Let’s think the unthinkable: Could the Islamic State win?

I say “unthinkable” because, discouraged as everyone has become, most commentary stops short of imagining what an Islamic State victory in the Middle East would look like. The common conviction is that the group is so evil it simply must be defeated — it will just take time.

But let’s test that proposition and think for a minute about what it would take for the group to win. What would success look like for the Islamic State? Essentially, it would amount to the group holding, for the foreseeable future, the core of what it has conquered — roughly half of Iraq and Syria — and exercising a rudimentary sort of governance there, in what it calls its “caliphate.”