The question What should we do about ISIS? is not the same as the question Do we want to go back to Iraq? One is about facing up to an extreme and immediate challenge, which we have to do. The other is about returning to an old experience, which almost no one wants to do. The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham is not just a grandiose army of freelancers and fanatics. Theyre something different in kind from the al Qaeda of old—more vicious, more organized and professional. George Packer in the New Yorker estimates ISIS controls 35,000 square miles of land. The self-proclaimed Caliphate stretches from the newly conquered towns along the Syrian-Turkish border, through northern Syria, across the Iraqi border, down to the farming towns south of Baghdad. ISIS funds its operations not like primitives but sophisticates: They sell oil and electricity and empty banks in the areas they seize. (A CNN report put their haul from the oil fields alone at $2 million a day.) They also make money from kidnappings and what they call taxation. Mr. Packer quotes a former Pentagon official: ISIS now controls a volume of resources and territory unmatched in the history of extremist organizations. They are something new and different in the Mideast drama. . . .
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 23:50:28 +0000
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