The Islamic State and the Terrible Twos

by John Feffer
The Islamic State celebrated its one-year anniversary in customary fashion. Other organizations might sponsor parades and make speeches. ISIS spilled blood.
A beheading in France, the murder of 38 tourists at a resort in Tunisia, and a bomb blast at a mosque in Kuwait all reminded the world, if it had somehow forgotten, that ISIS isn’t merely interested in securing sovereignty over a particular stretch of territory. It has much grander ambitions.
At the moment, it doesn’t have the means to take on the world or take over even a single country. But that could change.
In a recent article in Foreign Policy, analyst Stephen Walt writes that the international community should basically learn to live with the Islamic State if it “becomes a real state and demonstrates real staying power.” Other brutal proto-states in history — colonial America, marauding Brits — eventually settled down and acted like more-or-less responsible international actors, he points out. The IRA in Northern Ireland and the ANC in South Africa have channeled their more violent tendencies into the more mundane tasks of statecraft. So, why not expect the Islamic State to do the same?
Walt, usually quite astute, is wrong on this occasion. ISIS isn’t like previous proto-states or liberation movements. It’s a fundamentally different creature. I share Walt’s skepticism about the U.S. ability to “degrade and destroy” the entity, as President Obama proposes. But devising an effective strategy for countering the Islamic State requires a clear-eyed understanding of why this apparently medieval phenomenon is in fact a very new and very dangerous development.http://www.lobelog.com/the-islamic-state-and-the-terrible-twos/#more-29906