ISIS may have just won the lottery, in that, luckily for the group, those who call for U.S. military action against it are quite unpopular. ISIS’s anti-American bluster is worth noting, as are its direct ties to lethal insurgents elsewhere. But surely the way to expedite the fermentation of the next wave of Sunni terrorism is for the U.S. to start fighting Sunnis.
Interestingly enough, the central tenet of President Obama’s counter-terrorism policy is NOT to deny terrorists safe havens. Our counter-terrorism policy is mocked by critics as little more than a game of whack-a-mole. And they’re right. A terrorist pops up here; so here is where you send the drone. Mole whacked.
But a “broader” counter-terrorism strategy would involve a lot more skin than Americans are willing to shed. We’ve denied al Qaeda a safe haven in Afghanistan. We’ve tried appeasing. We’ve tried waging war. We’ve tried policy shifts. We’ve even said mean things to Israel. And yet, terrorism endures. The folks who get paid to counter terrorists eventually settled on a less ambitious goal: work to reduce the likelihood that terrorists can obtain weapons of mass destruction, easily kill large numbers of Americans, or take governments hostage. The means: intelligence, limited air strikes, drone wars, and hardening the target here at home.
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