By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, October 26, 2017
The Islamic State just lost its capital at Raqqa, and
with it the last of the terrorist group’s fantasies of establishing a Middle
East caliphate.
In recent years, ISIS has horrified global audiences with
video clips of unspeakable atrocities. What sort of humans could behead,
incinerate, drown, torture, and blow up innocent civilians, mock and record
such horror, and then narrate their macabre videos for a world audience?
How could such pre-modern psychopaths ever be defeated,
given that in a matter of months ISIS had managed to overrun vast swathes of
Iraq and Syria?
The zealotry of the Islamic State in celebrating the
unthinkable added to its cult of invincibility. Young would-be jihadists from
the Western world flocked to the group’s Middle East compounds, eager to engage
in viciousness as if it were the latest video game.
Dejected Middle Eastern armies seemed to have no answer
for the medieval violence of ISIS. Impotent Western leaders either ignored or
denied the group’s homicidal appeal. Indeed, in 2014, pessimistic analysts were
predicting that ISIS might soon carve out enough oil-rich parts of Iraq and
Syria to spread its barbarism throughout the region.
But recently, the entire Islamic State project began
going up in smoke almost as abruptly as it was born. It turned out that squadrons
of American bombers were not impressed by ISIS threats and bombed to
smithereens its command centers and headquarters.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis relaxed the rules of
U.S. engagement and made it a veritable open season on Islamic State jihadists,
while American forces trained entire new cadres of anti-ISIS fighters.
Specialized drones and GPS-guided Western munitions made it almost impossible
for ISIS leaders to escape constant attack.
Their past horrors had earned Islamic State jihadists only
ill will. Tens of thousands of Iraqi and Syrian victims volunteered to fight
ISIS with a ferocity that they had rarely exhibited in the past.
The net result is now mass ISIS surrenders. Half-starved
jihadists in rags and in tears beg their captors for forgiveness — and not to
show them the same savagery that had so often fueled ISIS slaughtering.
The fate of ISIS reminds us that throughout history those
who posed as superhuman savages, without any limitations to their cruelty, were
often bullies who could not stand up to the determined payback of their finally
aroused and outraged victims.
After 9/11, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden frightened
Westerners with his tough talk about the “strong horse” of radical Islam, for
whose brutality and cruelty a supposedly weak and decadent West had no
antidote. But after years of the U.S. and its allies whittling away al-Qaeda
from Afghanistan to Iraq, and bombing its ringleaders wherever they appeared,
bin Laden was killed in a dingy Pakistan compound.
In the early 1940s, the most feared killers in the world
were Nazi kingpin Heinrich Himmler’s SS elite. The SS claimed they were the new
racial supermen, overseeing extermination camps and spearheading the German
army by executing prisoners and civilians alike.
But by May 1945, with Berlin in ruins and Hitler dead,
former killers were trying to hide their SS tattoos. Like Himmler himself, most
SS commandos were cowardly, fearing that their victims might do to the SS what
the SS had done to others.
Before and during World War II, Japanese militarists
slaughtered millions of civilians in China and butchered their way through the
Pacific. They boasted that they would never surrender in World War II. Yet
after the Allies had rooted out fanatical forces from their strongholds in the
Pacific and bombed Japan into ruins, even the most diehard fanatics meekly gave
up.
Civilization in peace becomes complacent. People
understandably hope that growing terror on the horizon will burn out on its
own.
During calm periods, prosperous and more liberal nations
certainly do not want to send their youth across the world to fight those who
claim that they would enjoy nothing more than dying while trying to kill those
who are more successful and better off.
But the true strength in arms is usually civilizational,
not tribal. A modern state that lives by the rule of law and the consent of the
governed, and is energized by free markets and a free people, can be a deadly
force when finally provoked into rage. The same is true of innocent victims
initially overwhelmed by tribal killers like those of the SS, al-Qaeda, or the
Islamic State.
ISIS may have been able to invent ever more macabre ways
of dismembering innocent victims, but it could not make a fighter plane or win
the lasting allegiance and loyalty of the majority of Iraqis and Syrians.
And so, like soulless killing machines of the past, ISIS
is now finally being killed off.
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