Return of the Stupid Shit Caucus (like they went somewhere?)

Agnes Ayres and Rudolph Valentino in George Melford's The Sheik (1921).

Verbatim David Brooks, "When ISIS rapists win", August 28 2015:

President Obama has said that ISIS stands for nothing but savagery. That’s clearly incorrect.

Aw, Mom, do I have to?

OK, OK, incorrect in what sense? What are you, Politifact? By what metric would you determine the truth or falsity of that statement?

And by the way when did Obama say it? You put a link there as if to lead us to your source, but it just leads to the Times Obama Navigator page, and a search button whose closest result is your column today.

FBI director James Comey has called the Da'esh forces "savages", White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough has said that their killings show they "stand for nothing" tout court. Secretary of State John Kerry called the killing of Stephen Sotloff "an act of of medieval savagery by a coward hiding behind a mask."  At the United Nations last September, Obama must have been referencing the Da'esh indirectly as the contrast when he told young Muslims, "You come from a great tradition that stands for education, not ignorance; innovation, not destruction; the dignity of life, not murder." But that's as close as it comes.

He has used "barbaric" in association with a "nothing but" account:

this is a difficult mission, and it will remain difficult for some time.  It’s going to take time to dislodge these terrorists, especially from urban areas.  But our coalition is on the offensive, ISIL is on the defensive, and ISIL is going to lose.  Its barbaric murders of so many people, including American hostages, are a desperate and revolting attempt to strike fear in the hearts of people it can never possibly win over by its ideas or its ideology -- because it offers nothing but misery and death and destruction. (February 11 2015)

But in such a way as to acknowledge that they have an ideology, if you're complaining that he fails on that. Brooks seems to feel that Obama doesn't offer Da'esh enough respect: like what's so savage about a bloody-minded God-haunted woman-hating retroactionary ideology that sees nothing wrong in blowing up and occupying Arab countries in order to advance its medieval views? Oh wait.

Let's acknowledge here that the news out of Da'esh that's distressing him this week is indeed distressing, though it may be stretching to call it news.

The awful story about their theologization of sex slavery (rape of infidel women as an act of religious devotion) adds startling detail to the facts we've pretty much known for a year (by a couple of weeks after it started with the siege of the Yazidis in August 2014, for instance in a Daily Beast report of the 28th of that month; the Times ran video of an outdoor market for the sale of Yazidi girls in November 2014), and their brutality against the beheaded 82-year-old scholar Khaled Assaad and pillaging and destruction of his beloved antiquities in Palmyra is completely of a piece with what they've been doing since they first surfaced.

Then there's the other news he doesn't mention, from Wednesday, about how the Pentagon is distorting intelligence it feeds to the administration to make it look as if the Da'esh is doing worse than it actually is and the "allies" are making progress they aren't making. That's bad if Obama and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter believe them the way Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and George W. Bush did, but I'm hopeful they're a little more suspicious (a reassuring note in the Marine Corps Times, of all places, said that Carter "counts on independent intelligence and analysis from a variety of sources to help him make critical decisions about the nation's security").

What really fills Brooks with horror, though, is the thought that Da'esh is "killing ideas", in the language of Professor Ross Harrison of the Middle East Institute (and Georgetown), author of Strategic Thinking in 3D: A Guide for National Security, Foreign Policy and Business Professionals (Potomac Books, 2013), which currently is a required strategy text at the U.S. National War College, in his recent article in The National Interest:

"A brutal battle against nationalist identity is being waged by ISIS, and a response is needed before it is too late." 

The sacred "nationalist identities" (don't you mean "national identities"?) of the Iraqis and the Syrians and the Lebanese, forged by the helpful hands of T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell out of virtually nothing in the early 1920s? That's something we need to be concerned about? as a cross-border Kurdish state forges itself in the north and the multiethnic social contract falls to pieces in the West and the Baghdad Shi'ite government finds itself totally dependent on Persian forces to defend itself against a Sunni insurgency and...

Any strategy is doomed to failure if it ignores that ISIS is not merely killing people, but also killing the ideas that have served as the region’s defense mechanism against Islamic extremism for the past several decades. While the U.S.-led coalition is focused on rolling back ISIS from territory it has captured in Iraq and Syria, it is missing the fact that this group’s strategy is to systematically destroy the idea of the nation and nationalist identity as the organizing principles for the Middle East.

Really, there's hardly been but one serious nationalism in the Arab world since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and it's the pan-Arab nationalism invented by Gamal Abdel Nasser and inaugurated in the form of the United Arab Republic consisting of Egypt plus Syria in 1958, which the Syrian army officers disliked and destroyed three years later. And the peculiar nationalisms of Lebanon and Palestine created by the obnoxious Israeli presence, which has also spurred a good deal of fake nationalism around the region, but no, the "idea of the nation and nationalist identity as the organizing principles for the Middle East" has always been an idea imposed by the victorious allies of World War I, never a local reality, and has existed practically only as enforced by Britain and France at first (anxious to guarantee their petroleum supplies) and then local strongmen.

Kuwait is a nation? Yemen (rebuilding, under Saudi bombardment, its old division into the distinct countries of urbanized, leftist Aden and inland conservative Sanaa)? Libya (currently broken, without much or any assistance from the "Islamic state", into what amounts to a restoration of the traditional Cyrenaica, Fezzan, and Tripolitania)?

Not that Brooks is in any sense interested in any of this stuff. He's only looking for an academic-sounding excuse to voice the complaints of Senators McCain and Graham that the Obama administration isn't serious enough about the arming of the "Syrian moderates":

So far the response to ISIS has been pathetic. The U.S. pledged $500 million to train and equip Syrian moderates, hoping to create 15,000 fighters. After three years we turned out a grand total of 60 fighters, of whom a third were immediately captured.

There's a good deal, though from the Brooksologist's point of view not an inconceivable amount, of wrong here. ISIS didn't even exist three years ago (it was a troublesome branch of Al-Qa'eda until April 2013). The idea of training anti-Isis fighters got started after their shocking conquests in August 2014, and the pledge was just last February, and actual work didn't get started until May, with one class of 90 students, so it wasn't after three years but rather less than three months (or half a Friedman Unit) that al-Nusra fighters (not the Isis enemies) captured seven of the 60 graduates of that first class in July, including a commander (quite a bit less than a third), and half the unit fled, presumably into Turkey, or disappeared. How many of them may have joined Al-Nusra, the rump Qa'eda organization in Syria, remains unknown. Two more classes started in July and they're still hoping to have 3,000 trained soldiers by the end of the year. While the price is, as with all Pentagon projects, going up, to $1.1 billion over the three years (to keep that in perspective, it's the equivalent of what the Defense Department spends in Iraq and Syria in about five days).

Anyway we won't be able to judge the program, for better or worse, until mid-2018, when the next president is beginning her second year in office. Also, as I have been saying for a long time now, this is more or less the least important project in the administration's Middle Eastern plans, whatever McCain and Graham may think. In the first place because of the recruitment problem, that practically everybody the US Army can find to serve in the Moderate Sunni brigades is a moderate jihadi who is likely to desert to the Nusra front, while virtually all of the pluralist-minded young heroes of the Arab Spring are by now in Turkish or European refugee camps; and in the second place because the main elements of a solution must be political rather than military, even if Da'esh itself has to be militarily defeated (not by the US but by local forces).

Nationalism in the sense in which Brooks (he's been there before) and Harrison conceive it has always been a fraud in the Middle East, perpetrated by the colonial powers and the tyrants they set up to watch over things for them. What is needed, as Obama has understood, is a new political understanding, something that may be growing in Lebanon and Palestine (and Yemen? and Tunisia and Morocco?), in pluralist communities joined by economic and cultural rather than tribal loyalties and multilingual, multiconfessional interaction.

But it's not something that can be created by an external power in the way Iraq and Syria and Saudi Arabia were created in the 1920s; it has to grow from the inside with the Powers leading, if at all, from behind, in Obama's language. If the rich foreigners try to make things happen they will certainly fuck it up. Horrible as it is to watch the Da'esh do the things it does, it is essential that we do just that, while quietly encouraging whatever modern, pluralist forces we can find (notably the Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish communities) to establish areas of stability and commerce and develop their self-defenses against the wild tribalist reactionaries (Da'esh claims to be internationalist, aiming at a "Caliphate", but its religious views are so exclusivist that they might as well be living in complete isolation). If we are even slightly fighting their battles for them, we will be wrecking the whole thing once again. It's not ours.

The best news about Da'esh in the last weeks, in this respect, is not from Syria but from Lausanne, and the first steps in bringing Iran back into the international community. Iran has also taken on a tribal, exclusivist character in recent years under he constant threat of European or Israeli or Saudi or Turkish violence, but it is a natural model of Middle Eastern complexity, with its Persian-Shi'ite majority and Sunni Arab, Christian, Bahai, Parsi, and Jewish minorities, and its large economy in which petroleum plays only a limited role, and it is already playing an essential part in the fight against Da'esh, in which European and American troops really should not be participating. Not always constructively (as when they encourage Iraqi Shi'ite troupes to brutalize the local Sunnis), but always in a way that shows how Middle Easterners can organize themselves without bullying from a colonial or crypto-colonial power. But Brooks and his friends are determined, as ever, to stop that from happening, and to retain a colonial dispensation in the region.