James Taranto offers another example of the president engaging in something that’s a bad habit of his, musing out loud:
He’s a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, a better political director than his political director, and to hear President Obama tell it–or, to be precise, to hear the New York Times retell others’ retelling of Obama’s telling it–he’s a better terrorist than the terrorists:
If he had been “an adviser to ISIS,” Mr. Obama added, he would not have killed the hostages but released them and pinned notes on their chests saying, “Stay out of here; this is none of your business.” Such a move, he speculated, might have undercut support for military intervention.
Perhaps the president wishes he had pinned such a note to the chests of the journalists with whom he purportedly shared this brainstorm last Wednesday afternoon. “Although three New York Times columnists and an editorial writer were among those invited,” the Times reports, “this account is drawn from people unaffiliated with The Times, some of whom insisted on anonymity because they were not supposed to share details of the conversations.” The Times report doesn’t name any of the attendees, but the Puffington Host’s Michael Calderone does.
As comical as it is for the president of the United States to imagine himself giving political advice to a terrorist army, Obama’s musings are also revealing. He imputes to the Islamic State the objective of forestalling U.S. military intervention. It understates matters considerably to observe that there is no obvious reason to suppose that is so.
For me, musing is fine. It’s not a good practice for the president of the United States.
However, I do think that the incident is revealing but not in the way in which Mr. Taranto suggests. Why do people think that the audience for the beheading of Americans and a Brit by ISIS is the United States or Britain? I think they were just handy Westerners. I think the audience for these actions is Muslims in the Middle East.
ISIS is portraying itself as the “strong horse” and the legitimate carrier of the banner of Islam for all Muslims, with the right to make demands on all Muslims. It’s a specific challenge to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and any other notionally Muslim country that won’t march to its banner but particularly Arab Sunni Muslim countries. It’s not about us at all.
Update
After noting the psychological impact the beheadings have wrought on Western audiences, Pat Lang remarks:
Secondly, these are mightily potent weapons in the struggle for control of the collective Sunni mind. The gesture of defiance explicit in the deeds appeals greatly to people who seek an absolutist answer to the riddle of existence. Fighters and money seem to be joining the cause and the horror of IS actions contributes to that achievement.
In my view that’s the primary purpose of the actions. They’re a recruiting tool.
Agree that the messaging was aimed towards other Muslims, though I suspect they also knew they would get a big bump from the US media, especially those scared to death of, or hating, Muslims.
Steve
It’s okay for a president to muse, just so long as he does it in private with aides and confidantes who can be trusted to keep their damned mouths shut. Do such people exist in the halls of power any more?
ISIS has expressed a desire for global importance, dominance, as well as carrying out terrorist acts on countries outside the ME, extending into our western sphere. Consequently, I think the beheadings of two Americans and one UK man were aimed to get the entire planet’s attention. After all, how many Muslims have they already beheaded, with merely a collective sigh of acknowledgement by the MSM? However, with the beheadings of these three men, social and print media went into spasms, relaying the text and images from their graphically-produced videos for world-wide consumption, not just for the benefit of arousing fear in other Muslins.
As a side bar to this topic: Obama is now aiming his attention at countering Ebola in Africa, to head off epidemic proportions of the disease “before it gets too big or out of hand.” I find his diligence, to entertain preventive measures, ironic, as he hasn’t applied this same long term, pragmatic logic in his foreign policy strategies. In Iraq, for instance, he opposed his entire national security team by not leaving a military presence there (and not trying harder to succeed in exacting a SOFA with Maliki), in order to prevent Iraq from backsliding into chaos again. The same held true for not intervening in Syria, years earlier, as was the advice from many of his high-ranking secretaries and military officers. in order to prevent massive civilian death and greater mayhem.
About the only time Obama has enacted an immediacy to problems at hand was if it added some kind of praiseworthy layer or acclaim to his presidential legacy. Killing OBL was one such event, in which he gushed so much, within hours/days of this military take-down, that key intelligence gleaned from the raid was either jeopardized or nullified by his ill-timed and/or unnecessary revelations. Talking about the failed attempt to rescue James Foley was yet another more recent example of choosing to save his presidential face, by detailing efforts to at least save an American hostage, rather than keeping such a mission quiet, giving ISIS less impetus to disburse their captives to more fail-safe places. The sad twist to the Foley story — Obama not acting immediately on the intelligence he had for 30 days — was an indecision that actually helped to foil a successfully timed rescue.
Thus far, “Too little too late”, IMO, is an accurate epitaph that can be engraved on the Obama presidency.
“It’s not about us at all.”
No, that takes things too far. The beheadings have multiple audiences, including making a play for the strong horse of the Arab World. The beheadings are also intended to attract recruits — young adults all over the world that want to shoot-up on the pure jihad. They are intended to demoralize and intimidate the West — when people say to themselves that the Middle East is full of dangerous, religious freaks, which we need to disengage from, the message is received. It is also presumably a message to Allah, so I don’t think we can assume too much calculation.
You’re right, PD. When I was composing the post that sentence was “not everything is about us” which I think is more accurate.
ISIS has proved that it can do what no other group since al-Qaeda has done. ISIS said jump, and the US started jumping. To Americans, four years is a long time, and eight years is a lifetime. ISIS has what the US does not – time. After breaking the area, the US will tire and leave.
Meanwhile in the US, the geniuses will whine about not renewing a SOFA every four years, and every time the terrorists need more equipment or weapons, they will just chop off another head.
Unless you have the balls to establish permanent bases or exterminate every last one of them, they will eventually own the neighborhood. You can whine all you like, but until you understand that, you are just pissing in the wind.
Why not just lob a nuke onto whatever ISIS claims as their capital? Explicate who has the best toys, and who is crazy enough to use them.
@Dave, I thought you might have been inadvertently overstating your case.
re update: I find Lang to be unreadable most of them time. He shoots from the hip. I cannot read past his opening sentence: “It should be clear by now that IS is inviting the US to return its forces to the ME.” Really? I find that clearly to be nonsense. For a decade I’ve been reading claims that bin Laden wanted the U.S. to do exactly what it did in response to 9/11. Really? How is that working for you Mr. Bin Laden?
The would-be-Caliph wants the U.S. out of the Middle East, that is the end-goal. See Bin Laden’s fatwa from the mid-1990s. Repulsion and terror and murder are the techniques. Asymmetric warfare is the secondary resort if the U.S. comes, and of course, they’ll say they’ve got the U.S. in the brier patch and people who opposed U.S. intervention will agree with them whole heartedly because it reinforces their prior position that the U.S. should disengage from the Middle East.
@Icepick
I would sell some surplus nukes (fully working) to Iran, and the Saudis could have a few overnighted from Pakistan. That should shake things up.
I doubt it. I presume that they were surprised that the U. S. responded the way it did. I also doubt that they thought the destruction wrought by the two jets that struck the towers of the World Trade Center would be as complete as it proved.
@PD Shaw
I think taunting would be a better word. I seriously doubt the US is going to reinsert large numbers of ground troops, and I also suspect ISIS knows nobody else can defeat them. Eventually, the US may keep expanding until there is a large number, but that will take a few years.
The second issue is time. The Taliban are going to win in Afghanistan. It is just a matter of time. When President Bush did not have the courage to establish permanent bases, he ensured the enemy would win.
Osama bin Laden’s goal was never a comfortable sofa in a safe living room. He was a killer, and his goal was to murder as many people as possible before he died,
Even so, what he was selling is an ideology not comfort. The final goal can never be reached, but the adherents will always strive to attain it. They receive pleasure in the striving, and they do not measure success by the same metrics as the US does.
Losing to the biggest guy shows that you had the guts to challenge him and then to take a beating from him. On the comfortable sofa in the safe living room, this may seem stupid, but in less comfortable and less safe places, this is how it works.
TB, I’ve been advocating selling nukes to the Iranians for years. I’m sure I’ve got a link somewhere on my own site. Just tell ’em that if one gets used someplace we find objectionable, no more Iran. Plus, it’ll help the balance of trade!
Another benefit would be that they’d have “cleaner” nukes than they would have otherwise.
It’s a win all the way around!
Couldn’t find a link for my proposal to arm Iran with nukes, so probably something from a comment somewhere.
But you might get a kick out of an alternate proposal for solving the problem of a nuclear Iran
http://theoreticalblingbling.blogspot.com/2006/04/most-fun-blog-post-of-march-29-2006.html?m=1
What a difference eight years make! But see the last paragraph for the solution. In the comments a gambling analogy is made that can be somewhat useful.
Anyway, I had fun with it at the time.
@Icepick
Some years ago, I learned to stop fearing nukes. They really are terror weapons, but once you learn about them, they are not that terrorizing. The suitcase nuke is silly. They all have expiration dates. They need to be replaced or refurbished. They cannot be assembled by the local mechanic.
If Iran wants to feel like one of the big boys, they will be required to act like the big boys. Pakistan with nukes should scare the living shit out of anybody who is worried about Iran, but instead, they are dreaming up new ways to piss-off the Pakistanis.
I think it’s difficult to ascertain motives from people so different from ourselves (meaning, from such a different cultural background.)
For instance, on the question of whether or not the provocation of 9/11 “worked out” for al Qaeda: how do we define “working out?” If their goals are to create chaos and break down regional and world order, I’d say they’ve succeeded.
And if their goals (at least for some of them) align with fundamentalist religious views of standing up to Western secularism with its depravity, then fighting and dying for the cause is the whole point, so again they succeed just by drawing us into a fight. Doing it in the “strong horse” manner to recruit others to the cause of jihad is a bonus.
There are clearly internal and external goals and motivations (and the external further breaks down into “near enemies” and “far enemies.” It would be comforting to think that this is limited to internal audiences and that we simply are collateral, but I think that’s mistaken (a product of our own thinking whereby we judge progress as a course toward peace and material prosperity- plus a bit of wishful thinking thrown in.)
Sadly though, I don’t know what our response should be because the jihadists set up a “heads we win- tails you lose” situation. If we don’t respond, I believe they will keep raising the provocations, if we do respond, well, we see how that works out for us. I think that this requires higher order thinking, to determine how we can stay out of the vortex but also contain or extinguish it- because neither engaging nor ignoring it will work.
@CStanley
If we study human history, we learn that people are mostly the same, and we have not changed much in the last 10,000 years. I would go further categorize humans with the other social animals, and therefore, animal studies are applicable to humans.
Powerful goal oriented leaders do not hide out in caves plotting the end of the world. They go out and take what they want. They use violence as a tool, but they move steadily towards their goals. Osama bin Laden never moved towards the stated number one goal of overthrowing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Without ground forces closer within or adjacent to Saudi Arabia, this was never going to be achieved, and he had no plans for it. He had plans for chaos and killing. Therefore, we know that he was an anarchist and killer. These are not a new phenomenon. The Jews that pissed off the Romans were basically anarchists, and we know how they solved their problem.
ISIS is somewhat different. Presently, they have or had the goal of overthrowing Assad and ruling Syria, and they were working towards that goal. They needed additional equipment and weapons, and they modified their goals to allow them to fulfill these needs. ISIS seems to be more of a classical organization, and they use violence in a classical method. ISIS could be headed by Genghis, Stalin, or Mao.
This could change, but if they follow the pattern, they will use the true believers – religious fanatics – to achieve their goals. Once the goals have been achieved, the true believers will be purged. It may be possible to corral the true believers somewhere, but they are like rabid dogs.
Once the true believers understand that the leaders were not really working towards “the cause”, they will turn on them. This is why the true believers are dangerous, and it is better to put them down. It is easier to create new ones as needed. This is why ruthless dictators rarely partner with fanatics, and it is why there are purges once the revolution is completed.
If ISIS is only a terrorist organization, it will follow the patterns of anarchist organizations. Then the US will need to follow the example of the Roman Empire, and the first step is to establish the US Empire.
None of this will matter in a few years. The US public is fickle and has a short attention span. History to the US public is last version of the iPhone. The informed voters pride themselves on being better than the monster truck crowd, but to then, history is a few elections back.
The majority of the US public has more to fear from the Mexican drug cartels than ISIS. Much of the crystal meth drug trade is controlled by them, and they are probably a lot closer than most people think.
The nice guy next door may be dealing meth on the side to support his habit. One day he may piss off the Mexican drug cartel, and they may come to his house to have a chat. Hopefully, they do not mistake your house instead. They are not nice people, and you may wish ISIS has stopped by instead.
On the other hand, we could stomp our feet and shake our fists, or we could break a bunch of crap. Both of these have worked. The terrorists are on the run.
Alternatively, he genuinely believed that God was on his side and would provide. Such belief is not unique. For example, the Iranian revolutionaries believe that Operation Eagle Claw was halted by the direct intervention of God.
In that case too much planning would not only be presumptuous, it would be blasphemous. I suspect that’s one of the factors that has prevented a certain class of vehement radical Islamists from being successful.
There is nothing about Osama bin Laden or any of the leaders that ever made me think of them as religious fanatics or even really religious. They always seemed like televangelists – more preaching and less practicing. The religion always seemed bolted on.