This is how ISIS wins: Repeating the Bush/Cheney/Rove approach just won’t work

[unhappycamper]

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/20/this_is_how_isis_wins_repeating_the_bushcheneyrove_approach_just_wont_work/



The way to battle ISIS long-term is to understand its appeal and retain our humanity. Take Sun Tzu's word for it!

This is how ISIS wins: Repeating the Bush/Cheney/Rove approach just won’t work
Paul Rosenberg
Saturday, Sep 20, 2014 08:00 AM EST

For all his vaunted love of nuance, President Obama’s recent speech announcing our new war against ISIS (or ISIL, to the White House) denounced them in terms strikingly similar to George W. Bush’s language waging war on “evil doers,” and that’s a development that should trouble us all. Yes, Obama avoided the word ‘war,’ but the rest of his team soon embraced it, and the logic of his address made that move virtually inevitable, whatever he may personally and privately have wished.

“We can’t erase every trace of evil from the world, and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm,” Obama said — a typical, and laudable, example of his nuance and restraint. But unfortunately, its main purpose was anything but nuanced: to firmly establish the black-and-white evil enemy frame: “ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple,” Obama continued. “And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.”

No one can doubt that ISIS is murderous — just like Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, last year’s No. 1 candidate for America’s wrath. But it’s simply untrue that ISIS has “no other vision” than slaughter. Their vision of an Islamic state — a new Caliphate — may be many things: delusional, presumptuous, contrary to true Islamic values and obviously cruel. But it certainly is a vision of sorts, and it has some appeal, if only to a tiny, disaffected fragment of the world’s Islamic community.

If we don’t understand that vision — and what people find attractive in it — then we really have very little chance of effectively fighting against it, even though ISIS now commands only a few thousand fighters. We may win lots of battles, but not the war. Even if we defeat ISIS itself, but don’t understand its appeal, it will only a reappear in another, potentially even more deadly form, just as ISIS now appears more malignant than al-Qaida. This is particularly true if we ignore the multilayered network of historical grievances which ISIS seeks to exploit.