8/27/19
Back in February, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that the Islamic State was “100 percent” defeated and took full credit for the alleged victory. Unfortunately, the president and the truth seemed to be on different planets once again. National Security Advisor John Bolton quickly corrected Trump’s boast, telling ABC News that “the ISIS threat will remain.” U.S. Defense Department reports emphasized that remnants or offshoots of the group remained active in several places, including Afghanistan, and last week, a lengthy New York Times article reported that the group was regaining strength in Iraq and Syria. Trump was obviously wrong to claim the Islamic State had been totally defeated, but its persistence and partial recovery are not surprising at all. On the contrary, to believe that such a group could be totally defeated in the short to medium term was never a realistic goal. Eliminating the Islamic State’s territorial control over a significant part of Iraq and Syria (much of it empty desert) was a feasible objective, and the United States and its local partners did that job pretty effectively. Eradicating the organization in its entirety was never in the cards, at least not anytime soon.like most revolutionary ideologies, the Islamic State’s worldview is designed to insulate the movement from potential failures and setbacks. Like Leninism, Maoism, Jacobinism, and other revolutionary ideas, Islamic State ideology acknowledges that its cadres are (presently) outnumbered, accepts that its opponents are more powerful for the moment, warns that temporary setbacks are possible, and tells its members that they must be prepared to make sacrifices in what may be a long struggle.
Furthermore, the Islamic State has yet to disappear because some of the conditions and grievances that fueled its emergence are still present. From the very beginning, virtually all jihadi movements derived some of their support on overt opposition to foreign (read: Western) interference in the Muslim world. This is as true of the Taliban as it is of al Qaeda and the Islamic State (although there are important differences between them as well). Guess what? Foreign powers are still interfering in the region, and Western leaders—including Trump—continue to say and do things that appear to confirm Islamic State propaganda about the West being “at war” with Islam. (The Islamic State itself is at war with just about everyone, of course, including the millions of Muslims it deems heretical.) As long as this level of foreign involvement persists, the Islamic State and its brethren will be able to win a few recruits. The Islamic State has been equally hostile to existing Arab and Muslim governments, and its leaders originally believed that proclaiming a caliphate would trigger a sympathetic uprising that would topple the so-called corrupt apostates now governing key Arab states. That result was never likely and didn’t happen, but the conduct of some prominent Arab governments hasn’t done much to discredit the Islamic State’s denunciations. Defending the behavior of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s regime in Egypt or Mohammed bin Salman’s in Saudi Arabia is not exactly an easy task these days, and you can bet that Islamic State stalwarts are quick to highlight the brutal and capricious nature of these governments and their intimate ties to the United States. Such arguments won’t turn the Islamic State into a revolutionary juggernaut (or even to allow it to regain its former position in Iraq and Syria), but they may provide just enough ideological oxygen to keep the movement alive.
