This is my brother's response to my blog entry about the history of ISIS.


Thanks for sharing your ISIS post, and kudos for reaching blog number 70. The backgrounder on Wahabiism is very helpful, as is the chronology of Saudi Arabia's evolution (devolution?) from warring nomadic tribes to an oil-rich kingdom that "exports" (and supports clandestinely) the most violent forms of jihad beyond its borders. Think of all the Wahabi jihadi schools Saudi has funded worldwide.

I appreciated your Stanford alumni respondent's reference to America's twisted relationship with the Saudi monarchy and our complicity in so much of what has gone down (mostly badly) in the Middle East. I was also reminded of Michael Moore's excellent 9/11 documentary, which seems increasingly prescient with the passage of time. The only commercial flight allowed to depart U.S. airspace on 9/11 was a plane packed with relatives of Osama bin Laden and other Saudis with monarchial ties. The film also shows the Bush family's (and hence America's) three-generation partnership with Saudi royals. Good stuff.

I hadn't realized there were historic Wahabi precedents for the recent demolitions of the Bamayan Buddhas, the saints' crypts and ancient libraries in Timbuktu, the Shiite mosques in Iraq, and other revered monuments and grave sites in areas conquered by ISIS. Now I realize this has been going on for centuries as a "purification" and self-corrective whenever Islam strays too far from what the purists perceive as the True Way. Christianity has had a similar trajectory, if you consider all the times it has "self-corrected" with wars, snake handler splinter sects, inquisitions, triplicate popes, wanton slaughters of "disbelievers" and the like. In Israel now, the radical purists who control the government seek compression and conquest of the Palestinians so Jewish settlements can continue expanding. It works.

I see now that McCain, Lindsay Graham and the usual neo-con hawks are beating the war drums for an escalation of U.S. military action against ISIS. The rationale is that jihadis with western passports will soon return to their home countries and create the next 9/11. While that's certainly possible, I think a better rationale for U.S. military involvement is to forestall the rape, enslavement and slaughter of innocents and "apostates" now under way in ISIS-conquered territories. As your blog suggests, unless vast new oceans of oil are discovered beneath their boots, the Wahabbis are not prone to negotiate or conciliate with anyone. It's "fire and sword" all the way. A template exists for U.S. intervention under the U.N. genocide aegis, as happened when the Serbs were "cleansing" Croatia in the 1990s. (Although we have conveniently ignored much vaster genocides -- see Ruwanda and Sudan -- when our "national interests" were not involved). 

Ironies abound, many of them of our own making. If we continue to battle ISIS, our "allies" are Syria, Iran and Russia. ISIS' battlefield success owes much to its acquisition of U.S. weaponry and munitions that our very expensively "trained" Iraqi army abandoned in the field. So now we're trying to blow up our own stuff. We're helping stabilize a Syrian dictatorship that has gassed its own citizens (as we backed Saddam Hussein when he did the same thing). And anything we can do to forestall the creation of the new ISIS caliphate helps Iran and Russia expand their spheres of influence in the Middle East. And so on, ad infinitum.

As for ISIS, it has used 21st century technology to advance a very old conquest strategy. As Genghis Khan discovered, a populace that is thoroughly terrified in advance is easiest to subjugate. Before his army moved in on a city, he made sure its inhabitants had seen and heard about the hideous atrocities that would be visited on them if they resisted. His emissaries would then offer peace if the city would capitulate bloodlessly. It usually worked. ISIS uses social media postings of massacres and beheadings to achieve a similar terror quotient, but it goes beyond Genghis by demanding conversion as well. 

I find it incredibly bizarre that the same caliphate websites that depict the brutal rape, slaughter and "heads on pikes" beheadings of conquered non-believers can with another click guide users to jolly immigration entreaties. "The new caliphate needs doctors, dentists, pilots, school teachers, bakers, bankers, public health workers! Come on down! The future is here!"

And supposedly people are flocking there, but then, that may just be their propaganda. Hard to know what's real.