President Barack Obama has referred to the Islamic state as "the face of evil" but he is now under pressure from those who say he is not doing enough to defeat him. Some insist that an attack against France was an attack against NATO and that it is time to go to war.
Pope Francisco indicates that the West is at war ... a "third world war". If the pope is right, does that not require more severe response? Do not ended and the time for warnings?
But only a fool would confuse caution with weakness. On the contrary, to defeat the enemy we must fully understand who the enemy is, what they want and what kind of conflict is the conflict in which we are involved here. There is good reason to proceed with extreme caution.
Let's be clear: in fact, right now we are at war with ISIS. A US-led coalition has been bombing targets in Syria and Iraq for over a year, and in recent months, Russia has been doing the same. How well it worked it is something that is discussed: Obama, rhetorically, has changed its objectives to crush ISIS to contain it.
However, late last week there were signs of success. The Kurds took Sinjar, strategically significant area in northern Iraq. Mohammed Emwazi a ruthless murderer and activist, was probably killed in a drone attack.
Paris obviously has overshadowed the news of these great advances.
Against whom or what we fight? ISIS is different from al Qaeda, the group behind 9/11. The latter operated as an alliance of worldwide scattered cells; ISIS, by contrast, seeks to create a geographic space within which wants to build a caliphate. The change in strategy may explain why ISIS has been even more successful than many al Qaeda to attack foreign targets with very different methods ... from Sinai to Beirut and Paris.
The caliphate of ISIS offers shelter to tens of thousands of foreign jihadists: they come, many train and then return home to create chaos. The caliphate also provides money and moral encouragement to have an earthly "paradise" for which to fight. In his pioneering about the motivations behind ISIS essay, Graeme Wood describes a recruiter ISIS ISIS referred to as "a vehicle for salvation."
Its fighters are obsessed with spreading Islam in its most primitive form (or as they interpret it has been since the early caliphate was much friendlier) and believe that most other Muslims have come from that model ... one that It includes the use of the crucifixion and slavery. While al Qaeda has limited itself to comparatively rational policy objectives such as expelling Westerners in the Arabian peninsula, ISIS want to cause the apocalypse. It is not nihilistic. -but This is deeply religious and retorcidamente- is that we must learn to take seriously their way of religion.
The good news is that ISIS is isolated. Apply the phrase "world war" here is useless because it evokes images of rival nation states of equal size and engaged in a total war. But while the scope of ISIS is global, this command does not have a significant beyond its boundaries changing support. Meanwhile, the alliance against him is one of the largest and most diverse in history, including the United States, Britain, France, Russia and Iran.
Saudi money may once have supported, but the Saudi state now opposes. In fact, the extreme evil of ISIS leads us to view many of the regional political agenda in a different light. Iran, for example, certainly is exporting its theocratic regime to other countries. But he does not wish the end of the world. The regime is murderer and must be contained. But it can be compromised.
The complexity of the Islamic world politics highlights other aspects of this conflict: it can not be completely solved by force of arms. ISIS has exploited Sunni dissatisfaction with the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. This may mean that Iraq, as a whole, has to be divided to work. Turkey will probably have to please the Kurds wishes regarding a homeland. Moreover, most important of all, Bashar al-Assad, Syria's dictator, will have to leave the stage.