ISIS Wants the United States and Its Allies to be Dragged into a Ground War in Syria; George W. Bush Bashes Obama for Not Sending Ground Forces to Syria

ISIS leaders are trying feverishly to draw the U.S. and the Western powers (“the forces of Rome”) into a bloody ground war in Syria. Why? In order to fulfill Islamic prophecies about an apocalyptic End Times battle in an obscure Syrian town called Dabiq and establish a global Islamic kingdom or caliphate.

ISIS did not just emerge out of nowhere, but has been festering for over a decade, taking root in the chaos that Iraq found itself in after the U.S. invasion in 2003. So why is it working for ISIS this time, starting around 2010-2011? Despite facing multiple challenges and disappointments, ISIS was able to use the continued lack of a cohesive state in Iraq to survive. The breakdown of central authority left a power vacuum filled by a variety of self-appointed Sunni militia groups, but these proved to be little more than armed thugs imposing protection taxes but providing no protection (nor trash collection, water and power supply, medical care or food). Next to them, ISIS was seen as a relief.

The second big break ISIS got was the civil war in Syria, a war that left the (largely Sunni) Syrian hinterland ungoverned. The disparate, disorganized and fractious rebel groups in that region were unable or unwilling to fight sustained battles against the central government forces under Bashar Al-Assad, which made it excruciatingly difficult for the West in general and the U.S. in particular to find reliable recipients of U.S. military aid. The only group that really pushed the battle forward was the Nusra Front, and they were allies of Al Qaeda. For his part, Al-Assad was (and is) only too happy to let ISIS do his Sunni-on-Sunni dirty work. Truly a foreign policy problem from hell from the U.S. standpoint.

The third big break ISIS got was the Arab Spring, a movement of popular revolutions that unhinged government after government but which led not to a birth of a new Arab freedom but chaos and further economic dislocation. Disaffected youth (and not just youth) hear a resonance in these End Time prophesies as their world has turned upside down. Utopianism has a strong appeal to the marginalized and disaffected, whether it’s the weird cult of a Jim Jones or a restoration of a more pure and primitive society as preached by Pol Pot. When the Utopians are heavily armed, the myth plays out exactly one way—the dubious peace of mass slaughter and unburied death. [Robert J. Hard]

U.S. Seeks to Avoid Ground War Welcomed by Islamic State

December 7, 2015

New York Times - As the debate on how best to contain the Islamic State continues to rage in Western capitals, the militants themselves have made one point patently clear: They want the United States and its allies to be dragged into a ground war.

In fact, when the United States first invaded Iraq, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the move was the man who founded the terrorist cell that would one day become the Islamic State, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He excitedly called the Americans’ 2003 intervention “the Blessed Invasion.”

His reaction — ignored by some, and dismissed as rhetoric by others — points to one of the core beliefs motivating the terrorist group now holding large stretches of Iraq and Syria: The group bases its ideology on prophetic texts stating that Islam will be victorious after an apocalyptic battle to be set off once Western armies come to the region.


Should that invasion happen, the Islamic State not only would be able to declare its prophecy fulfilled, but could also turn the occurrence into a new recruiting drive at the very moment the terrorist group appears to be losing volunteers.

It is partly that theory that President Obama referred to in his speech on Sunday, when he said the United States should pursue a “sustainable victory” that involves airstrikes and supports local forces battling the Islamic State rather than sending a new generation of American soldiers into a ground offensive.

According to Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, and the author of “Apocalypse in Islam,” one of the main scholarly texts exploring the scripture that the militants base their ideology on:

“I have said it repeatedly: Because of these prophecies, going in on the ground would be the worst trap to fall into. They want troops on the ground. Because they have already envisioned it. It’s a very powerful and emotional narrative. It gives the potential recruit and the actual fighters the feeling that not only are they part of the elite, they are also part of the final battle.” 

The Islamic State’s propaganda is rife with references to apocalyptic prophecy about the last great battle that sets the stage for the end times. Terrorism experts say it has become a powerful recruiting tool for the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL [or Daesh], which sells potential fighters on the promise that joining will give them the most direct chance to battle Western interests and will bring ancient Islamic prophecies to fruition.

The specific scripture they are referring to describes a battle in Dabiq as well as in al-Amaq, small towns that still exist in northern Syria. The countdown to the apocalypse begins once the “Romans” — a term that militants have now conveniently expanded to include Americans and their allies — set foot in Dabiq.

Last year, when Islamic State militants beheaded the American hostage Peter Kassig, a former United States Army Ranger, they made sure to do it in Dabiq.

“Here we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive,” the executioner announced.

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Dabiq is now the name of the Islamic State’s monthly online magazine, and each successive issue continues to hammer home the notion of the looming doomsday battle. Meanwhile, Amaq is the name the militants have chosen for their semiofficial news agency, which last week was the first to announce that the couple who carried out the attack on a holiday party in San Bernardino, Calif., killing 14, were “supporters” of the Islamic State.

How to undo the Islamic State is a matter of intense debate. As the United States prepares for a general election, Republican contenders are pushing for a ground invasion, with Senator Ted Cruz vowing to “carpet-bomb them into oblivion.”

“I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we are going to find out,” Mr. Cruz said at a campaign stop on Saturday.

Regardless of a ground intervention’s potential to succeed, some veteran analysts caution that the act of invasion would play handily into the group’s prophetic vision.

“To break the dynamic, you have to debunk the prophecy,” Mr. Filiu said. “You need to do so via a military defeat, like taking over Raqqa. But it needs to be by local forces — by Sunni Arabs.”

That so far has been the approach of the Obama administration, which has armed as well as provided air support to a number of militias in northern Iraq and Syria, hoping to give a local veneer to the tip of the sword. The result has been mixed, with gains only in areas that are outside the main Sunni Arab strongholds that the Islamic State controls.

The effort has been limited by the fact that the only viable partners so far have been Kurdish militias, who are willing to fight only in a ribbon of land in northern Syria, which is predominantly Kurdish.

In those areas, victory over the Islamic State has been like pushing on an open door.

Last month, the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar, which had been under the brutal rule of the Islamic State for more than 15 months, fell to Kurdish forces in less than 48 hours, after a sustained assault by American A-10 attack jets. As Kurdish forces advanced, the Islamic State fighters, having booby-trapped roads and houses, chose to run rather than fight for the city, burning hundreds of tires so the smoke would obscure their departure.

Yet a month since then, the Kurdish forces have advanced little beyond the city of Sinjar, and their commanders have been clear about why: The rest of the area is predominantly Sunni Arab rather than Kurdish.

The same pattern has been repeated in neighboring Syria, where the Syrian Kurdish forces reached the village of Ein Eissa earlier this year — just 30 miles north of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the terrorist group’s self-declared state. But they have stayed put.

“It would not be appropriate for us to go further south,” Redur Xelil, the main Syrian Kurdish force’s spokesman, said in an interview this summer, summing up the unease that many of his soldiers expressed at the thought of Kurdish rebels invading and trying to hold an Arab area.

To date, the United States and its partners have failed to find a Sunni Arab partner force. In October, the Obama administration acknowledged that a $500 million program to train thousands of local troops — many of them Sunni Arab — had failed. And a new United States-backed entity intended to claw back Arab land from the Islamic State seems to exist in name only.

Proponents of a ground assault argue that an even bigger recruiting drive than the militants’ end-of-times prophecy is their promise of an Islamic state.

“They actually, it seems to me, have two objectives,” said Jessica Stern, one of the authors of the book “ISIS: The State of Terror.” “One is to goad us into a ground war. And the other is to run a state, and they are contradictory.”

In the most recent issue of Dabiq, an essay alleged to have been written by the British hostage John Cantlie discussed similar options, with the first being that the Islamic State is allowed to continue to expand while the West does nothing. The second alternative was to drag the United States into war by carrying out a deadly attack on American soil.

“Then again,” the essay concludes, the Americans “may well come to Dabiq on their own without the Islamic State needing to blow up any dirty bombs in Manhattan.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 8, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Strategy Seeks to Avoid ISIS Prophecy.

George W. Bush Bashes Obama on Middle East

April 26, 2015 

Bloomberg View - In a closed-door meeting with Jewish Donors in April, former President George W. Bush delivered his harshest public criticisms to date against his successor on foreign policy, saying that President Barack Obama is being naïve about Iran and the pending nuclear deal and losing the war against the Islamic State.

One attendee at the Republican Jewish Coalition session, held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas with owner Sheldon Adelson in attendance, transcribed large portions of Bush’s remarks. The former president, who rarely ever criticizes Obama in public, at first remarked that the idea of re-entering the political arena was something he didn’t want to do. He then proceeded to explain why Obama, in his view, was placing the U.S. in "retreat" around the world. He also said Obama was misreading Iran’s intentions while relaxing sanctions on Tehran too easily.

According to the attendee's transcription, Bush noted that Iran has a new president, Hassan Rouhani.

“He's smooth," Bush said. "And you’ve got to ask yourself, is there a new policy or did they just change the spokesman?”

Bush said that Obama’s plan to lift sanctions on Iran with a promise that they could snap back in place at any time was not plausible. He also said the deal would be bad for American national security in the long term:

“You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren. That’s how Americans should view the deal.”

Bush then went into a detailed criticism of Obama’s policies in fighting the Islamic State and dealing with the chaos in Iraq. On Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of 2011, he quoted Senator Lindsey Graham calling it a “strategic blunder.” Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw those troops, but the idea had been to negotiate a new status of forces agreement to keep U.S. forces there past 2011. The Obama administration tried and failed to negotiate such an agreement.

Bush said he views the rise of the Islamic State as al-Qaeda’s "second act” and that they may have changed the name but that murdering innocents is still the favored tactic. He defended his own administration’s handling of terrorism, noting that the terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was captured on his watch:

“Just remember the guy who slit Danny Pearl’s throat is in Gitmo, and now they're doing it on TV.”

Obama promised to degrade and destroy Islamic State's forces but then didn’t develop a strategy to complete the mission, Bush said.

Bush said that if you have a military goal and you mean it, “you call in your military and say, ‘What’s your plan’?” He indirectly touted his own decision to surge troops to Iraq in 2007 by saying, “When the plan wasn’t working in Iraq, we changed.”

“In order to be an effective president ... when you say something you have to mean it,” he said. “You gotta kill em.”

Bush told several anecdotes about his old friend and rival Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bush recalled that Putin met his dog Barney at the White House and then later, when Bush went to Moscow, Putin showed him his dog and remarked that he was “bigger stronger and faster than Barney.” For Bush, that behavior showed him that Putin didn’t think in “win-win” terms.

Bush also remarked that Putin was rich, divorced his wife and loves power. Putin’s domestic popularity comes from his control of Russian media, according to Bush.

"Hell, I'd be popular, too, if I owned NBC news," he said.

Regarding his brother Jeb’s potential run for the presidency, Bush acknowledged that he was a political liability for Jeb, that the Bush name can be used against him, and that American’s don’t like dynasties. He also said that foreign policy is going to be especially important in the presidential campaign and that the test for Republicans running will be who has got the “courage” to resist isolationist tendencies.

Regarding Hillary Clinton, Bush said it will be crucial how she plays her relationship with the president. She will eventually have to choose between running on the Obama administration’s policies or running against them. If she defends them, she's admitting failure, he said, but if she doesn't she's blaming the president.
For George W. Bush, the remarks in Vegas showed he has little respect for how the current president is running the world. He also revealed that he takes little responsibility for the policies that he put in place that contributed to the current state of affairs.

A Review of the Book, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State:

1. “The Islamic State’s leaders proclaimed the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth, called the caliphate. Prophecy was fulfilled, they said, and Judgment Day approached.”
2. The history behind the Black Flag. “The Islamic State was signaling that its flag was not only the symbol of its government in Iraq and the herald of a future caliphate; it was the harbinger of the final battle at the End of Days.”
3. “Apocalyptic messages resonate among many Muslims today because of the political turmoil in the Middle East. In 2012, half of all Muslims in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia expected the imminent appearance of the Mahdi.”
4. War strategies. “It is well known that one of the requirements for plunging into wars is to have a reserve army and to continue exhausting the enemy in the open fronts until the enemy becomes weak, which would enable us to establish the state of Islam.”
5. A look at past failures to institute a caliphate. “In the end, the reasons for the collapse of the AQAP state were similar to the reasons for the Islamic State’s failure in Iraq: fickle tribal allies, resentful subjects, and powerful foreign enemies—all reasons Bin Laden had cited for delaying the establishment of an Islamic state in Yemen.”
6. The philosophical differences between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. “In both cases, they drew a distinction between themselves and the Islamic State, which we can put at the other end of the hearts-and-minds spectrum. Think of AQAP as attempting to win hearts and minds and the early Islamic State as trying to cut them out.”
7. “The “Strategic Plan” has a lot in common with The Management of Savagery, a book released online by an al-Qaeda franchise in 2004, two years before the Islamic State’s founding. The book explains how to take control of territory, establish a nascent state, and develop into the caliphate.”
8. The circumstances that fed into the doomsday scenario. “The mounting violence in Syria, or al-Sham, the land of the eastern Mediterranean mentioned in Islamic prophecies as the site of the final battles of the apocalypse, made the doomsday interpretation of events hard to resist.”
9. “But the prophecies attributed to Muhammad outside the Qur’an foresee Jesus returning to fight alongside the Muslims against the infidels. As in the Bible, the appearance of Jesus heralds the Last Days. But instead of gathering the faithful up to heaven, he will lead the Muslims in a war against the Jews, who will fight on behalf of the Antichrist, called the Deceiving Messiah.”
10. Sectarian battles and the implications. “The sectarian wrangling over the identity of the Sufyani suggests an important difference between Islamic and Christian End-Time prophecies. Although both envision a fight between good and evil, the Islamic prophecies foretell a period of intracommunal fighting before the Day of Judgment.”
11. A look at the sixth caliphate. “With that, the caliphate was supposedly reborn and prophesy was fulfilled. All Muslims had to now bend the knee to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, renamed Caliph Ibrahim al-Baghdadi.”
12. The challenges facing the caliphate. “It didn’t help that the Islamic State was more focused on fighting than on governing. The local economies in the State suffered as a consequence.”
13. The implementation of justice and how they differ. “Unsurprisingly then, most of the Islamic State’s hudud penalties are identical to penalties for the same crimes in Saudi Arabia: death for blasphemy, homosexual acts, treason, and murder; death by stoning for adultery; one hundred lashes for sex out of wedlock; amputation of a hand for stealing; amputation of a hand and foot for bandits who steal; and death for bandits who steal and murder.” “The State carries out its penalties in public whereas Saudi Arabia hides them because of international censure.”
14. The impact of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “The U.S. invasion of Iraq and the stupendous violence that followed dramatically increased the Sunni public’s appetite for apocalyptic explanations of a world turned upside down. A spate of bestsellers put the United States at the center of the End-Times drama, a new “Rome” careering throughout the region in a murderous stampede to prevent violence on its own shores. The main antagonists of the End of Days, the Jews, were now merely supporting actors.”
15. How to contend with ISIS. “The coalition should provide air cover and intelligence to Sunni tribal militias and rebel groups that fight against the Islamic State, whether Arab or Kurd.”

Further recommendations: “Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue” by Sam Harris, “Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism” by Maajid Nawaz, “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris, “Faith vs. Fact” by Jerry A. Coyne, “Why I’m not a Muslim” by Ibn Warraq, “Heretic” and “Infidel” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and “ISIS: The State of Terror” by Jessica Stern