RUTHFULLY YOURS

Movements like ISIS don’t spring from nowhere. It took centuries of decline, serial humiliations at the hands of arrogant European imperial powers, and decades of failed postcolonial governance to produce the toxic mixture of bigotry and hate out of which Baghdadi and his adherents emerged. That toxic brew won’t quickly disappear. Angry, alienated and profoundly confused people—many young and at best half-educated—will continue to find the message of ISIS and similar groups seductive. Baghdadi’s death isn’t the end of ISIS, and the collapse of the U.S.-backed order in northern Syria could provide conditions for its re-emergence as a serious military force.

Yet Baghdadi’s death was more than a meaningless episode in an endless game of Middle Eastern Whac-A-Mole. The fall of his so-called caliphate brings the U.S. a little closer to the end of its longest war.

Baghdadi’s reign of terror began with prophecies, visions and dreams. He and his lieutenants promised their followers paradise. They crafted a god in their own image—a god of genocide, violence, rape, enslavement—and claimed that this god was powerful enough to give victory in battle. It turned out they were wrong.

Baghdadi’s fate makes the task of recruiting fresh jihadists a little harder. The next “austere religious scholar” seeking recruits will face a bit more skepticism in the marketplace of ideas.

Remember that the fanaticism of Baghdadi and his ilk is a minority view. The Islam that the overwhelming majority of Muslims revere has no more to do with Baghdadi’s pornographic fantasies of violence and sex slaves than Torquemada’s inquisitorial bonfires represent the true spirit of Christianity. The majority of Muslims rejected Baghdadi’s pestilent movement before its military decline. The more the world’s Muslims saw of this dystopia, the more utterly they hated both Baghdadi and the wider movement that spawned him. Most of the forces that ground the caliphate into dust came from the Muslim world; if ISIS tries to rise again, Muslims will again be on the frontlines trying to defeat it.

Yet though Islam as a faith can’t be conflated with Baghdadi’s delusions, the deformation and dysfunction of so many societies in the Islamic world provides fertile soil in which fanaticism can grow. The epicenter of the crisis is the Middle East, where sectarian strife, economic stagnation, foreign interference and political failure have trapped hundreds of millions in a cycle of frustration and despair. But the crisis is broader. From Xinjiang’s persecuted millions in China to Islamic communities challenged by Boko Haram’s nihilistic rage in Nigeria, adherents of the world’s second-largest religion face a daunting range of pressures and challenges from without and within.

Back in those halcyon end-of-history days not long ago, people in the West generally believed that we had the wisdom and the power to curb religious extremism by curing its causes. We had a plan for that, as Elizabeth Warren might say. By promoting the political and economic development of the Muslim world, we thought we would reduce the appeal of radical religious ideas. By aligning with “moderate Islamists” like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi, would win the trust of most Islamists and further marginalize the fanatics.

Those hopes were nobler than the ones that inspired Baghdadi, but they were almost as delusional. The West can help at the margins, but the cultural, social, religious and economic reform the Middle East needs will have to be enacted by the people who live there—in their own time and in their own way.

America won’t “fix” the Middle East by killing bad guys like Baghdadi. But leaving them to flourish unmolested would be worse. And terrorism isn’t our only interest in the Middle East. U.S. energy independence doesn’t untether us from the region. For decades to come, hydrocarbons from the Middle East will be critical to the economic health of Europe, China and Japan—and therefore, because of our trade and financial links, to America as well. Unless we want to give others the ability to blackmail the world over oil, the U.S. must stay engaged.

President Trump understands how tired Americans are of the seemingly endless wars the U.S. military has been fighting in the Middle East since 2001. He knows Americans have lost faith in the development economists and democracy “experts” whose Middle East plans never quite work. The question is whether he understands how important the region still is.