Davis Merritt: Seven realities about combating terrorism

Here are seven realities that Americans must understand in order to deal with the terrorist campaign that has too many terrified and frustrated:

▪  We cannot defeat a vaguely defined enemy. We need to reach consensus that our enemy is not a religion, not a race of people, not a nation; it is an invidious idea – a what, not a who – that turns some people into monsters. Ideas can be frustratingly resilient, and you can’t kill them in the same ways that you kill people or defeat nations. You must work to discredit them, though the most extreme ones eventually discredit themselves.

▪  There are no easy or quick fixes for our terrorism problem, and anyone claiming to have one is mistaken or lying.

▪  Declare a no-fly zone? Who takes out the Syrian air defenses? How many Russian and Turkish planes can we turn away or destroy before we ignite a broader war with them?

▪  Put together a local coalition to take out ISIS? Good luck with that against the convoluted patterns of Mideast politics and history. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained last week: “Kurds are not going to die to liberate Mosul from ISIS (and then) hand it over to a Shiite-led government in Baghdad…. The Turks primarily want to block the Kurds. The Iranians want ISIS crushed, but worry that if moderate Sunnis take over its territory they could one day threaten Iran’s (Shiite) allies in Iraq and Syria. The Saudi government would like ISIS to disappear, but its priority right now is crushing Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen. And with 1,000 Saudi youth having joined ISIS as fighters … the Saudi government is wary about leading the anti-ISIS fight. The Russians pretend to fight ISIS, but they are really in Syria to protect Bashar al-Assad and defeat his moderate foes. It’s not exactly the D-Day alliance.”

▪  Bomb the (Trump expletive) out of them? You don’t carpet bomb Brooklyn. That is, if a criminal gang based there is killing people all over New York, you can’t justify blowing away Brooklyn and all its inhabitants; you must fight the killers other ways. If, however, the gang drives away most innocent Brooklynites, then massive destruction becomes acceptable. That’s the long-term weakness of ISIS’ dreams of a caliphate. The closer ISIS comes to establishing one in Syria and Iraq by killing and driving out dissenters, the more vulnerable it becomes.

▪  In today’s wired world, nothing is for domestic consumption only; a campaign blurt in an Ohio cafe sweeps around the world in five minutes. Candidate disdain of “political correctness” becomes more than self-permission to say reckless, inflammatory things; it feeds directly into the propaganda and recruiting machines of the terrorists.

▪  Barack Obama isn’t running for anything, so try listening. His address Dec. 6 was dismissed by many because he did not offer a drastic new plan or strategic lurch after the most recent terrorist abomination. He knows there is no short-term magical solution (see above). He asked, in his quiet if too-cool way, for us to employ our best weapons: patience, resolve, cohesion, resilience, aggressive vigilance, and to avoid what the terrorists most want: discord, panic, fear and abandonment of our historic ideals.

This story was originally published December 14, 2015 at 6:01 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: Seven realities about combating terrorism."