A recent Herald column by David Katzevich ’16 claims that the Islamic State was essentially an American creation. This assertion is patently false and also dangerous. Blaming all the world’s troubles on the United States and then using those arguments as a basis for isolationist policy is a terrible path to take our country down. Let’s set the record straight.
Katzevich describes the First Gulf War as pretty much an all-American affair. It was not. Military action in the Gulf was sanctioned by United Nations resolutions and backed by a global coalition of over 30 members, including many from the Middle East. Every continent except Antarctica was represented. It was the largest military coalition assembled since the Allied powers worked to defeat Hitler’s Germany 50 years prior.
Katzevich also fails to mention the Iran-Iraq War in his column, an error of omission if there ever was one. The war lasted considerably longer than the First Gulf War and cost Iraq many times more casualties and battle deaths. It was an eight-year slugfest, with widespread use of chemical weapons, bombing of civilian targets and trench warfare. That war and its associated debts had already broken the Iraqi economy before the First Gulf War. If there was a war where “the fathers and grandfathers of those now waving the black flag of the Islamic State” were killed, it was the Iran-Iraq War, not the First Gulf War.
Now we can look at what actually spawned the Islamic State. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi originally founded the group in 1999 under the name Jama-at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. That’s four years earlier than the Second Gulf War, which Katzevich claims led to “the creation of what would later become the Islamic State.” This was a group in Jordan whose members had cut their teeth fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, they renamed, swore allegiance to al-Qaeda and fought against U.S. and coalition forces. It was during the current civil war in Syria that the group took its current form and expanded rapidly, eventually seizing territory in both Iraq and Syria.
The ideology of the Islamic State is a branch of radical Wahhabist Islam. This same ideology was professed by multiple proto-caliphates that popped up in the 19th century and had to be quashed by major world powers. The phenomenon of the Islamic State is not some new breed of enemy created by “American hubris.” The Islamic State is the modern manifestation of the same religious radical movements that happened across the Middle East and Caucasus region in the 19th century.
It’s clear that the United States did not spawn the Islamic State. The Islamic State was conceived not in “a river of blood” initiated by George H.W. Bush, as Katzevich writes, but in the minds of radical Wahhabist thinkers and clerics in the 19th century, and then was melded into its current form in the chaos of the Iraqi insurgency and the crucible of the Syrian civil war. I’ll concede that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 certainly destabilized the country in a way that made it easier for radical groups to grow and operate, but it would be a dubious claim that the invasion was a direct cause.
Now that we’ve established the true roots of the Islamic State, why are alternate explanations dangerous? Because they are often used as a pillar of anti-interventionist rhetoric. America cannot sit idly by while this new form of evil spreads across the Middle East. If it was not clear before, the Islamic State is a global threat. Just days ago, Australian counter-terrorism officers foiled a plot to kidnap strangers in Sydney and behead them on camera.
As I claimed in my last column, we must step in because no one else is willing or able. We do not have to shoulder the whole burden ourselves, and I think the coalition that President Obama is building to combat the Islamic State threat is essential to our success.
We must act carefully — we cannot repeat our misadventure in Iraq, and if nothing else, the last decade at war has taught us that the Middle East is a place that is intensely complicated and at the edge of our ability to control. Obama is reluctant to commit forces to the Middle East, which I applaud — but he is also resolute in his commitment to combat global terrorism wherever it appears. As a nation, we should follow his lead and steel ourselves for coming conflict, think critically about our actions and make sure we know what we’re talking about.
Walker Mills ’15 is a senior concentrating in history and archaeology. He is planning on commissioning as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps after graduation. He can be reached at walker_mills@brown.edu.
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