Last semester, my fellow columnist Jesse Berman penned an op-ed declaring Syrian President Bashar al-Assad far more threatening than the self-proclaimed Islamic State, more commonly referred to as ISIS. This semester another Cavalier Daily columnist, Sawan Patel, argued our nation’s fear of ISIS is vastly and unnecessarily exaggerated by opportunistic politicians and journalists. Both columnists’ op-eds contain more than a kernel of truth: Assad is indeed a brutal dictator whose repressive actions have fueled and helped sustain the Syrian Civil War, and politicians (primarily, as Patel notes, Republicans) have turned the legitimate threat of ISIS into hollow talking points in order to appear tougher on terror. But our perception of ISIS does not have to behave like a pendulum: simply because some candidates swing too far to the right on this issue does not mean our editorial pages should swing equally far to the left. ISIS threatens the United States, the world community and — as President Obama recently phrased it — our shared sense of humanity. An enemy this serious warrants a more sober response than mockingly labeling them “a bunch of bandits in a stretch of relatively empty, uninhabited desert.”
Let’s start with a disclaimer: as Patel notes, the statistical likelihood of ISIS killing any one person in the United States is lower than the chance an American will die of heart disease. But this is a particularly meaningless assertion that can be used to distract from nearly any crisis one doesn’t want to address. ISIS may not pose the same existential threat to the U.S. as Hitler’s Germany or Soviet Russia, but for “a bunch of bandits” ISIS has displayed a distressingly high capacity to carry out worldwide atrocities. The November attack in Paris is the starkest example of the looming threat of ISIS assaults on major Western cities, but equally worrying is the Islamic State’s capacity to inspire people not directly associated with the group to commit terrorist attacks, as we saw recently in San Bernardino and Philadelphia. I don’t think it amounts to “fear mongering and apocalyptic prophesying” to say that until ISIS is destroyed, or at least decimated, attacks like these will continue.
Even if you do not consider ISIS to be the threat many conservatives do, should we not seek to eliminate the scourge on humanity that is this cult? This organization which routinely turns young women and girls into sex slaves, burns prisoners alive and destroys with impunity ancient cultural sites that have stood since antiquity deserves nothing less than complete and utter destruction, regardless of the statistical likelihood they will kill U.S. citizens tomorrow. Even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not exactly one those right-wing nutjobs Patel lambasts, recognizes that ISIS is currently carrying out genocide. The Clintons themselves have since realized we should have intervened in the Rwandan genocide two decades ago for humanitarian reasons, despite no threat to major U.S. strategic interests. Is it not then obvious we should escalate our fight against ISIS, who, in addition to committing crimes against humanity, also threatens vital American interests in the Middle East? Such escalation need not include a massive U.S. ground force. We could start by drastically increasing our daily airstrikes which, recently averaging only four sorties per day in Syria, pale in comparison to 1,200 daily sorties we averaged during Operation Desert Storm.
Patel argues against such retaliation on the grounds that “throwing counterpunches legitimizes the fight” and thus “to so knowingly play into the hands of terrorists is pure idiocy and cowardice on the part of the irrational and overemotional average American voter.” But I find the idea that we cannot respond to ISIS with greater force because letting them influence our policy is just what they want us to do absurd on its face. Now, there may be other reasons why we shouldn’t send American troops loaded for bear into Iraq and Syria to wage war on ISIS, but it has nothing to do with whether or not ISIS wants us to engage them head on. Americans are not in the business of letting our foreign policy get dictated to us by savages.
Patel is correct to argue certain Republican rhetoric towards ISIS is overheated — for example, Sen. Ted Cruz’s call to carpet bomb the desert to see if sand glows lacks nuance, and Sen. Lindsay Graham’s call for sending 20,000 ground troops to Syria is a tough sell to a nation with less-than-fond recollections of the war in Iraq. But it is preposterous to conclude it’s “morally reprehensible” for politicians vying to become commander-in-chief to continue to pitch countering ISIS as a central plank of their platform. I think Patel has reversed the law of causation here: voters aren’t hawkish on ISIS because politicians and journalists are using Orwellian scare tactics; politicians are focusing on ISIS because they recognize terrorism and national security are major concerns of Americans right now. Patel is right in that the world will not end due to ISIS, but we tolerate their existence at our own, and the world’s, peril.
Matt Winesett is a Senior Associate Editor for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at m.winesett@cavalierdaily.com.
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