The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (56 page)

Then on April 22 came definitive confirmation that the Pentagon had misled the public. The map the Pentagon had used to illustrate its claim that the Islamic State had lost 25 to 30 percent of its territory was inaccurate and misleading, leaving out or obscuring evidence that the U.S. airstrikes had not been successful: it showed territory the Islamic State had lost between August 2014—when the airstrikes started—and April 2015, but it didn’t show what territory the Islamic State had gained during that same period.

Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren insisted that the omission was beside the point. “ISIL’s own doctrine,” he said, “says it must gain and hold territory. This map shows they are not achieving their stated goals.” But he acknowledged that the map wasn’t “meant to be a detailed tactical map—it is simply a graphic used to explain the overall situation.” By that measure, it was highly misleading—it left out all of western Syria, where the Islamic State had made significant gains.
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During the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Americans laughed as “Baghdad Bob”—Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf—repeatedly declared that the Iraqi Army was making huge gains and humiliating the Americans everywhere, and would soon throw them out of the country altogether, whereupon Allah would “roast their stomachs in hell”—when in reality, the U.S. was defeating Saddam Hussein’s army with little difficulty.
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Twelve years later, Baghdad Bob could just as well have been the U.S. Secretary of Defense, triumphantly announcing that Allah would soon roast the stomachs of the Islamic State jihadis in hell.

But appearance would never conquer reality. As the Pentagon spun its misinformation, the Islamic State went from success to success.

Just a month and a day after the release of the deceptive map, Islamic State forces, using armored construction equipment and ten suicide bombers, breached the walls of Ramadi.
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Within three days the city was firmly within ISIS control—and ISIS was within seventy miles of Baghdad.

So now the capital of Anbar Province, the heart of the “Sunni Awakening,” where local Iraqi tribes first turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq to support U.S. forces in 2006—in other words, the home base of some of America’s few potential strong allies against ISIS on the ground—has been absorbed into the caliphate. And the U.S. was reduced to blaming our weak allies in the Shia-dominated Iraqi Army: “What apparently happened is the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered,” Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said. “In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force. That says to me, and I think to most of us, that we have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight [Isis] and defend themselves.”
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The chairman of the defense and security committee in the Iraqi parliament wasn’t having any of it: “Hakim al-Zamili . . . calls Carter’s comments ‘unrealistic and baseless.’ He said the US should bear much of the blame for the fall of Ramadi, for its failure to provide ‘good equipment, weapons
and aerial support’ to the soldiers. Now he says the US military is seeking to ‘throw the blame on somebody else.’”

While the Americans and Iraqis pointed fingers at each other, the Islamic State was consolidating its control of more newly captured territory—this time, in Syria—including most notably the city of Palmyra “and a nearby military airbase.” Palmyra—just a hundred and fifty miles from the Syrian capital—was home to fifty thousand Syrians and also a UNESCO heritage site containing priceless Roman ruins.
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Islamic State jihadis found immediate use for Palmyra’s Roman amphitheatre, staging public executions there before a crowd of locals and ISIS fighters.
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Then, the next week, ISIS launched “a surprise assault” that “opened a new front in the multi-pronged war being waged by the extremist group across Iraq and Syria, and . . . underscored the Islamic State’s ability to catch its enemies off guard.” This new offensive in the Aleppo Province of Syria brought ISIS within striking distance of Azaz on the border with Turkey—and put the Islamic State on the verge of cutting off rival militant groups’ supply lines and seizing control of border areas that would make smuggling weapons and foreign jihadis through Turkey all the easier.
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ISIS was winning the war.

The Only Way the Islamic State Can Be Defeated

There is only one way to defeat this kind of rogue state, short of a nuclear holocaust: by utterly defeating it and destroying the wellsprings of its ideological indoctrination. In the case of the Islamic State, nothing is much less likely than that these things will happen.

No ground force capable of recapturing the Islamic State’s territories and preventing their reconquest is likely to be fighting ISIS, at least for the foreseeable future. America won’t be doing it—not if Barack Obama has his way. The president campaigned on a promise to withdraw from Iraq and made good on his promise; the last thing he wants to do is betray the fact that the
withdrawal was precipitous and ill-considered by committing U.S. ground forces to Iraq again.

Without a return of the Americans, it is hard to imagine what force on the ground
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defeat the Islamic State. The Kurds withstood the ISIS siege of the Syrian border town of Kobani, but they have not been able to make significant advances into Islamic State territory. Bashar Assad has not been able to prevent the Islamic State from occupying ever larger portions of Syria—and threatening Damascus itself. The Shi’ite regime in Baghdad has (as per the Pentagon’s misleading map) made some gains against Islamic State holdings in Iraq, but the Islamic State is not seriously threatened by it, and continues to advance elsewhere. The Turks appear unwilling to act, perhaps so that they can use the Islamic State’s successes to their own advantage. King Abdullah of Jordan promised a massive retaliation against the Islamic State after its murder of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh in February 2015, but took little real action.

That leaves Iran. Yet while they are aiding the Baghdad regime in actions against the Islamic State, the Iranians don’t appear disposed to get into a full-scale war with the Islamic State. This reluctance may stem from their awareness of the fact that if they advance deeply into Sunni territory, they will face resistance even from people who despise the Islamic State.

The Ideological War

Even if the U.S. did invade and destroy the Islamic State, American troops can’t remain in Iraq forever. As soon as they left, the vacuum could well be filled by an entity very like the Islamic State. The problem that the Islamic State poses will persist as long as the United States and the West are unwilling to confront the ideology that gave ISIS its impetus in the first place.

After American troops toppled Saddam Hussein, we installed a constitution that enshrined Sharia as the highest law of the land. This was
in stark contrast to what should have been done: the explicit and enforced limiting of political Islam.

There are precedents: in October 1945, U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes wrote to General Douglas MacArthur, directing him to restrict the influence of the Shintoism, the ideology that had fueled Japanese militarism, in postwar Japan:

           
Shintoism, insofar as it is a religion of individual Japanese, is not to be interfered with. Shintoism, however, insofar as it is directed by the Japanese government, and as a measure enforced from above by the government, is to be done away with. People would not be taxed to support National Shinto and there will be no place for Shintoism in the schools. Shintoism as a state religion—National Shinto, that is—will go . . . Our policy on this goes beyond Shinto . . . The dissemination of Japanese militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology in any form will be completely suppressed. And the Japanese Government will be required to cease financial and other support of Shinto establishments.
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Allowing Islamic Sharia law into the constitutions of the U.S.-created Islamic (!) Republic of Afghanistan and Republic of Iraq in 2004 and 2005 was as foolhardy as it would have been to write emperor-worship and Shinto militarism into Japan’s 1946 constitution.

Also providing an example for the modern day is the nineteenth-century British General Sir Charles Napier, who when he was Governor of Sindh in the British Raj was confronted by Hindu leaders angered by his prohibition of the practice of sati, the casting of widows upon their husbands’ funeral pyres. Napier replied, “Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters
shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
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Of course it would be considered the height of ethnocentric impropriety to follow such examples today—either to confront ISIS on its own turf or to challenge mosques and Islamic schools in the U.S. and elsewhere to institute programs teaching against the Islamic State’s core beliefs and actively discouraging young Muslims from joining it. Yet if this were done, many Muslims who don’t want to live under Sharia any more than anyone else does would cast their lot with the free world; our ideas are better, our way of life is better, our civilization is better. But no one dares say that, or act upon it.

The only significant attempt that the United States government has made to confront the Islamic State’s ideology is the State Department’s Think Again Turn Away program, a rather embarrassing taxpayer-funded effort intended to make jihadists stop and think about what they’re doing and lay down their arms, but which in practice amounts to little more than Twitter trolling of Islamic State supporters. Alberto Fernandez, coordinator of the State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), which oversees the program, explained in April 2014, “We are actually giving al Qaeda the benefit of the doubt because we are answering their arguments. The way I see it is we are participating in the marketplace of ideas.”
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Since, however, the Obama administration is committed as a matter of policy not to discuss Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism, or to acknowledge that there is an ideology of violence and supremacism within Islam, it cannot confront jihadists even on Twitter—when it tries, it only betrays its failure to understand their perspective. When one jihadist on Twitter praised the Taliban’s 2001 destruction of the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan, the Think Again Turn Away program responded: “Destroying ancient culture out of hatred and backwardness are a feature of al Qaeda’s
ideology”—thereby demonstrating that the State Department has no understanding whatsoever of the jihadist imperative to destroy the relics of ancient non-Muslim civilizations so as to demonstrate the judgment of Allah and the victory of Islam.
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The quintessential example of the ineptitude, willful ignorance, and absolute ineffectiveness of the Think Again Turn Away program came in March 2015, when it tweeted as an example of the positive aspects of freedom of speech in the West a photograph of Muslim hard-liners in Britain manning an information table labeled “Shariah Law/Man Made Law: Which Is Better for Mankind?”
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It is unclear how the State Department thought that a photo of Muslims spreading Sharia in the West would move them to stop trying to establish it in Iraq and Syria or anywhere else.