War, counter terrorism and counterinsurgency are not sufficient means. It is also necessary to build trust to underpin such faith.
US leadership with which most world governments can empathize is the prerequisite for international cooperation to galvanize this kind of trust.
It entails enlightened diplomacy to bring a maximum number of governments behind concrete actions to support those who are trying to stand up to terrorist regimes.
Above all, it requires recognition that the “war on terror” is against a new, if fragmented, international movement fighting for totalitarian power over communities, territories and now, countries.
Further, it is about the determination of the movement’s component groups to expand power by exploiting any weakness and any opportunity in any location.
Even carefully measured military responses are likely to remain ineffectual if the local people continue to be held hostage by the terrorists.
While Obama struggles to protect the homeland from terrorists, it is well to remember that their first and continuous victims are the people whom they force to provide safe haven.
Those human shields will never dare to fight for freedom from tyranny without faith that Obama’s America will steadfastly stand by them through all their pain and travails, with all necessary means.
Although there is no reliable study, it is quite possible that those means will be less costly for American blood and treasure than current methods of fighting the “war on terror”. They may also be the most productive ways of protecting Americans and rekindling friendly US influence in Mideast affairs.