RUTHFULLY YOURS

However the US campaign against ISIS goes, the beneficiaries will be its Sunni Muslim allies who are also doubling as our allies. While on the surface ISIS appears to have cut all ties, threatening even former allies like Turkey and Qatar, underneath the surface the pragmatic connections remain as strong as ever.

Terrorism is the fire of the Muslim world. Everyone plays with it and everyone gets burned. The trick is burning someone else with it first.

Americans still think of the relationship between terrorist groups and countries as servant and master. However it’s often more like feeding a rabid dog and then luring it into your neighbor’s yard. It’s less about direct control of a terrorist group and more about maneuvering it to reshape the political and military environment that your enemies and allies operate in.

That’s why Al Qaeda and Iran, religious enemies, could still occasionally cooperate.

The current campaign against ISIS is a typical example. By empowering ISIS, the Sunni Muslim oil states dragged the United States into an alliance with the bands of Islamic Jihadists commonly known as the Free Syrian Army. When the West balked at intervention even after reports of WMD use, the smart money went to ISIS. By turning Al Qaeda into a major regional threat, the United States would be dragged into the conflict and then forced to make common cause with the Free Syrian Army anyway.

When that still didn’t happen on schedule, mass murder and rape by ISIS did the trick. Now the Kurds have been forced out of their neutral position and into an alignment with the Sunni rebels. Western countries have gotten deeper into an alliance with the Free Syrian Army which will ultimately force them into a NATO intervention in Syria to protect the FSA. That was always the endgame. ISIS was the means.

The ISIS gamble was a dangerous one, especially under Obama, but now it’s beginning to pay off.

Islamic terrorism benefits Muslims directly and indirectly. The direct benefits are obvious. The indirect benefits are more subtle. Whether it’s ISIS and the FSA, Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia, the “extremist” mosques that openly preach death and the “moderate” mosques that dress it up a little, Islamic violence benefits both sides in the game of “Good Caliph” and “Bad Caliph”.

Islamic “extremism” creates a market for “moderates”. The more bombs go off, the more the affected countries scramble to ally with cooler heads who claim to be able to defuse the anger of the radicals.

It’s a familiar game.

Jihadists set off bombs in Boston and the state partners with local mosques. The Taliban kill girls and the United States pumps more money into Pakistan. ISIS massacres non-Muslims and we ally with the FSA.

The Muslim world needs “extremists” to blow off dangerous steam and to achieve their goals indirectly. Each new extreme may hurt Muslims, but it also makes Westerners more dependent on them while turning yesterday’s unacceptable groups into the new moderates. When we look past the individual groups to the larger objectives of Islamization, we can see that each group in its own way helps put another piece of the puzzle into place. One group may do so through violence, while another promises to counter radical extremists, but all are working to secure the same ultimate totalitarian concessions.

Muslims object to the idea that each of them should be viewed as a ticking time bomb and yet they have benefited enormously from such a perception. PLO terrorism turned Western foreign policy into a tool for pursuing Muslim grievances against Israel. Al Qaeda turned Muslims from an obscure minority into a civil rights priority. ISIS combines both, forcing the West to accommodate Sunni territorial demands in Iraq and Syria through armed intervention while spreading paranoia about ISIS recruitment in the West.

When the current conflict with ISIS ends, it is likely that the Shiites will have been broken in Syria and weakened in Iraq, that Kurdish statehood will once again be a fantasy and that the position of Sunni Muslims in both countries will be stronger than ever after having profited from seizing the properties of Christians and Yazidi who were ethnically cleansed by ISIS. Even if ISIS loses, many of its goals will have been met because they’re also the goals of our Muslim allies in the coalition against ISIS.

We’re not even allying with Stalin to beat Hitler. We’re allying with one wing of the Nazi Party to beat another wing of the Nazi Party. And whichever wing wins, the Nazi agenda still wins.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t deal with ISIS. Like its Al Qaeda parent, it does represent a threat to us. But we also need to recognize that the best way to fight it is without the entangling alliances and strategic linkages that reward its backers. The surest way to perpetuate ISIS is to show its backers that they can can drag us into a war on their behalf by arming and funding Islamic terrorists for us to fight.

Too many politicians have bought into the myth that we can’t beat ISIS without allying with “moderates” in Syria despite the fact that even this administration, which can find moderates in Gitmo, couldn’t originally find any that it could safely arm. Our allies against ISIS are also the allies of ISIS.  We are not using them to beat ISIS. They are using us to seize Iraq and Syria.

When we accept the linkage between beating ISIS and helping the FSA, we reward the backers of ISIS. In the future when the Sunni oil states want to drag the US into a war, all they have to do is arm and fund ISIS or another group very much like it. And if we don’t come running when the bell rings, then they’ll have to make it an even bigger threat until it becomes too big for even a Democrat to ignore.

That’s exactly what happened with ISIS.

The answer doesn’t lie in ignoring Al Qaeda or in becoming a puppet of its backers. Instead we have to be aware of the larger political agendas involved. And those political agendas cannot be talked about.

When Biden wandered around the edges of the truth, he was swiftly told to apologize to Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE. The same administration that can blame Israel for ISIS recruitment can’t even admit the fact that its Sunni allies were the ones who provided the money, weapons and manpower for ISIS. And if it can’t admit that, then it certainly can’t admit that it wasn’t a mistake, but a calculated plan.

The weakest and wealthiest Muslim countries compensate for their weakness by turning their dependency on us into our dependency on them. They need Al Qaeda and ISIS to make Western countries dependent on them. Muslims in the West similarly compensate for their weakness and dependency by exploiting the fear of Islamic terrorism to increase their influence and political power.

Islamic terrorism won’t end with airstrikes. It will end when we break this cycle of dependency by recognizing that what really feeds terrorism isn’t oppression or injustice, but Muslim political cynicism.

The backers of ISIS are also our allies against ISIS. Sunni Arab Muslims have aided in the genocide of non-Muslims to force us to back their territorial claims which include the ethnic cleansing of the same people we are fighting to protect. To fight ISIS we have made a deal with the devil to carry out the ISIS agenda.

That is the same thing that has happened each time we allowed ourselves to be led into the trap of allying with the “moderates” to defeat the “extremists.” It’s a road that leads to trying to bring democracy through Islamism and allying with Jihadists to fight Jihadists.

We can’t defeat ISIS by becoming ISIS.