Friday, July 24, 2015

What's the Message?

The recent New York Times article on the Islamic State that I discussed in this post is accompanied by a photo that is said to be from "a militant website." Here's the photo:

 
Precisely in the center of the photo is a boy wearing a blue shirt. It appears to be a polo shirt, although it's possible it's a T-shirt over a polo shirt. The real mystery associated with the shirt, however, concerns its message: What's the message and was it intentional?

Here's what can be read on the shirt:

. . . IGHT
AC-130
GUNSHIP

The AC-130 is a modified C-130 flown by the U.S. Air Force to provide air support for ground units. Its side-mounted weapons have been used to devastating effect in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Libya, mostly against suspected insurgents and terrorists on foot and in vehicles. Some have called for AC-130s to be used against Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq, but its vulnerability to anti-aircraft fire (the reason for the flares being deployed in the photo below) and the fact that it is used in conjunction with troops on the ground who direct its operations have militated against deployment against ISIS.


But, getting back to the shirt: Was it printed up and distributed by the Islamic State? Is this why the boy wearing it seems almost to be posed in the center of the photo? Is there another photo where this one came from that displays the full message? And, again, what's the message?

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Rethinking the Islamic State

On Tuesday, the New York Times ran a story on the evolution of the Islamic State. While it might be better to characterize what has been happening as an evolution in Western thinking about the Islamic State, a point that the story (if not the headline) attempts to make, there is some useful information to be gleaned from the pastiche of interviews and expert analyses presented in Tim Arango's narrative.

First, individuals living in areas controlled by the Islamic State and experts on the region make the point that the Islamic State, while extremely repressive, has brought a measure of stability to parts of Iraq and Syria that have long been in turmoil. This stability is, at least to some extent, due to the elimination of the corruption that existed under the region's dictators and, all too often, its supposed liberators as well. As a man from Raqqa put it, "You can travel from Raqqa to Mosul, and no one will dare to stop you even if you carry $1 million." Sadly, neither the forces favored by the West in Syria nor the governments that succeeded Saddam Hussein in Iraq or the Taliban in Afghanistan have been convinced that good governance--clean governance--is essential to the state-building enterprise. This seems to be something that the Islamic State, for all of its horrors, understands.

Second, three of the experts quoted in the article--Harvard's Stephen Walt, the Brookings Institution's William McCants, and former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin--find parallels between the violence of the Islamic State and that of revolutionary France, Bolshevik Russia, Maoist China, and some other modern states. If these parallels are meaningful--and I would argue that they are--then Western discourse needs to abandon the rhetoric of fighting terrorism where the Islamic State is concerned, unless those using that rhetoric intend "terrorism" to mean what it did when the term was coined in connection with the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. A state that conducts beheadings--whether with a guillotine or a sword--should be condemned, but we misconstrue what is happening if we call the beheadings acts of terrorism while using that term in its modern sense.

A few weeks ago, while working on the third edition of Seeking Security in an Insecure World, I wrote the following about the Islamic State for the section of the book that deals with failed states:
At the heart of the Peace of Westphalia was an agreement to eliminate religion as a reason for warfare by establishing a rule of mutual tolerance among (if not within) states. Both the Holy Roman Empire’s bid to subdue Protestant principalities and the effort of Protestant rulers to extend their control to Catholic territories were delegitimized by their joint acceptance of a principle encapsulated in the Latin phrase cuius regio eius religio (the ruler of the territory determines the religion practiced in it). While religious differences have factored into conflicts many times in the Westphalian era, now the basic principle is being threatened. 
The Islamic State--also called the Islamic State in Iraq and ash-Sham (the term for Syria in classical Arabic) or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)--has capitalized on state failure to inject into the modern world a distinctively pre-modern understanding of the way religion and the state are to interact. On June 29, 2014, the Islamic State publicly proclaimed a caliphate with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the first caliph since the days of the Ottoman Empire. It is a theocratic state that considers itself unbound by the Westphalian principle of sovereignty with its corollaries of non-aggression and non-intervention. In fact, the formation of the caliphate signaled the Islamic State’s intent to pursue a policy of expansion that would, according to prophecies in the Qur’an, lead to the Day of Judgment with its divinely foreordained apocalypse. For Muslims who subscribe to the most literal reading of the Qur’an, the establishment of the caliphate was a pivotal event; thousands began traveling from all over the world to the lands controlled by the Islamic State to lend their support to its efforts, military and political, to impose divine judgment on both Muslim and non-Muslim apostates. 
By the middle of 2015, and in spite of armed opposition on the ground supported by American and British airstrikes, the Islamic State controlled a swath of territory roughly equivalent to the size of the British Isles with a population estimated at six to eight million. Its territory, primarily in the most ineffectively governed regions of Iraq and most war-torn parts of Syria, demonstrates well the hazards posed by failed states and the tendency for conditions in them to threaten other states. To be clear, in the territories it controls the Islamic State exercises many of the functions associated with modern states. It enforces law, collects taxes, maintains both military and police forces, and even seeks to build alliances with like-minded organizations. (In March 2015, Boko Haram offered--and the Islamic State accepted--a pledge of allegiance that, in theory, extends the caliphate to West Africa.) In many respects, the Islamic State exercises more effective control over the territories it occupies than the states it has displaced did. However, the Islamic State does not have, and will likely never obtain, the recognition of other states. It exists as a quasi-state (due to the absence of the critical element of recognition) only because the recognized states whose territory it occupies are themselves quasi-states (due to their inability to exercise effective control). Nation-building, therefore, appears as an essential element of any strategy to defeat ISIS, a point recognized by President Obama in his pledge at the June 2015 G-7 meeting in Germany to accelerate efforts to train the Iraqi army to fight Islamic State units.
In working on a book that deals with contemporary issues, there is a constant concern that the period between writing and publication will witness changes that render even the most careful analyses obsolete. Our powers of prediction in international politics are severely limited. In this instance, however, I suspect the Islamic State will still be around next spring when the new edition of Seeking Security appears. It will likely be looking more and more like a "real" state. And some in the West will probably still be trying to figure out why it doesn't really make sense to call it a terrorist organization.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Seventy Years and Counting

The Atomic Age began seventy years ago today. On July 16, 1945, in a part of New Mexico that the Spanish explorers had called the Jornada del Muerto, a nuclear device was detonated for the first time, demonstrating the viability of bombs fueled by nuclear fission.

It was a portentous moment. Exhausted scientists and technicians, having worked feverishly for months with little time off, were on edge. The weather--unsettled, with thunder and lighting perilously close to "the Gadget"--contributed to the tension. Even Enrico Fermi's attempt at humor--he was taking wagers from other physicists on whether the atomic bomb might detonate the atmosphere and, if so, whether New Mexico only or the entire world might be destroyed--rubbed many people the wrong way.

Away from the McDonald Ranch where the device and the measuring instruments were being readied, many other important things were happening. The U.S. Government's Interim Committee was finalizing plans for the first use of nuclear weapons against Japan. President Truman was en route to Germany where he would meet with Stalin and Churchill and Churchill's successor, Clement Attlee, at the Potsdam Conference, ready to talk tough in the knowledge that the U.S. possessed "the winning weapon." In Washington, London, Moscow, and other capitals governments were trying to determine what could be expected from the new organization created by the United Nations Charter that had been signed just weeks earlier in San Francisco. Ongoing preparations for war crimes trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo were laying the groundwork for a renewal of international humanitarian law. All of these things would have an impact on the way nuclear weapons would be regarded. And the very existence of nuclear weapons--for the last seventy years and counting--would profoundly affect these things, from U.S.-Soviet/Russian relations, to the functioning of the United Nations, to the character of the laws of armed conflict, to views on terrorism and transnational organized crime and failed states, to the evolution of economic sanctions.

"The Gadget" worked--and we are different because of that.