Our Obsession with ISIS is Unhealthy
ISIS is bad. Very bad. They’ve committed horrible atrocities. It is easy to go online and be sickened by their savagery. They have fetishized human suffering. They have effaced irreplaceable ancient artifacts. They fill our hearts with horror and loathing. We all know this.
ISIS dominates the news. It seems like they’re all anyone is really talking about. The political discourse is fraught with questions like “whether we should accept Syrian refugees” to wrangling over whether Islam is compatible with Western values. Both sides spend considerable amounts of time affirming their commitment to obliterating ISIS. From the extent to which government officials talk about ISIS, you would think they are a central strategic threat to the United States. From the way it is a focus of political debate, you would think it is the defining question for our times.
ISIS is overrated
The reality is that the threat from ISIS is vastly overblown. Even with the horror of the Paris attacks with 130 killed, ISIS is insignificant. They are strategically unimportant. They are basically a rebel militia fighting for survival in the power vacuum left by two broken states. They are hemmed in on all sides by enemies who vastly overpower them: including comparable militias (Kurds, other rebels, Assad regime), regional powers (Iran, Turkey, Jordan), and Great Powers (US, Russia, France, Germany). If they were a country at war you would deem their prospects of survival at virtually nil. It’s as if Luxembourg declared war on France and Germany simultaneously and posted a bunch of brutal videos on the Internet.
ISIS’s ability to project power is limited to a handful of desperate terrorists in isolated cells. While we may be shocked by their misdeeds, these are simply not existential threats. The deaths in Paris are not strategically significant, horrified though we may be. The numbers simply pale in comparison to fully-fledged wars between industrial nation states. Those wars involve death in the hundreds of thousands. Such losses are virtually incomprehensible to us, and yet they have happened and could happen.
The Real Danger Remains Nation-States
Though we have not been involved in a serious conflict between powers for decades, arguably since the Korean War, we should not be lulled into forgetting the severity of the threat. The real existential threat remains other nations, particularly those with nuclear weapons. The low probability of an apocalyptic outcome should not goad us into forgetting it entirely. On balance an industrial war is vastly more consequential than any number of terrorist attacks, even when the low probability of such a war is taken into account.
There is simply no comparison between ISIS and any nation-state opponent. The fact that we worry so much about ISIS is a symptom of the extraordinary peace that we have experienced. But we should not be biased by the good fortune of our recent history so as to discount real dangers. Compare our tmies with Russia in the 19th century. Russia was rife with terrorism. The Czar himself was assassinated in 1881! It preoccupied the people of that time. And yet the horrors of the ensuing world wars dwarfed the impact of terrorism such that it is virtually forgotten today.
ISIS’s power is emotional and not physical
ISIS has sought carefully to wage a propaganda war. Their atrocities are calculated to stir outrage, and I suspect also a perverse fascination with the brutality. They weight in our minds disproportionately greatly because they specifically target us for an emotional response. In this capacity they have succeeded wildly.
Consider the mistakes of the post 9/11 era. Remember the rash rhetoric employed during those times. The nation was seized with paranoia and fear; the tough talk of 2003 was compensation for the domestic trauma of 2001 and the lingering fear, the mothers fretting over their kids at school, of 2002. This was not a logical response but an emotional one. While we may credit people with good intentions, it should be obvious, in hindsight, that our response at that time was poorly-thought out.
Even the 9/11 attacks, which are unmatched in American history, were not strategically significant in and of themselves. They struck a deep blow in the American psyche. I am still filled with deep horror when I reflect on the events of that day. And yet, in the dispassionate analysis, the American decline of that decade was vastly more significant than the actual damage inflicted on 9/11. The deterioration of our fiscal solvency, the fruitless wars, the erosion of our civil liberties, these are the long-lasting consequences of 9/11. Only what we could do to ourselves would be of strategic consequence.
I fear that we are headed down that same path again. I hear the harsh rhetoric that comes in response to terrorist attacks. And though my heart is also stirred by the barbarity of these acts, my head is alarmed by the mood of the country. I fear that terrorists have learned a lesson contrary from that which we would like them to learn: namely, that terrorism is highly effective insofar as it occupies our minds and warps our behavior.
We can still deal with ISIS. But we ought to be smart about it. We shouldn’t let them dominate our attention as they do. We shouldn’t be afraid. We should recognize them for the weak, desperate annoyance that they are. We should lament the dead. But we should also weigh things equally, by their material impact, and not the emotional toll. Thousands die in mundane ways everyday, but we scarcely consider them. If we paid undue attention to ISIS and neglected the things that matter, the big issues at home and abroad, we will have made a foolish mistake.
