#Daeshbags: Refugees, ISIS, and Winning the War on Terror.
As the events of Friday the 13th unfolded in Paris, I sat on the other side of the Atlantic at a dinner table with my family. The constant updates on my phone from the French news service RFI brought back a familiar emotion. An emotion that terrorism aims to evoke: impotence. I remember sitting in a common area of my barracks in Japan viewing the events of September 11th with the same feeling. As a Marine, I joined because I wanted to defend our nation and I sat there unable to do anything. Like so many Americans, I demanded action. Something had to be done.
This is the effect impotence has on a society, particularly one as powerful as ours, and on 9–12 we changed. Terrorism can be defined as the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. We often think the political aim is to intimidate countries into backing down. So, of course we double down and intensify our actions without thinking them through. The overreactions, be it total withdrawal or total war, is what motivates the act.
Another aim of terrorism we also have to consider the use of ethnic violence in past and present conflicts: Lebanon in the 1980s, the Balkans in the 1990s, and Iraq in the 2000s. These brutal acts of violence were not carried out to sow the seeds of chaos. On the contrary, these acts are meant to drive irreconcilable wedges among various peoples based on religious, ethnic, racial backgrounds — in essence: categorization. If the past examples drove wedges within societies, today’s atrocities are meant to drive wedges between societies.
How can they claim to be the Islamic State if there are no Muslims living there?
We saw categorization when almost half of state governors and all Republican candidates called for an outright ban on the entry of refugees. However, the existence of such a large number of refugees contradicts ISIS propaganda and undermines their legitimacy. How can they claim to be the Islamic State if there are no Muslims living there? Blocking Syrian refugees serves a dual-purpose for ISIS. It disheartens Syrians living under ISIS rule from trying to leave. The other purpose is that an alienated and mistreated group could lead to the radicalization of a large number of youths among the refugee population.
Many of its victims would have been saved were it not for our anti-Semitism getting in the way of our humanity.
If the goal of ISIS is to intimidate Western countries into closing their borders to refugees, then it is clearly working. It was easy by comparison when one considers the fact that thousands of refugees have died crossing into Europe. Yet those refugees still risk all for the promise of safety. All it took for ISIS to close that door was 129 deaths.
You might feel somewhat ashamed at this fact, and you should. It was over 70 years ago we defeated the Axis and discovered the horrors of the Holocaust. Many of its victims would have been saved were it not for our anti-Semitism getting in the way of our humanity. Opening the door to Syrian refugees is not only a moral obligation, it is strategic asset in a war of ideas.
A War of Ideas
Since 9–11 we have been waging the so-called “War on Terror” by trying to kill our way to victory. Radical Islam is neither a nation-state nor is it a single, coherent ideology — at best a vaguely defined idea. To even call our enemy “radical Islam,” as one ex-presidential candidate suggested, could lead us down a slippery slope without end. Even the mere label of terrorists puts American foreign policy on thin ice when groups we are sympathetic to are designated as such by Russia, Syria, or China. We may live in a changing and complex world but our morals should remain constant and simple
Not to be mistaken with coexistence nor accommodation; containment and pullback may not be the strategies we want but they are the strategies we need. Over a decade of military interventions set the conditions for the Middle East we have today. We must also apply nuance and be able to distinguish between violent extremist and political Islamism. No, ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood are not one and the same and our approach should reflect that. This war, as General Dunford said, is a generational one where objectives are not always military. Accepting Syrian refugees is one way to spread the idea nobody wants to live the Islamic State. #Daeshbags.
Honduran-born, Carlo enlisted in the Marines shortly after becoming an American citizen and credits his decision to having read Making the Corps, by Tom Ricks. Carlo deployed in the opening days of OIF as Marine and twice as a US Army Soldier. After 7 1/2 years of service, he left to pursue a degree in History at Concordia University in Montreal and graduated in 2015. You can follow him on Twitter @cvalle0625
