Combating ISIS More Effectively
Have you been following the current debate about ISIS and our
president’s choice not to use the phrase ‘Islamic Terrorism?’ There is much to learn by closely examining
this debate. One lesson focuses on the often hidden-in-plain-sight importance of strengthening democratic politics at home and abroad.
When politics and the rule of law fail as our alternatives to violence, we are left
with violence to fill that void. Without effective and functioning democratic political regimes in the Middle East…those with opposing views are left with only violence, which results in increasing the power and influence within opposing groups of those most skilled at violence (rather than those most skilled at the liberal arts central to democratic citizenship and political compromise).
We do not want to exaggerate the role that ordinary citizens actually do play in democratic societies, like our own. But our democratic institutions are both distant from our platitudes about democracy as
government by the people AND yet still powerfully important alternatives to the violence we observe in regions without any semblance of the rule of law or democratic decision making.
So, take a moment to compare a sober view of democracy in America—with all of its challenges—as a functioning
alternative to the cycles of violence observed below in societies without democracy.
Trudy
Rubin (Philadelphia Inquirer) is
critical of the president’s focus on language, and argues that our response to
ISIS must focus on the role of political failure in the region, particularly the
failures of those regimes who are close allies.
“In the
Mideast, the appeal of radical Islam has more to do with failed politics than
with the Quran. Dictatorships and would-be democracies have failed to deliver
prosperity or justice, so Islamic extremists present themselves to disaffected
youths as the only alternative.
The
nonviolent Muslim Brotherhood movement was elected to power in Egypt but was
overthrown in a coup — bolstering the radical claim that parliamentary
democracy is useless. The Washington summit, attended by authoritarian regimes
like Egypt, didn’t touch on such thorny issues.
Nor did
it address the trickiest issue of all when it comes to the spread of radical
Islam in the region: the role America’s allies play.
Saudi
Arabia, America’s close friend under Republican and Democratic administrations
alike, is still financing religious schools throughout the region and the
Muslim world that teach the harsh Saudi brand of fundamentalist Islam. This
ideology does not condone jihadi violence but still provides the baseline for
ISIS thinking. (Saudi Arabia has beheaded nearly 40 people this year, notes
Watts, compared with ISIS’ two dozen.)”
Thomas
Friedman argues, similarly, that the failure of politics or what he calls ‘misgovernance’
is the root cause we continue to overlook, perhaps because our fingerprints are
all over it.
“The U.S. keeps repeating the same mistake in the
Middle East: overestimating the power of religious ideology and
underappreciating the impact of misgovernance. Sarah Chayes, who long worked in
Afghanistan and has written an important book — “Thieves of
State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security” —
about how government corruption helped turn Afghans away from us and from the
pro-U.S. Afghan regime, argues that “nothing feeds extremism more than the
in-your-face corruption and injustice” that some of America’s closest Middle
East allies administer daily to their people.”
Quoting a global consultant, Friedman notes that “The Arab
peoples have been mostly ruled by radicals or reactionaries. And without the
prospect of a legitimate politics “that genuinely responds to popular
grievances,” no amount of top-down attempts to engender moderate Islam will
succeed….”
American
foreign policy, like the foreign policy of any nation, has a limited capacity
to remake the world. But we likely have
a better chance of influencing our allies than we do persuading our enemies to
change their behavior.
The president appears
to be choosing not to make salient a religious war by choosing to avoid the
phrase Islamic terrorism, but is he doing this in order to displace this 'clash
of civilizations' conflict with a focus on the deeper, and more challenging (but
more important if Rubin and Friedman are right), conflict over creating and
sustaining stable democratic politics and the rule of law…as our best
alternative to violence, including the violence associated with terrorism?
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