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From the Editor’s Desk: Remember al Qaeda?
We know what you’re thinking. “Is al Qaeda the world’s most dangerous terrorist group or is ISIS?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement we kinda lost track ourselves.
Report: Syria’s al-Nusra ‘more dangerous’ than ISIS.
Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, is a greater threat to the United States in the long term than is ISIS, making the United States’ current single-minded focus on the latter group misguided, a new report is charging.
Al-Nusra is “much more dangerous to the U.S. than the ISIS model in the long run,” according to the authors of a report labeling both groups “existential” threats. The report was released last week by the Institute for the Study of War and American Enterprise Institute.
The report criticizes the administration’s ISIS-centric strategy, saying, “Any strategy that leaves Jabhat al-Nusra in place will fail to secure the American homeland.”
However, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, Gen. Mark Milley, in a speech Wednesday said that only Russia constituted a potential “existential” threat due to its possession of a large nuclear arsenal capable of striking the U.S.
Glad China’s not on the existential threat of the day list. (But Global Stocks Sink Amid China ‘Doom’ Fears doesn’t sound good, either.)
Your thoughts?
Published in Islamist Terrorism
Given that ISIS is just a spin-off of al-Qaeda, and shares the same fundamental goals, is there really any reason to consider them separately?
Sure: They’re at war with each other. And their philosophies are different. The US view has been, “focus on ISIS, don’t worry so much about Nusra — if Nusra’s killing ISIS, that’s a bonus.” (Nusra’s the Syrian franchise of al Qaeda.)
How do you think their philosophies are different? Both seek a world-wide Islamic Caliphate, and are willing to kill everyone who objects to that goal.
The fact that they’re at war with each other is a feature, not a bug.
What else do we need to know about them? The rest is just details, and tactics.
Just like with Iran and Saddam’s Iraq, they shared enough goals and methods—the number one and number two sponsors of terrorism, depending on which week it was—that they needed to be addressed in the same manner.
It is difficult to relate to the jihadists. I just wish they would find something else to do. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I mostly feel impatience with these idiots.
What is this ‘administration’s ISIS-centric strategy’? Willful ignorance?
Seems like nobody can agree on what “existential threat” means.
No, it’s willfully playing them off against each other in the assumption that ISIS is the greater threat. These offshore-balancing strategies can go very much awry if you don’t understand who’s really winning, and I don’t know how good our intelligence about that is, or could be, since we have a sufficiently small number of boots on the ground that we technically have none. (I don’t believe we have none, but do believe it’s a small number.)
Yeah, “we don’t have a clue” is a pretty safe bet.
It needn’t be. You can reach every member of every Syrian militia on Skype, if you feel like it. Give me a few good translators and I’d be able to get a clue pretty fast. I’m not going to prove that to you — I get a little worried that if I start placing calls from France to 1-800-Splodey-dope in Raqaa I’ll attract the kind of attention I don’t need — but in principle, we need not be clueless.
It means, “One that can end our existence now, should it so choose.” Only an advanced nuclear power could do that. I reckon a skilled terrorist organization could take out a city or even several, but not today, and they’d have to get lucky.
Obviously. But we’re talking about the incompetent Federal Government here, not Claire on Skype. I have no doubt that you might make an excellent, OSS-style spy, but that’s mainly because you’re actually willing to go talk to people.
Agree. We choose to be clueless.
While usually I’m willing to believe almost any story of Federal government incompetence, I would put a lot of money on the bet that our Federal government does this. I mean, journalists do it. It would be really quite something if it had occurred to no one in any of our many intelligence departments that these days you can just reach out and give these folks a call. After all, on the Internet, no one knows you’re not an impressionable 16-year-old who wants to learn more about how he can join the jihad.
Seems to me the Obama administration is the biggest threat to our security and financial health. These distant clowns in the desert are minor compared to our home grown twice elected gangstas.
Or we choose to be discreet about our methods of gathering intelligence. I’d prefer to think that.
That must be why the White House relies so heavily on journalists for intelligence gathering.
If they’re not paying attention to social media in the US, why do you think they’re doing it in Syria, where it’s far harder, and evidence of success is far more scarce?
Islam needs a new covenant.
I think the disagreement remains over the meaning of “our existence”. If we are all vaporized, that’s easy. But are any of the following “existential threats”?
My point is that it doesn’t matter whether we label them as “existential” because the debate is merely semantic. The ambiguity allows the term to be used in a weasely way by politicians, similar to “Take Back America”.
I don’t see how this changes our goals or strategies much. It just means there will be more terrorists to kill when ISIS is annihilated or reduced to scattered gangs.
If they haven’t attacked us yet, that’s not a problem. Presumably, they are being described in such dangerous terms because they have threatened us by their words. If someone threatens your life, it’s foolish to wait for that person to attack you. Deadly threats do not qualify as free speech. By threatening us, they are telling us they are ready to die.
Indeed. Han shot first, and was well within his rights to do so.
Here’s what I think. However we define it, the phrase “existential threat” has become a cliche, and cliches dull thought. So I say, “Dump the phrase.” I’d prefer people specify exactly what they mean in a way that makes the nature of the threat vivid to the imagination: “Al Qaeda has a declared goal of destroying Western civilization and has already succeeded in attacking the US in ways that stunned us, killed Americans by the thousands, and permanently changed the way we live and think. So we should never underestimate their malice or their imagination, and if they get their hands on more advanced weaponry, we should assume they’ll use it.”
I don’t think it wise at all for the government specifically to enumerate the kinds of weapons they might be able to find if they have the run of Syria, or the effects these weapons might have, but from what we know from open sources, it’s not utterly unimaginable that they could get their hands on “immediate-threat-to-every-American’s life”-level weapons. It does seem to me, however, very unlikely. They’re not going to find nuclear weapons or the means to deliver them in Syria, or at least, they certainly won’t find any that have been tested. The only other thing that could do that job would be biological weapons. Assad is generally not believed to have them.
If they manage to get their hands on other weapons that have been let loose in Syria, no doubt they could do a lot of damage — Russian SAMs could take down a commercial aircraft, for example, and chemical weapons could be used to terrible effect in an American city — but I still don’t see “existential threat” there, that is, I can’t see how they could irreparably physically destroy the territorial United States.
If they were to pull off another mass-casualty spectacular like 9/11, or several, we could conceivably become a danger to ourselves by passing vastly more intrusive versions of the Patriot Act — at some point, we could conceivably surrender so many civil liberties that we’d no longer be the same country, in an important sense. But that’s up to us, not them.
So I don’t see “existential threat” there, but I do see “a big danger not whatsoever to be taken lightly.”
ISIS is the JV team again?
We are in full agreement.