Now is the time to take f ight to ISIL
The great conflict of our time, so-called, is not one war but three. At the moment we are losing the lot. The first war is kinetic and symbolic. Kinetic, because each successive massacre of innocents by each successive sociopath, with degrees of madness falling across a sliding scale from the deranged misfit looking for an excuse to murder, to the calculatingly theoretical Islamist zealot, is another open wound to the idea of civilization. And they accumulate. Symbolic, because the massacres have a psychological blast zone that radiates worldwide through media.
We are losing this first war because, despite incremental gains by allies on the ground in northern Iraq and Syria, despite progress in pushing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant out of the territories it has conquered and in which it is administering the most loathsome depravities in the human tool kit, it is taking too long. Too long, because the now-numbingly regular massacres which Daesh’s caliphate inspires, combined with the civil war in Syria and blowback from other conflicts, are destabilizing civil society globally.
Exhibit A is American presidential candidate Donald Trump, fuelled by Islamophobia. Exhibit B is the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, fuelled by Islamophobia. Exhibit C will be the next lurch to the nativist far right in Europe, whether in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands or elsewhere, fuelled by Islamophobia.
The second war is moral and personal. This is the struggle, put simply, to preserve what is most fundamental to modern democracy — the ideal of equality under the law for every individual — in the face of a rising drumbeat of xenophobia aimed, not at the Islamofascists perpetrating the massacres, but at Islam and Muslims generally. We’re losing this one because the incidents worldwide are now too numerous to annotate.
Republican Newt Gingrich says all American Muslims should be “tested,” and it barely registers; it’s another grotesque departure among many, which 10 years ago existed only as a dystopic theme in TV dramas, now made real. There are those who will argue this historical moment is different from, to cite one example, the xenophobia that eventually saw Japanese-Canadians locked up in camps during the Second World War, and for which this country has apologized. How is it different, precisely? It would be interesting to know.
The third war, growing directly from the first two, is economic and political. Though the growing backlash against globalization and trade worldwide has several causes, rising income inequality among them, it also cannot be untangled from the war between democracy and Islamism. Islamist-perpetrated chaos is fuelling the Syrian refugee crisis, in tandem with dictator Bashar Assad’s brutality, and that has powered the Brexit. ISIL-inspired terrorism is energizing nativist movements worldwide, and these in turn are undermining a liberal global economic system that has taken 70 years to build.
The connecting filament, from rural England to rural Austria to rural Pennsylvania, is anti-internationalism. The trend line is obvious: it isn’t one civil society can sustain. For evidence imagine Trump or someone worse as the most powerful human on the planet, possessed of the nuclear codes.
All of which is why Western liberal democracies, Canada included, soon will need to come to grips with this reality: the caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi must be destroyed sooner, not later, and he along with it. ISIL must be wiped out, and its leaders killed or put on trial for war crimes. The instrument for that destruction, should Iraqi and peshmerga ground forces not be able to make much faster progress very soon, should be an international army, including ground forces, much like the one that occupied Afghanistan 15 years ago. That force could be led, conceivably, by a future U.S. president Hillary Clinton — for lack of a better option. And Canada should be there, in a significant way, as we were in Afghanistan.
The mere suggestion will be anathema among many Canadian liberals. The horrific miscalculation, chaos and carnage of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, together with the failure of internationalist idealism in Afghanistan, has spawned a war-weariness that is entirely understandable. Pacifists, Canada’s New Democrats leading the way, will say, with some justification, that past military interventions in the Middle East have only made things worse.
The question the noninterventionists might answer though, as they extol the merits of isolationism, or half measures and an endless war by proxy, is this: what is the alternative to more aggressive intervention? Paris, Istanbul, Orlando, Baghdad, Nice. How can a global civilization unwilling to defend itself against barbarians — who hold territory, who proudly trumpet their atrocities — endure? Based on the gathering evidence, it doesn’t seem it can.