By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, November 16, 2015
CNN’s Sally Kohn has today been kind enough to provide us
all with a perfectly distilled example of what, post-Paris, has become a
popular progressive talking point. “Y’all realize,” Kohn wrote on Twitter this
morning, that “ISIS wants to provoke a war, right? If we go to war, we’re doing
exactly what the terrorists want.”
Assurances such as Kohn’s have been forthcoming since
before the blood dried. In Saturday’s Independent,
Sunny Mundal suggested that the West will only “win if we don’t get provoked
into the response they want from us.” And what do “they want”? First, for us to
“to attack them on their soil: in Iraq and Syria,” thereby creating a “backlash
that would would play directly into their hands”; second, to “create division
and exploit tension in our modern multi-racial societies,” and thus to cause
“western Muslims to feel that they can only truly be at home at the Isis
Caliphate.” If we react by going after them, Mundal predicted, we will only
“create countless new recruits.” In yesterday’s Huffington Post, Nick Robins-Early made a similar argument,
submitting that if Western nations respond to the abomination in Paris by
slowing down the influx of refugees — or even by talking favorably about
“Western civilization” — they will be playing directly “into the hands of
extremists.”
All in all, this is a peculiar way of looking at this
question, not least because it presumes that ISIS’s calculations must
inevitably be correct. It is certainly true that one of the outfit’s central
aims is to shock the West to such a remarkable degree that its people begin to
generalize about Islam, and, thereby, to alienate and radicalize the moderate
Muslims who live among them. It is true, too, that ISIS and its ilk hope to set
up a broader fight with the world’s liberal democracies, and, ultimately, to
parlay that fight into the establishment of an expansionary global caliphate.
But for us to acknowledge these risks
is not necessarily to place them above
all else. For as long as men have fought one another, there have always
been downsides to the use of both military and government force. As such, the
question before us today is not “Are there any drawbacks?” but “How do those
drawbacks stack up in context?”
As is often the case with foreign affairs, I am not
entirely sure what the best answer is here, and in consequence am happy to hear
a wide range of opinions from those who know better. What I am not prepared to do, however, is to
accept without challenge the suggestion that the nasty little buggers who just
wiped out scores of free people should get to call the shots going forward.
Upon closer investigation, it might well turn out that there are more efficient
ways of eradicating ISIS than taking them on head-first. Likewise, we may
discover that restricting the flow of refugees to the United States does little
more than annoy the very people whom we need on our side. But for us to arrive
at either of those conclusions, the arguments in their favor will have to be
presented from the ground up. Merely
asserting that a particular reaction is “what ISIS wants” will not cut it.
Sometimes in life, we have to accept that a third party wants a fight and that there is no other choice but to
give it to them — yes, even if that fight is likely to be messy and costly, and
to have a series of potential downsides. Determining whether this is one of
those times will take more than idle sloganeering.
Which is to say that while it is admirable for Sally Kohn
and her fellow travelers to worry about the potential consequences of an
American-led war against ISIS, by casting their objections in such absolute
terms, they are demonstrating not refinement but fealty. If we are agreed that
ISIS has to be destroyed — and pretty much everybody is, including those who are currently sounding the fire bells — then we
are agreed that some degree of risk is inevitable. Why? Well, because there is
simply no way for us to eradicate the group without giving it at least some of what it so desperately seeks. As
has been the case since the dawn of the human era, there are those among us who
err toward the hawks and those who prefer the doves, and our conception of what
constitutes justice is keenly fractured and hotly disputed. But we’re not really disagreeing as to whether we
should take some risk in order to enhance our security; we’re beginning the
long and unlovely process by which we haggle over the details.
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