ISIS says it has ramped up suicide attacks due to its recent losses on the battle field.  This is entirely consistent with the instrumentalist view of terrorism, that is, terrorism is undertaken to achieve political objectives with a strategic logic and is not the result of mental illness, nor is it random. It is a tactic used in conflict typically from a position of weakness. Its key feature is that the targets are civilians, other non-combatants, or civilian installations, explicitly ignoring the just war principle of civilian immunity.

Suicide terrorism has its own strategic logic that is tied to the hardness of the target. As counter-terrorism operations improve security, the terrorist organization escalates to suicide terrorism in order to demonstrate (a) to its adversary the ability to still terrorize its victims, (b) to its supporters that it is still relevant to the cause. Religiously motivated terrorist groups are rational economic actors.  The resort to suicide tactics is a sign that other less expensive options have been foreclosed.

In the case of ISIS it must project the image of a successful Islamic insurgency that will result in the establishment of an Islamic state. To fail would risk the dissolution of the movement as various Sunni salafist jihadi and takfiri organizations would seek a stronger horse to back in the battle against the nearest enemies (Marxists and Shi’ites) and the far enemies (Europeans and Americans).

Samuel Huntington poked a stick in the hornets’ nest with his controversial article in Foreign Affairs The Clash of Civilizations? (few commentators acknowledge the question mark on the end), which was followed up by his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order that expanded on the theme.  In the book Huntington made a distinction between “fault line wars,” small wars that occur on the margins of civilizations where two different civilizations are in contact and populations are mixed and a clash of civilizations where multiple states contend waging total war divided between two civilizations.  I bring this up because I recently read an article that seems to seek an escalation of the various fault line wars on “Islam’s bloody borders,” to use Huntington’s phrase, to a full-blown clash of civilizations.

Choksy and Choksy advocate a vigorous prosecution of war by the West against Islamist groups around the world.  They correctly diagnose the current strategy of the Obama administration as a failed strategy, however, the remedies advocated violate all international norms and are beyond the military capabilities of the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia (who are the only great powers willing and able to project power.  They propose an eight point plan of action:

1. The war on terror must stop focusing upon one group at a time. Organizations such as Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram share commonality with IS through Arabian funding sources, extremist interpretation of Islam, intolerance of moderate Muslims and members of other faiths, and reliance on violence.
2. Military actions should be expanded. Bombardment from the air, special forces on the ground, and training to establish indigenous troops should not be limited to countering IS in Syria and Iraq, but also demolish IS offshoots, Al-Qaeda, and other groups in Libya, the Sinai, Afghanistan, and elsewhere… Systematically eliminating the traveling ideologues and the local gangs they organize also must become a priority for breaking the global jihad.
3. The non-military counter-offensive against Islamic extremism needs to be taken worldwide. Better intelligence collection and more effective preemptive operations must prevent attacks by terror cell members and wannabes… Extremist-affiliated media portals providing attack techniques should be taken down as soon as they appear. Internet sites portraying Islamic terror organizations as principled should be taken over and redeployed with vivid images of how they distort Islam’s doctrines and practices to achieve radical goals.
4. While much success has been achieved in cutting off external funds especially from the Middle East to IS and Al-Qaeda, cash flows within terrorist-controlled areas must be shut down too.
5. Ending Islamic terrorism requires focusing not merely on current troublemakers but emerging ones as well.
6. The countries that contributed most ideologically, fiscally, and socio-politically to the rise and spread of Islamic fanaticism must become central to ending it.
7. The US and its western partners need to persuade Middle East rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran that inflaming sectarian tensions for religio-political goals is detrimental.
8. Solutions to civil wars in the Middle East must tackle not only military dimensions but religious ones in order to endure. A workable political resolution for Syria has to accommodate all that country’s communities, including Alawites and other Shiites. Likewise for Iraq to stabilize, mechanisms to prevent revenge extraction between Shiite and Sunni citizens have to be established. Power-sharing and revenge foregoing are both needed to end the struggle in Yemen. After all, Islamic terrorists are most active, destructive, and lethal in countries where Muslims comprise a substantial portion of the citizenry.

A underlying assumptions behind this plan are that (1) there is a war of ideas that can be won by intervention by the West, and (2) that colonial intervention in civil wars being waged by jihadis across the Muslim world is both possible and desirable. Both assumptions are wrong. There is no war of ideas being waged between Islam and the West. It is a war of ideas within Islam! Interventions by Western great powers will be counter-productive. Furthermore, the internecine struggles in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen are not going to be solved by Western or even IGO intervention. Syria is beset with the multiple actor problem and will ultimately be solved by population transfers and partition. There is no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again as a multi-confessional multi-ethnic state on a Western model. Yemen is a proxy war being fought between Iran and Saudi Arabia both for ideological reasons (Iran’s export of revolution) and control over the Persian Gulf.

The Obama administration has stumbled into the correct policy for the wrong reasons (Jeffersonian non-interventionism). Great powers intervene in civil wars to contain conflicts and prevent them from becoming a global clash of civilizations, not escalating them to create a clash of civilizations. Treading lightly is the order of the day. Islamic civilization needs to find its own way, which will be violent and possibly last centuries. It took nearly three hundred years for Christendom to make peace with Enlightenment modernity. To expect Islamic civilization get there in decades is unrealistic.

Ryan Cooper writes over at The Week that the United States should abandon Saudi Arabia as a Persian Gulf ally. The rationale boils down to the following reasons: (1) the human rights record of Saudi Arabia is awful; (2) wealthy Saudis sponsored Bin Laden and the clerics export a form of Islam that fuels our enemies; (3) the Yemen war works against U.S. interests; (4) we don’t need the oil from the Middle East any longer because of fracking revolution.

What went unstated is what are U.S. interests in the region. U.S. interests in the region have mainly been counted as three: (1) maintaining the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, (2) maintaining the Jewish State in the region, and (3) preventing another great power from dominating the region.

The U.S. pried Egypt out of the Soviet orbit during the Cold War. It is certainly the case that nations chose to play one super power off against another in order to maximize their financial and military support. Egypt is no different. The U.S. had to rely on the Saudis as the bulwark against revolutionary Iran after the fall of the Pahlavi regime. Revolutionary Iran was and is an enemy of the United States. A capitulation to Iran by throwing Saudi Arabia over the side would hardly be in U.S. interests.

Fracking has turned the United States into the world’s swing producer, but the United States is not self sufficient in energy. Thus, the claim that the U.S. is no longer dependent on Middle East oil is bogus. An appeal to autarky is foolish. This is socialist banana republic thinking. The U.S. is too integrated into the world economy to think that risking tumult in global oil supplies is something that won’t affect the United States.

As to the case of the Yemen proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Because ISIS and al Qaeda have acquired a foothold in Yemen as a base of operations is a complete smokescreen. Al Qaeda has been operating in Yemen since the 1990s, before the current proxy war. ISIS has global appeal to jihadis world wide (Boko Haram, which had no institutional ties ISIS has pledged allegiance). They are likely to back a winner.

My only conclusion based on the recommendations made in the article is that Cooper has been infected with the idea that Iranian hegemony in the Gulf would be stabilizing. There are not a few in the State Department and the foreign policy team in current administration holding out hope for this. However, those that do, fail to understand the religious dynamics of the region. The goal of the international community is to prevent the region from being consumed in a broad Sunni-Shia conflict. Putting out fires are what superpowers do. There is no grand solution to the multitude of interrelated conflicts in the region, but limiting the chaos is what the benign hegemon does. Britain did it since the 18th century. And the U.S. has been carrying that mantle since 1945, no one else is stepping up to do it.

This is the fundamental failure of those who seek ultimate solutions. Perfection is the enemy of the good. Cooper’s essay is an example.