"[A]t the end of that process, as far as the U.S. is concerned, there is no Bashar al-Assad, he is gone"

This specific campaign, against this specific enemy, he continues, belongs to a larger intellectual, religious and political movement, what he describes as “the rescue of Islam.” He explains that “I understand the challenges that the Arabs face now in trying to deal with Daesh as an entity, as a clear threat to their states and to their people, but also the threat that Daesh is to their faith.”

Gen. Allen says he regularly meets people who say “ ‘we want to take all measures necessary to reclaim our faith.’ . . . I recognize how central this faith is to so many people in the region, how important it is to so many people in the region, how difficult the struggle has become between those who would like to use it to justify horrendous acts and those who would like to reclaim it.”

Or as Gen. Allen put it in an essay earlier this year, “I can say with certainty that what we’re facing in northern Iraq is only partly about Iraq. It is about the region and potentially the world as we know it.”