Davis Merritt: Paris shouldn’t void containment policy

The Paris weekend atrocity unleashed the rhetorical hounds of war, particularly in the U.S. political arena. All major presidential candidates are baying for action, massive and immediate. Even Hillary Clinton, once the face of American Mideast policy, labeled containment an insufficient policy. Jeb Bush’s new sound bite falsely claimed that President Obama announced he “had no policy” for the Islamic State. And, of course, Donald Trump … well.

Destroying ISIS is indeed a vital short-term goal. But how it is done has long-term implications requiring much more than a reflexive, 20th-century response.

Containing ISIS does not mean resigning ourselves to coexistence with it. Containing it means destroying ISIS in ways that do not kill thousands of innocent people, create heavy military casualties for the U.S. and our allies, and obligate us to occupy Syria and (once more) Iraq for decades.

It means accomplishing those goals while minimizing the ability of ISIS to replicate Paris, and not alienating and radicalizing more of the world’s 1 billion Muslims.

This approach is, by necessity, wholly different from this country’s last successful major military undertaking, World War II. Like all previous wars, that one was about rogue nations seeking to extend their control over other nations. Stopping them meant set-piece battles over territory between armies wearing uniforms with recognizable symbols. It also meant, eventually, the mass killing of noncombatants through indiscriminate carpet bombing of cities and, finally, two atomic bombs to force Japan’s surrender.

The last set-piece war, Korea 1950-53, ended in military and geographic stalemate. Since then conventional military power has been aligned against indigenous insurrections around the globe, given the label asymmetrical warfare. Rand Corp. has cataloged almost 100 of them.

ISIS is the latest iteration of asymmetrical warfare, and perhaps the one most threatening to the rest of the world’s peace-seeking people, including hundreds of millions of Muslims in the Mideast and elsewhere.

That very real urgency must not, however, tempt the U.S. back into World War II mode, because ISIS, despite its long-term delusion about a worldwide caliphate, is for now focused on destabilizing other societies through terror while killing as many nonbelievers as it can and recruiting more people to its cause.

Battleships, heavy bombers and missiles, and battalions of occupying troops can do little to thwart those aspirations long term. Instead, unleashing that sort of military muscle in Muslim nations would reinforce the centuries-old conviction that the Christian and secular worlds seek to destroy Islam. Faced with such a conventional onslaught, the jihadists would melt back into the population, then rebuild their ranks with newly alienated and radicalized recruits.

The only long-term answer to the present ISIS threat and to new, as-yet-unborn jihadist threats lies within the Mideast and the Muslim world.

The region’s mix of petro-politics, modernist ambitions and 1,000 years of religious strife between Shiites and Sunnis is complex, and its people’s suspicion of Western motives, based on the Crusades and, later, colonialism, is unshakable.

But the mix contains the seeds of resolution.

Its jumble of secular or religious, peace-seeking or militant monarchies and pseudo-democracies means that any regional suppression of ISIS will not, by Western sensibilities, be efficient or pretty. But it is the least-fraught available solution.

This story was originally published November 16, 2015 at 6:05 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: Paris shouldn’t void containment policy."