Kijun Times

There's consensus that the only way to deal with ISIS is to bomb the hell out of them Today, President Obama said today (link is external), "We will destroy them."  A New York Times op-ed said (link is external), "The only adequate measure...is the crushing of ISIS."

It's tempting to agree. After all, softness in response to Naziism only accelerated it, If only the world had banded together in 1939 to crush the Nazis, millions of lives would have been saved.

And yet we must remember that millennia of efforts by the West to change behavior by Muslims in the Middle East have failed. As historian Rufus Fears wrote (link is external),

Ramses II, the Macedonian phalanx of Alexander the Great, the Roman legionnaires of Caesar and Trajan, the Crusaders of Richard the Lion-Hearted, the legionnaires of Napoleon, the Camel Corps of Lawrence of Arabia. All of these have come through the Middle East...to bring stability, even freedom to the Middle East. All have passed away. The Middle East has been the graveyard of empires.

More recently, we most acknowledge our failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and in attempting to destroy Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups: Smash one and and another pops up. The jihadi group du jour is ISIS. If we bomb the hell out of them, does anyone really think it will end anti-Western sentiment? More likely, another cohort of disaffected fundamentalist Muslims will band together and sooner or later inflict their terrorism not just with standard bombs and beheadings but with chemical and bioterrorism as predicted this week (link is external) by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. We ain't seen nothing yet.

So in addition to, yes, bombing them, yes, trying to stop their money flow, yes, gathering better intelligence to prevent the next attack, it seems we need more than an ounce of prevention.

The Psychology Today readership would seem likely to be sympathetic to the idea that most of the ISIS members were not born to be monsters. They became that way through some combination of bad genes, poor parenting, failures in school, economic deprivation, and radical indoctrination.

For time immemorial, such youth have committed deadly acts. (link is external)For example, here in the U.S., the pre-Civil War Bloody Tubs "stab voters with awls, beat people up, and dunk them into vats full of blood." The 18th century, London-based Mohocks "assaulted people at night, slashing and disfiguring their faces, cutting their noses off with knives."  The Kabukimonos in feudal Japan were "roving gangs of them, trained to kill, armed with the sharpest swords ever invented—if you have pee in your pants, you’re getting the picture." And of course, more recently, gangs such as the Bloods and Crips are known for their deadly violence.

So in addition to the bomb-the-bejesus approach to ISIS, might it be wise for world leaders to consider sitting down with ISIS and other Wahabi leaders, defacto though they may be, to discuss a face-saving path to peace?

For example, the West might agree to "accept your people's right to practice fundamentalism and, in the absence of atrocities, not interfere with your internal affairs and, indeed, provide financial support to help your people gain economic self-sufficiency and a peaceful basis for finding meaning in life. And if you pledge to stop your terrorism, we promise to stop bombing you. The West cannot and will not become part of your Caliphate but we will accept that we cannot try to turn your people into clones of us."

Of course, it would be hubristic of me to assert with any confidence that such an approach is wise. It could turn out to be like Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of the Nazis. But few people seem to be talking about supplementing the Bomb-the-Bejesus approach with a more psychological and preventive approach, so I figured I'd raise it here for your consideration.

Marty Nemko's bio is in Wikipedia. (link is external) His 8th book, The Best of Marty Nemko, (link is external) has just been published.