While no one is predicting that the Islamic State will become steward of an accountable, functioning state anytime soon, the group is putting in place the kinds of measures associated with governance: issuing identification cards for residents, promulgating fishing guidelines to preserve stocks, requiring that cars carry tool kits for emergencies.
That transition may demand that the West rethink its military-first approach to combating the group.
“I think that there is no question that the way to look at it is as a revolutionary state-building organization,” said Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is one of a small but growing group of experts who are challenging the conventional wisdom about the Islamic State: that its evil ensures its eventual destruction.
.. Inside Islamic State territory, the group’s violence is regarded differently than it is in the West. In the communities it controls, citizens have already grown inured to violence. In Iraq, citizens have lived with war for more than a decade, including the days of sectarian civil war when a signature act of some Shiite militias was to drill the heads of Sunnis. And before that, they lived under the police state thuggery and corruption of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
Now there is a limited sense of order, and cleaner streets, a low bar, perhaps, but a reality amid years of war and anarchy. Hassan Hassan, an analyst who has studied the Islamic State and is a co-author of a book on the group, said that on the ground there was a “logic of savagery.” If people avoid any sign of dissent, he said, they can largely go about their lives.
“Not happily,” he said, “but they can live at peace.”
Opinion: Merkel Must End Devil’s Pact with America
The US began systematically spying on the German government at least since 1999 (perhaps even earlier); in other words, two years before the attacks on New York and Washington. It is questionable that the German Agricultural Ministry’s fisheries department, which the NSA also spied on, had anything to do with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida.
.. It wasn’t security of the Western world that concerned the Americans. Instead they pursued their own interests, unscrupulously vying for slight political advantages in diplomatic dealings and in the struggle for economic prosperity. The reference to the terrorist threat has long become a fig leaf for habitual and brazen espionage.
.. But through her silence, Merkel has made the German government complicit. She allowed the law to be broken. She also permitted the principles that characterize open, democratic societies to be compromised.
The German government had the wrong priorities. There is no guarantee of security. Fear of an attack is no reason to sacrifice legal principles.
Could ISIS Exist Without Islam?
“But I want to answer a slightly different question, which is: If Islam did not exist … would a group like ISIS, with all the other realities as they are, exist today and do the same things?”
“My answer to that hypothetical question is a resounding yes.” Discussing global terrorism at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mogahed, who formerly led research on Muslims with the polling organization Gallup, said that extremist groups all over the world commit the same kinds of violence using what she called “the local social currency” to justify it. “That is sometimes Christianity. That is sometimes Judaism. That is sometimes Buddhism. And it is sometimes secular ideologies. So a world without Islam would still have a group like ISIS—they would just be called something else that may be less catchy.”
.. It’s not, she said, the group’s interpretation of Islamic texts that drives its brutality—it’s the group’s desired brutality driving its interpretation of the texts. “We start at the violence we want to conduct, and we convince ourselves that this is the correct way to interpret the texts,” she said.
The Other Terror Threat: Right-wing Extremism
Since 2000, the handout notes, 25 law enforcement officers have been killed by right-wing extremists, who share a “fear that government will confiscate firearms” and a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”
Despite public anxiety about extremists inspired by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, the number of violent plots by such individuals has remained very low. Since 9/11, an average of nine American Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorism-related plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years.
In contrast, right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities, according to a study by Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. The toll has increased since the study was released in 2012.
.. Meanwhile, terrorism of all forms has accounted for a tiny proportion of violence in America. There have been more than 215,000 murders in the United States since 9/11. For every person killed by Muslim extremists, there have been 4,300 homicides from other threats.