In one of my favourite episodes of The West Wing, Admiral Percy Fitzwallace and Leo McGarry, the White House Chief of Staff, are in the Situation Room discussing an illegal killing carried out by the US military. Fitzwallace asks “Can you tell when it’s peacetime and wartime anymore?” That episode was broadcast in 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, before the London bombings, before the collapse of Syria and the rise of ISIS. Now President Francois Hollande says France is at war, in distinctly post-9/11 George Bush fashion, but what does mean in the age of international terrorism?
Pope Francis prayed for the Paris victims, declaring we are now fighting the Third World War piecemeal. For a world spiritual leader with such a reputation for compassion and peace to make that bold claim is worth noting, but he’s never claimed to be an expert of politics. The neo-con historian, Niall Ferguson, raised a furor by comparing Islamic terror to the barbarians who destroyed the Roman Empire and accusing Europe of letting its defences ‘crumble’. The usually right-wing bogeymen on both sides of the Atlantic made similar denouncements of refugees, tolerating Muslims and Europe’s long years of openness. There is a strong feeling that ‘we’ are at war. We experienced it back in 2001 but it was gradually replaced with outrage as the US government behaved irrationally and illegally in its pursuit of imaginary weapons and fabricated enemies. This time it may be different.
ISIS is a real, definite organisation with an identifiable leadership, territory and concrete aims. Al Qaeda was largely the product of bad intelligence and neo-con myth making. ISIS is today what the Bush administration claimed Al Qaeda was a decade ago. And it’s clear now that ISIS wants to kill westerners as well as anyone in the Middle East who disagrees with them. We know they can hit western targets and have promised more violence. That’s where the difficulty comes in. Fighting ISIS in Syria is not enough. Homegrown terror cells were responsible for the London bombings and the Charlie Hebdo attacks. They were inspired by, but not directed by, foreign Islamic extremists. The Paris attackers were directed and aided by ISIS, and we know at least one of them was a French citizen. The combination between disenchanted young Muslim men inspired by Islamic extremism and an international system supporting terrorism is a terrifying prospect. But how should we fight it?
We have never experienced a war like this one. Before World War One, wars were fought on battle fields between soldiers. They were often bloody and hideous, but civilians, for the most part, were spared the carnage unless the war dragged on for years (such as the Thirty Years War). World War One saw whole generations of young men lost on battlefields and whole populations mobilised to create war economies. World War Two brought deliberate targeting of civilians through bombing campaigns used both strategically and in an effort to erode support for the war. This war is more insidious. You can see Luftwaffe bombers coming. You can track troop movements. You can observe a country rejigging its economy for a prolonged war. Now, the major enemy is the enemy within — the notorious fifth column so often feared during the Cold War that never achieved much of anything. We’ve never had to seriously battle an enemy fifth column. Soviet spies weren’t there to bomb restaurants and magazine offices. The old style enemies within acted in the geo-political interests of the state they served. Killing French civilians in theatres does nothing to help Islamic State’s geo-political position but that just isn’t the point. The Paris attacks serve a twisted, ideological agenda with no comparison in recent history. As much as the Soviet Union claimed to be driven by Marxist ideology, its primary goal was rational self-interest. ISIS does not act like a state at war. It is primarily a terrorist cult which controls territory. The territory itself is a means to an end, serving ISIS policies rather than served by them.
To defeat ISIS it we will need to think like ISIS. We need to understand that rationality is subordinated to ideology. ISIS will risk its territory in Syria for an ideological victory. ‘Islamic State’ is a concept that exists separate from any given area of land, unlike Nazi Germany, which was emotionally tied to geography. For ISIS, the ‘state’ is the world, the enemy is everyone who doesn’t submit to its self-proclaimed caliphate. Non-military targets are preferable in an ideological war. We need to move away from our old understanding of war — a war of troop movements, uniforms, geo-political realities — and understand that our very existence is a provocation to the ISIS cult. Their aims may not be based on traditional political or military logic, but when it comes to planning attacks, they are very logical, very well trained and ruthless.