The ISIS Crusade

Nothing is as obvious in the viral proliferation of the Islamic State – which already covers northern Iraq, eastern Syria and zones in southeastern Turkey – than the incompetence of the United States in continuing with the policy initiated in the region from 2002. In principle, one can talk about Washington’s biggest foreign policy failure beginning in 1991, the year that the first intervention took place against Saddam Hussein.

Indeed, the Islamic State – Daesh in Arabic and the initials in English which are the equivalent to the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant – is the least anticipated balance remaining from the three wars in which the United States has been directly involved in the Middle East: the occupation of Afghanistan, the support to the rebels hoping to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the endless war in Iraq. All of the loss and waste has transformed into a war machine that is more efficient than what the Sunnis have managed to form up until now.

Reports about developments are reduced to columns that are observed as if from outside the region. What always amazes in the Sunni culture of war is the inescapable secrecy, a kind of denial, where discourse and narrative are strictly intended to be internal, as if public opinion was not a legitimate place to try to convince or dissuade, or at least to make policy.

The Islamic State militants comprise former officials and soldiers from Saddam Hussein’s army who fought the Shiites in the 1980s as well as in Iraq’s conflict with Iran. They are fighters with ample military experience. These fighters had to incorporate the Syrian rebels who fought in the civil war for four years. But most of all, the Sunni population in northern Iraq was permanently impacted by the alliance between American troops and the Shiite government in Baghdad. The difference with other forms of Islamic resistance is that they try as soon as possible to dominate the military and not the clergy. The theological narrative is its cement for action. Religion in the hands of the military.

White House figures show 30,000 Islamic State fighters armed with U.S. weapons captured from American-backed forces. But if viewed, in effect, as a people’s army, these figures are probably greater.

Their military strategy has all the signs of a policy known as “Lebensraum” (a “living space” in the language of German ideology from the first half of the 20th century which made expansion synonymous with ethnic and religious cleansing). The Islamic State group does not struggle by pretending to be a state (in Iraq and Syria), but instead, depopulates territories in order to build a “new order.” Even grander than it sounds, the term “caliphate” is a metaphor for a radically distinct order that reigns in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other emirates. There the structure is closer to a sultanate which is, in principle, quasi-monarchical. The caliphate, in contrast, can be formed by the fighters.

Indeed, this is the first widely known rebellion against military intervention from the West, which has a history of guerrilla wars fought between 2003 and 2007. And the broad awareness of the rebellion does not make it any less brutal or devastating. There is much speculation about the relationship between the Islamic State group, the current war and the geography of the country’s oil (in northern Iraq, 30 percent of its oil comes from their oil deposits, some of it already in the hands of rebels). Such speculation is legitimate. In the territories occupied by the Islamic State group, business negotiations continue with the global oil world.

One can reflect here about the government process of Iraq. Above all, one can see the failure and fallacy of the narrative which, since the 1980s, has recognized market discourse, inversions and openness as a condition for the development of democratic structures and civil coexistence. This all indicates that capitalism will increasingly grow in more unofficial forms of policy and in unexpected social orders.

Ten states from the region have united with the United States to combat the Islamic State group. All of them feel threatened by the Islamic specter which is not in the hands of the clergy, but in the hands of militants supported by popular contingents. The civil war in Iraq is an inter-Islamic conflict. The confrontation between the Sunni and Shiites has not been, up until now, any less dramatic than what was at one time a war between Catholics and Protestants in Europe.

What is so impressive is the crazy progression which this return to the past has produced about the current historical vantage points. Everything appears to indicate that this regression is supported by the same kind of energy that once predicted the future without the modern conventions we know today.