The political fight against ISIS is every bit as important as the military. IN HIS ADDRESS to the country Wednesday, President Barack Obama downplayed any notion of nation building.
Mobilizing public opinion against the militant faction is crucial to its defeat and will have longer lasting results than air strikes.
This is a part of the world where Islamist extremists publicly behead “infidels.” Though they are equipped with sophisticated technology, their ideology is rooted in some twisted, archaic interpretation of the Koran, their holy book.
In the last several years their strength has increased, first in Syria and now Iraq. That Iraq now has a unified government that includes the once maligned Sunnis, brings an element of hope that was not there under former president Nouri al-Maliki.
And while we welcome the world over to embrace democracy, we’ve come to realize that’s not up to us. This new battle is to quell a fomenting tide of terrorism that poses a global danger.
The U.S., with the help of other Western nations, is to provide necessary air power and intelligence to aid regional forces in Syria and Iraq to fight the terrorists, said to number 31,500.
Even with such a limited engagement, the stakes for the United States are high because we are regarded as the go-to freedom fighter. Critical to our success against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is building a regional consensus, especially among its young men, that ISIS is indeed a “cancer,” as President Obama said, whose spread is lethal. In immediate jeopardy are the fragile leaderships of Jordan, Kurdistan and Lebanon, who all share common borders with either Syria or Iraq and could be the next targets of ISIS.
It’s imperative that Arabs and Muslims come together to provide a united political front against ISIS, whose seeds were sewn in both the Iraqi civil war and then in Syria in efforts to eradicate the Sunni branch of Islam.
President Obama said his intent is to “degrade and destroy” ISIS. The first is the greater battle.
— Susan Lynn
Public opinion can thwart ISIS as much as military might
