Column: Deploying more bombs, troops against ISIS will backfire
Last week’s Paris attacks, which brought horror and carnage worldwide, also brought a din of fresh bluster from U.S. politicians. The Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives, supported by various Democrats including Iowa’s Dave Loebsack, voted 289 to 137 to restrict Syrian refugees. That's though they are fleeing the same forces that targeted Paris, and before that Beirut, and before that, a Russian airliner. The House bill would only allow in those whom the FBI, Homeland Security and national intelligence heads could verify pose no threat -- a Herculean task.
More than half the nation's governors, including Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, took steps to block refugees from coming to Iowa.
From many politicians came calls to blast the region with firepower to get at ISIS. Joni Ernst, the Republican U.S. senator from Iowa, called for all-out war in a USA Today op-ed piece. She also blasted President Barack Obama for his reluctance to send in ground troops. His strategy involves airstrikes and training local anti-ISIS militia.
The occasion brought fresh opportunity to demagogue Muslims and non-Western people in general. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump entertained the prospect of warrant-less searches of Muslims and revived surveillance in mosques — even closing mosques. There was talk about registering every Muslim in a database or requiring them to carry special ID cards.
“These folks aren’t coming from Sweden,” Trump said. “If they were, I’d feel differently.”
Rick Santorum said something similar in suggesting we help relocate refugees from Syria to other Mideast countries, but that he would consider admitting refugees from Paris.
Jeb Bush sounded OK with an idea to deny entry to Muslim men under 40. “We need to be merciless in this effort,” he declared on Fox News, of defeating ISIS by force. But he seemed to reject the idea of collaborating with Russia or Iran.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, formerly the top U.S. diplomat, wants the U.S. to lead a worldwide fight against ISIS “with more allied planes, more strikes, and a broader target set.” She did make an effort to clarify that “we’re not at war with Islam. We’re at war with jihadists.”
Against the warmongers' cries, some of us searched for a more nuanced understanding of our complicated role in Iraq and Syria. I found some from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies. One was a piece by Peter Certo offering evidence that bombing is likely to make us more of a target. He observed that the Paris, Beirut and Russian airliner attacks all occurred against countries whose governments (or militia in Lebanon) have fought ISIS in Syria. A month before the Paris attack, French warplanes bombed Raqaa, the Islamic state capital, a fact noted in a gloating ISIS communique after the Paris attacks.
Phyllis Bennis, who heads the New Internationalism Project for the same institute, just wrote the book — literally— on ISIS. It's called "Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror.” She is traveling and speaking widely on the recent events, repeating the line, “Terrorism survives war. People don’t.”
She says the U.S. has for 15 years been unsuccessfully using war to deal with terrorism: “Everything the U.S. has done has made it worse.”
Her recommendation: Stop the bombings and the drone strikes, withdraw remaining ground troops from Iraq and Syria and stop “flooding the region with more arms,” to local militias fighting ISIS, because they tend to end up in militants' hands.
The Obama administration announced last month it would stop training rebel fighters in Syria after U.S. Central Command disclosed that a $500 million program intended to train and equip 5,000 netted only four or five. Some gave their arms to the Al Qaida-linked Nusra Front for protection from jihadists.
Bennis also urges that we partner with Russia and Iran in forging a strategy, which must include stopping the funding of ISIS through oil sales. That would take pressuring oil companies. Pressuring the Saudi government to shut down the movement of money and arms to ISIS is another component, which she says could require us to threaten to cut off a $1 billion arms sale agreement.
She also calls for a massive increase in humanitarian assistance in the region.
ISIS recruits fighters with $700 payments, Bennis said. She said they recruited 20,000 in the same period that the U.S. killed 20,000. ISIS recruits professionals from the West with narratives of “acceptance, honor and respect,” she said.
ISIS was formed with Sunnis (Saddam Hussein's faction) and has some appeal with secular Sunnis fleeing violence by the current West-backed Shia Iraqi government. We can fight the ideology, says Bennis, by “convincing people through practice that you respect their religion, and that other versions of Islam are accepted.”
For me the most inspiring bit of soul-searching amid calls for vengeance came from a French man, Antoine Leiris, whose wife was killed in the Paris attacks. In a videotaped message he told her killers:
"I will not give you the gift of hating you. You have obviously sought it, but responding to it with anger would be to give in to the same ignorance that has made you what you are. You want me to be afraid? To cast a mistrustful eye on my fellow citizens? To sacrifice my freedom for security? You lost. ... "
Hatred, persecution and bombs can be back-firing missiles. The more courageous, and strategically sound approach, might just be restraint.