The Zeitgeist

ISIS or ISIL head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He's no Romeo.

ISIS vs. ISIL. What’s in a Name?

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the Bard of Stratford posited and Juliet articulated “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Juliet, vexed by the danger of a relationship with Romeo by virtue of his family heritage but nevertheless in love with the boy is making the point that who someone is matters more than what that person is called.

On a far less romantic note, way more dangerous than Capulets or Montagues (or Sharks or Jets in the New York iteration) is the Middle Eastern terrorist group alternately known as ISIS or ISIL, against which President Obama has declared war upon.

Thirteen years ago when former President George W. Bush launched the War on Terror, we had no such confusion as to the moniker of our foe, we knew them as al-Qaeda. Today, depending on who you’re listening to, we could be up against two different enemies who are actually one and the same. No, our adversary doesn’t have a split personality disorder – they know quite clearly who they are and what they stand for. We are the ones sowing the confusion.

If you listen to the President, or to John Kerry or to Chuck Hagel or to various members of the defense establishment, we are committed to “degrade and destroy” a group named “ISIL,” which stands for the “Islamic State In the Levant.” However, when watching the news, seeing some members of congress, hearing pundits and talking heads, reading news sites and such we are told that we’re fighting a nefarious organization named “ISIS,” which is short for the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.”

Within any given newscast, we can see Administration spokespeople wax on about ISIL while the anchors, analysts and correspondents keep saying ISIS, sometimes directly to one another within the same conversation. How are we to agree on a long term strategy to eradicate this evil if we can’t agree on what to call them? A rose by any other name, indeed

I believe we should all agree on “ISIS” and push the Administration to change their tune. Here’s why:

● “ISIS” is easy to pronounce, like “Hamas.” It just sounds better. ISIS is a nemesis. “ISIL” always comes across as awkward; it causes the tongue to make an unnatural pause before saying the next word. ISIS makes for better looking headlines, with the final “S” more graphically attractive than looking at an “L.” If we’re to spend a lot of time over the next few years talking about this group, we should make it as pleasant a linguistic experience as possible.

● “ISIS” sounds like the name of some ominous and dastardly group, like “Kaos” from Get Smart. Would Agents 86 and 99 have made any headway against “Kaol?”  All evil and violent NGOs have cool names.

● “ISIL” on the other hand sounds like the last four letters of some cholesterol, diabetic or cardiac pharmaceutical – the kind that gets advertised all day on CNN, Fox and MSNBC. Is it ennobling to be up against a pill, even if most of these medications warn you of the danger of heart attack, stroke or death?

● The “L” in “ISIL” is for the “Levant,” an old-world word that stands for the Middle East, particularly for the area between the Mediterranean and Iran. Most Americans wouldn’t know where the Levant was if it fell on them – also – why give this group regional status? Isn’t it the President’s objective to bomb them back into some corner or Syria anyway?

There’s a scary-looking black-clad guy named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who is the head of ISIS (or ISIL). Perhaps when our team of Navy Seals eventually gets to his lair in Syria, just before we pull the trigger, we can ask him which English-language acronym he prefers? After all, a Caliph should be able to write his own epitaph. Maybe we could send a message to his YouTube account asking him to clarify this debate for us before his next televised beheading?

My bet is al-Baghdadi will go for ISIS as he and his group seem to be very image conscious and media savvy. But in all seriousness, the American people will soon be clamoring for an end to the ISIS-ISIL ping-pong, especially if we’re being asking to support another trillion-dollar war effort. Juliet may not have cared much about names and labels but the American people deserve an adversary whose name is easy to pronounce and as we know from the play, ultimately the names did matter, which is why I’m “pro-ISIS” and “anti-ISIL.”

The Zeitgeist

The Current Incarnation of ISIS is No Joke. Should the US Stop the Spread of Evil in the Middle East Yet Again?

   

The Isis TV show from the 70s, the ISIS logo from the TV show Archer and ISIS fighters in Iraq this week.

Back in the mid 70s there was a groundbreaking female superhero on Saturday morning TV called Isis. An American high school science teacher found a magic amulet on a archeological dig in Egypt  that allowed her to turn into the ancient goddess Isis who had superhuman powers to control the elements and use these powers to fight evil. The show only lasted a couple of seasons, not enough time for Isis to rid the world of all its bad guys.

For the past several years the word “ISIS” has stood for the “International Secret Intelligence Service,” the employment domicile for a clueless, cartoonishly suave James Bond-type of secret agent named Sterling Archer. Archer is quite literally a cartoon character. The series Archer is one of the adult animated comedies running on FX and Fox. Archer, the agent, and his team at ISIS are out to save the world for fun and profit. The characters on the show lack any moral grounding whatsoever, which is what makes it funny. 

Unfortunately in the last couple of weeks a whole different version of “ISIS” has burst upon the world’s consciousness. It also lacks any moral grounding, they’re not into acts of violence solely for kicks, they’re not here for our amusement and unlike their namesake super heroine, in their world view women have no rights whatsoever.

The ISIS that is dominating the news is the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (the Levant, meaning Syria, Lebanon, Israel) a brutal neo-Maoist group so extreme that they were booted out of Al Qaeda  .  Although thoroughly Sunni Muslim in its presentation, it could be a dead-ringer for the Khmer Rouge in their tactics, and strategy. Wiping out vast swaths of the Shiite Moslem population in Iraq and elsewhere doesn’t perturb them all that much. In fact, to realize their dream of a resurrected Sunni Caliphate any expediency is acceptable. This has been demonstrated by a series of videos detailing their unabashed brutality.

In the past week ISIS, with just a few thousand soldiers has conquered more than a third of Iraq as the Iraqi army in the Sunni parts of the country melted away as fast as the former South Vietnamese army did in the spring of 1975. Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops just ran away, abandoned their equipment and abdicated their duty. Had even a fraction of them stood and fought, ISIS probably could have been thwarted. It remains to be seen whether the remnants of Iraq’s US-trained and US-equipped armed forces will make a stand in Baghdad and in the South of the country as the Kurds successfully have in the Northeast. If they don’t, it sure won’t be springtime for the Shiites who comprise about 60 percent of the country.

The utter collapse of Iraqi national institutions and of Iraqi national will in the Sunni regions of the country is highly edifying. As in South Vietnam it shows that a sense of nationhood, pride and purpose often can’t be imposed on people, it has to come from within. But sometimes that takes time.

Iraq was artificially created out of various and sundry provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I by Great Britain which was given that swath of territory as spoils of war (the French got Syria and Lebanon). 

As was typical in the colonial era, nations and borders were created by the Western powers without regard for the ethnic, religious, cultural or political cohesion of its inhabitants which has been the cause of much global bloodshed in the past 100 or so years.

In the case of Iraq, as we know, the Sunnis and the Shiites hate one another with a profound passion. However, it bears noting that this ISIS explosion is not a grassroots home-grown revolt against Shiite rule. The ISIS fighters have been recruited from across the Moslem world and imported to the region with an express goal of conquest and igniting conflict between Sunnis and Shiites to force a collapse of the state.

The conundrum for America (and it should be one for the European Union) is what to do about all this. Allowing Iraq’s vast oil reserves to fall into the hands of the most extreme Muslim terror group in the world is just not good for world stability. Allowing a Killing Fields type of ethnic cleansing of Iraq is not good on pure humanitarian grounds. Allowing the complete subjugation of Iraqi women is deplorable. Abandoning allies (hello, Ukraine!) like the Iraqi government does not one whit of good for US credibility around the world. Allowing Iran to fill the vacuum and in effect conquer Iraq won’t be good for US interests as it will set-off a humanitarian crisis with the Sunnis, it will put Iraq’s oil into the hands of the Iranian Ayatollahs who are building nuclear weapons and who already threaten stability in the region through their proxies Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas and it would give Iran complete control of the region stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. That also wouldn’t be too good for Israel either. Allowing the waste of so much American blood and treasure (forget debating the wisdom of going into Iraq in the first place) if Iraq falls is a disgrace to the memory of our fallen soldiers and an admission that aside from Germany and Japan, we can’t straighten out any other countries for the betterment of their citizens and the world.

Unfortunately, what’s needed is for the West to man-up and send in a multi-national force (Americans, Brits, French, Germans, etc.) and squash ISIS (which has ambitions of spreading their Islamic revolution to London and New York). It won’t take many planes or drones. ISIS has no air force. It won’t even take many troops to confront the several thousand ISIS fighters. What it will take is will power and if there’s absence of that we will be left only with the words of the 18^th Century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”