Why the Islamic State Is the Minor Leagues of Terror

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/05/why-islamic-state-minor-leagues-terror

So give credit where it’s due. Compared to a few training camps in Afghanistan -- the al-Qaedmodel before 2001 (and again recently) -- this is no small thing. But the Islamic State shoulalso be put in some perspective. It’s not Nazi Germany. It’s not the Soviet Union. It’s not an existential threat to the United States. It’s a distinctly self-limited movement, probably onlcapable of expanding its reach if even more of the region is laid to waste (as is, for instance, happening in Yemen right now, thanks in large part to a U.S.-backed Saudi war on the Iranian-inclined Houthi rebels).

IS is so deeply sectarian that it can never gain the support of a single Shia, Christian, Alawite, or Yazidi. Its practices, religious and political, are too extreme for many of the Sunnis it might want to appeal to. It is also an embattled movement. It has already lost some of the lands it captured to U.S.-backed Kurds in both Syria and Iraq and to the U.S.-backed, U.S.-equipped, and U.S.-trained Iraqi Army as well as Shiite militias. Its extremity has clearly alienated some of the Sunnis under its control. It’s unlikely to take seven decades, as in the case of the Soviet Union, to implode and disappear.

On the other hand, if the Islamic State, at least in its present form, is crushed or driven into some corner and the region is “liberated,” one thing is guaranteed -- as images of the rubble and landscapes of skeletal buildings left behind at the “victorious” battle sites of Kobane, Sinjar, Homs, and Ramadi will tell you. Combine the massively bomb-laden, booby-trapped urban areas under Islamic State control, American air power (or, in parts of Syria, the barrel-bombing air force of the government of Bashar al-Assad and now the firepower of Russia), and fierce urban combat, and what may be left in the moment of “victory” could be a region in utter ruins. One expert suggests that it may take decades and cost $200 billion -- three times Syria’s prewar gross domestic product -- to rebuild that country, bringing to mind the famed line from Tacitus: “They make a desert and call it peace.”

And just remind me, who’s going to help with the reconstruction of that shattered land? Donald Trump? Don’t count on it. And don’t for a second believe that from such devastated worlds nothing worse than the Islamic State can arise.