Another hideous beheading video from ISIS, this time captive American journalist Steven J. Sotloff was murdered, despite a plea from his mother. This couldnt be more disgusting, but as I wrote today, this is also clearly the attempt of ISISs leaders to bait Washington into an even more major intervention -- and I have little doubt that, despite a reluctant president, they will succeed. Heres what I wrote today in my latest post on the subject of ISISs nightmarish high-tech taunts -- with the James Foley execution video in mind. Tom When you think about it, from the moment the first bombs began falling on Afghanistan in October 2001 to the present, not a single U.S. military intervention has had anything like its intended effect. Each one has, in time, proven a disaster in its own special way, providing breeding grounds for extremism and producing yet another set of recruitment posters for yet another set of jihadist movements. Looked at in a clear-eyed way, this is what any American military intervention seems to offer such extremist outfits -- and ISIS knows it. Don’t consider its taunting video of James Foleys execution the irrational act of madmen blindly calling down the destructive force of the planet’s last superpower on themselves. Quite the opposite. Behind it lay rational calculation. ISIS’s leaders surely understood that American air power would hurt them, but they knew as well that, as in an Asian martial art in which the force of an assailant is used against him, Washington’s full-scale involvement would also infuse their movement with greater power. (This was Osama bin Laden’s most original insight.) It would give ISIS the ultimate enemy, which means the ultimate street cred in its world. It would bring with it the memories of all those past interventions, all those snuff videos and horrifying images. It would help inflame and so attract more members and fighters. It would give the ultimate raison dêtre to a minority religious movement that might otherwise prove less than cohesive and, in the long run, quite vulnerable. It would give that movement global bragging rights into the distant future. ISIS’s urge was undoubtedly to bait the Obama administration into a significant intervention. And in that, it may prove successful. We are now, after all, watching a familiar version of the escalation follies at work in Washington. Obama and his top officials are clearly on the up escalator. In the Oval Office is a visibly reluctant president, who undoubtedly desires neither to intervene in a major way in Iraq (from which he proudly withdrew American troops in 2011 with their “heads held high”), nor in Syria (a place where he avoided sending in the bombers and missiles back in 2013). tomdispatch/blog/175888/
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 21:49:07 +0000
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