Unfortunately, Walt’s analysis appears to be driven by a policy calculus, rather than an honest appraisal of respected scholarship or serious research. With this essay, he is playing to the journal’s primary audience, signalling to U.S. policy-makers, from a defensive-realist perspective, that they should not get embroiled in a military confrontation with ISIS because the involvement of a great power will galvanize support, lending it “anti-imperial” credibility that could serve as a recruiting and rallying point.
While Walt’s conclusion – not to look for solutions down the barrel of a gun – is valuable, his argument is based on three fallacies: First, it assumes that ISIS has a mass following in the Arab and Muslim world and that it could function as a normal “country” accepted by its populace; second, it compares arbitrary beheadings and systematic campaigns of ethnic cleansing to spells of revolutionary violence; and third, it overlooks the historical reality that revolutionary states in Russia, Iran, Cambodia, Cuba, China and elsewhere emerged out of broad, popular movements supported and fought for across several strata of society including workers, peasants, students, rights activists, and intellectuals, among others. Coming from someone like Professor Walt, who has long been an astute and accurate analyst on issues ranging from the problematic impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy to the disastrous consequences of the Iraq war, these are worrying omissions.
Adding insult to injury, Professor Walt also compares a psychopathic terror sect such as ISIS to revolutionary movements that may have been idealistic and naive, but which were not based on a dystopian – essentially anti-human – vision and guiding ideology. For all their faults, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, China’s Mao Zedong, Russia’s Vladimir Lenin and Iran’s Ruhollah Khomeini were the point of fixation for millions of people, charismatic figureheads of mass movements that are simply incomparable to the al-Baghdadis of this world. Compared to these revolutions and their leaders, ISIS is a cartel of Fascist bandits, more comparable to the Ku Klux Klan than to anti-imperial crusaders; al-Baghdadi is infinitely more Pablo Escobar than Robespierre.
To assume ISIS has any mass appeal in the Arab and Muslim world is an insult to the intelligence and inspiration of past revolutionary leaders and to the millions who have undertaken political struggles, and undervalues the achievements, such as the Arab Spring in countries like Tunisia. There is a reason why there is no ISIS party with mass appeal, nor any ISIS vanguard or intellectual movement. Movements such as ISIS, al-Qaeda, Jabat al-Nusra and the like are anti-human in their conception. They use terror and theatrical murder, rather than politics or diplomacy, to intimidate their enemies.
Arguing that ISIS is a “normal” movement heading a “country” should not come at the expense of the national struggles of other people. Groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda fester in failed states, e.g. Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan respectively. If there would have been a “Marshall Plan” in Iraq after the destruction of the country, in conjunction with a regional security order spearheaded by a U.S. diplomatic initiative, it most likely would have been that much more difficult for ISIS and other movements to terrorize the people of West Asia. (I have no doubt Professor Walt would agree on that point.) But then again, this was never the real ambition for the governing elites in Washington and the leadership of many regional states are too incompetent, corrupt, and manipulative to achieve such an outcome.
After all, until very recently ISIS fighters easily entered Syria by traveling undisturbed through NATO ally Turkey. ISIS continues to receive financial support from close U.S. partners like Saudi Arabia. On the battlefield these days, their favorite weapons are M16 rifles, made in the USA. Where were the U.S. Special Forces when these weapons were seized in Mosul and elsewhere? They were certainly not guarding the Iraqi National Museum or helping Syrian refugees.
The United States, both its elites and citizens, has a moral responsibility toward the people of the (so called) “Middle East.” The vast majority of those still dying in the region are all casualties – direct and indirect – of the “war on terror.” A September 2012 study published in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology that focused on maternity hospitals in the cities of Basra and Fallujah indicates an exponential increase in the number of birth defects in the past decade. The study also demonstrates that childhood leukemia and other types of cancers are on the rise. According to the authors of the study, in 1994 and 1995 “the number of birth defects per 1,000 live births in Al Basrah Maternity Hospital was 1.37. In 2003, the number of birth defects in Al Basrah Maternity Hospital was 23 per 1,000 live births. Within less than a decade, the occurrence of congenital birth defects increased by an astonishing 17-fold in the same hospital.”
Experts have attributed these striking increases to the use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus by the U.S. military. These are problems worth focusing on, not because of blind anti-Americanism, but because of the urgency of such humanitarian tragedies. What is needed, then, is more compassion and empathy for these individuals, for the victims of violence and aggression, rather than misguided theorizing about the latest villain du jour’s relative position in the historical procession of anti-imperialist bogeymen.
Professor Walt is right that more war is not the answer to ISIS. But we shouldn’t lose perspective of historical truths and our humanitarian responsibilities in order to make that point.
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Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies at SOAS, University of London and Chair of the Centre for Iranian Studies at the London Middle East Institute. Educated at the Universities of Hamburg, American (Washington D.C.) and Cambridge, where he received his MPhil and PhD as a multiple scholarship student, he was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow in International Relations and Peace Studies at St. Edmund Hall and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. His commentary and interviews have been published by leading outlets including Al-Jazeera, CNN, The Daily Star (Beirut), The Guardian, and The Independent.