Thursday, February 26, 2015

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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