“The Muslim world won’t let it happen,” a friend told me recently, referring to the stated goal of the Islamic State to dominate all Muslims. His reasoning: Most Muslims don’t want to live under the cruel control of a caliphate.
I couldn’t agree more. From many years covering the Middle East, I feel certain that most Muslims don’t want to live in the Dark Ages. The trouble is, up against the merciless militias of the Islamic State, that doesn’t necessarily make much difference. As history sometimes shows, even if the preponderance of a population loathes its leadership, nothing changes, at least not for generations.
Exhibit A: The Soviet Union. I never worked there without meeting citizens who wanted out from under the repression. And based on the drab, deprived, fretful lives they lived, I could only guess that they were the majority. But in a police state like that, what could they do? They had neither open elections nor the liberty to call for their own liberation. If flagrant dissidents got too brazen, they might find themselves slogging through the gulag with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Exhibit B: South Africa. During the era of apartheid, I didn’t even need to ask anyone in the black majority there how they felt about minority white rule. All I had to do was look at the unconcealed contrast between lives lived in luxury in all-white suburbs and lives lived without electricity or running water in all-black townships. If blacks got too rebellious, they might find themselves working a limestone quarry with Nelson Mandela.
Iraqi Shiites under Saddam Hussein, Chinese civilians under Mao Tse-Tung, probably the bulk of North Koreans under Kim Jong-un, maybe even most ordinary German citizens under Adolf Hitler, they all might fall into the class of the silent majority. They have no army, no political power, no voice.
Which brings us back to the question: Who’s going to rise up against the Islamic State? The John McCains of the world assert that if the United States puts more muscle into this war, we can kill the cancer. I don’t want to be a doomsayer, but I’m not a dreamer, either. Look at the facts on the ground. We fire a $100,000 missile; they lose a $10,000 truck. We kill 10 zealots, they recruit 20.
Sure, we have allies: The United Arab Emirates has resumed its off-again-on-again air campaign against the Islamic State in Syria; Egypt took out some Islamic State assets in Libya; Jordan’s talking tough; and the Iraqi military plans to recapture from the Islamic State the key supply-line city of Mosul. But how’s that going?
Tens of thousands of weapons the United States says it already has sent to the Iraqis (with more on the way) are missing, and their parliamentary defense committee chairman is quoted as saying that without those weapons, “any operation would be fruitless.” Some of our Arab allies look at us and complain that we’re not pulling out all the stops. But are they? Would they ever? And if they did, would they win? Qatar’s emir said that Arab leaders must commit “to the values … in the Arab Spring.” Dream on.
Or maybe it’s more like a nightmare, because the Islamic State isn’t even a single entity any more, operating only in Syria and Iraq. In a case of “déj… vu all over again,” remember how in Afghanistan, we chased out al-Qaeda only to see lookalikes turn up in a dozen different countries? Well, today, intelligence identifies Islamic State-like units, whether official affiliates or aspiring wannabes, in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, as deep into Africa as Nigeria and, yes, Afghanistan. The Islamic State has even tweeted, “We will conquer Rome” (meaning the West).
If we have learned nothing else since Vietnam, we have learned that even though we are mightier and hopefully more moral than our enemies, we don’t always win. There are too many variables in war. And too many enemies we just don’t understand.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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