Dear America,
I have always thought that one day ISIL would go too far and the consequence would be that the world would be mobilized against it. I thought that what happened last Friday in Paris was it, and it may be, but outside of the French increase in its dedication to the air war against ISIL in Syria and Iraq, there really isn't any sign of enhanced commitment to the task of extirpating ISIL on any other front. President Obama gave a press conference on the subject in Turkey today, and it was surprisingly tepid in its tone. We have been doing what needs to be done, The President said, and we will continue to do so in concert with our allies. But despite foreshadowing that France would invoke Article V of the NATO charter, which reads in essence that an attack on one member is an attack on them all, nothing but foreshadowing has really occurred. I am left to ask myself, if this attack on France with hundreds dead and gravely wounded left in its wake is doesn't suffice to galvanize the world, what would. While it is pointless to pontificate on the subject of how the world should respond, here is what I think should occur.
First, ISIL has proclaimed itself a caliphate, which is essentially a Muslim nation with all that such entails: sovereignty within its borders, inclusion in the world of nations as an independent entity, and most importantly, responsibility for its acts as a nation. When the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York were destroyed by terrorists dispatched by Al Qaeda, George Bush and Dick Cheney declared a "War on Terror" and got congress to enact the AUMF, or Authorization for Use of Military Force at the discretion of The President, and President Obama continues to rely on that authorization for his bombing campaign against ISIL today. But it constituted in effect a declaration of war on terrorists...criminals, not a nation...which was not unlike the war on crime that had dismantled much of the Mafia in the preceding decades, but had in no way been a war in the universally understood sense. Use of the term war was just a piece of demagoguery intended to inspire public support with jingoism and chauvinistic fervor. There was no nation on which to declare war per se, and calling it war was just a convenient euphemism. But now, in the war against ISIL, the concept of war is not so much of a stretch since there is a self-proclaimed nation to declare it on. President Obama has been seeking a new AUMF to specifically include ISIL, but I think he should instead seek a formal declaration of war...a real declaration of war as prescribed by the US Constitution, and a real war should be waged against the Caliphate of ISIL, but only after all of NATO does the same, either through NATO's charter provisions or individually in compliance with Article V. Then there would be arrayed against ISIL an alliance the likes of which hasn't been seen since the entry of the United States into World War II. There would be no question of unilateral American occupation of Syria and Iraq after such a declaration, and the might of virtually all of the western nations would be unified and dedicated to a single purpose: bringing ISIL to its knees and gaining either a full, formal surrender from its leaders, or killing them all. There would be no more problem of powerful nations and their weak sisters. The nations of the world would be effectively one, and ISIL would be deprived of the propaganda opportunity to single out individual nations as targets in consequence of their individual actions. ISIL are today's Nazi regime, and we should deal with them as such...all for one and one for all.
With the advent of what could pass as a real alliance of all nations, all of them participating in the war effort with unreserved commitment and vigor, an army could be formed and inserted into the Levant where ISIL claims its caliphate, and with a concerted effort, the alliance should be able to devastate the components of the ISIL caliphate in the physical sense in short order. In the aftermath of that victory, some occupation of the area would be necessary, but it would be like the allied occupation of Germany after World War II rather than being an American enterprise like the after math of the Iraq war. That is what would distinguish the war against the ISIL caliphate from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan too for that matter. As a real international coalition, the responsibility would fall equally, or at least proportionally, on all the nations participating, and there could thus be no focused zealots' wrath against one nation, which I believe would go a long way toward disabling the propaganda mechanism of the forces of darkness constituted by ISIL, which has managed to create a movement by pointing a finger at The West, the United States in particular. But let me point out one more thing that I have referenced before.
There will always be a religious and intellectual luddite contingent in the world. And in the case of religious luddites like ISIL and the Taliban, they are sufficiently committed by virtue of the willingness of their leaders to order their followers to commit suicide and the willingness of those members to do so that they can continue to wreak isolated instances of mayhem and havoc for the foreseeable future no matter what the fate of the caliphate in consequence of military defeat. So bizarre as it seems, and I concede that this idea sounds and probably is bizarre, I also believe that we have to give a caliphate like ISIL's a place to exist in the world as long as it allows those within its borders to come and go as they please and they refrain from obtrusive actions like continued terrorism. And it seems to me that Afghanistan is the most logical place since in its history, no other nation has ever been able to dominate it for long, including Alexander the Great, Russia and the United States. Such an entity, in that it would be definable, could be forced to comport its conduct with the basic comity of nations honored by the rest of the world. As long as we can vouchsafe the exodus of those who don't want to live the ISIL-Taliban mode of life, I think we should consider such an arrangement, but for now, it seems that the status quo is all we can look forward to along with the next ISIL attack on civilization.
Your friend,
Mike
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