Syria and Iraq: In Search of a Strategy

Posted: 02/17/2015 4:59 pm EST

A State of Perpetual Insecurity

The international community continues to witness the perpetual violence of terrorist groups such as Daesh, also called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIL, ISIS or IS), the beheading machine pretending to be a state. With Daesh, crime now has a political face that has pushed the envelope past anything heretofore imaginable, from selling women and children into slavery, brazen slaughter and desecration of human corpses, to burning alive a captured pilot, to cannibalism (eating the liver of a dead soldier).

The horror of terrorism is not limited geographically. As the tragic event at Charlie Hebdo demonstrates, terrorism can strike in the very heart of democratic Europe, and probably in every corner of the globe, at any moment. Like a biological epidemic, it can cross borders and trespass on the relative freedom of more socially open lands also. Terrorism is a cancer born of a myriad unresolved economic, ethno-cultural, and political/geopolitical contradictions within society -- especially those societies devoid of any democratic heritage, mostly in the Arab-Islamic Middle East and South East Asia. Like cancer, it spreads unchecked by democratic and legal institutions in certain countries. In the immediate, it must be limited and, where possible, excised by military force. In the long run, however, eradicating it will necessitate an ideological and cultural battle.

President Obama defined the strategy for the U.S.-led war against Daesh: "Our objective is clear: We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL."

Secretary of State John Kerry has declared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee something more: "The military action ends when we have ended the capacity of ISIL to engage in broad-based terrorist activity that threatens the state of Iraq, threatens the United States, threatens the region. That's our goal."

U.S. Secretary of Defense Nominee Ashton Carter, during questioning by the Senate Armed Services Committee, told senators that the U.S. military campaign in the Middle East must ensure a "lasting defeat" of Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria. "It's important that when they get defeated, they stay defeated."

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