Trump's bluster about radical Islam helps radical Islam

But as I wrote in January after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, there are good reasons why Obama — and President George W. Bush before him — did not describe jihadists in explicitly Islamic terms. It was not because they are cowed by political correctness. Rather it was because the wider war on radical Islamic terrorism requires the tacit and at times active support of many radical Muslims.

To illustrate this point, consider the Iraq War counterinsurgency campaign known as the surge. In 2007, the U.S. military formed an alliance with sheiks in Anbar province who had aided al-Qaeda’s Iraqi franchise in the first years of the war. These sheiks were pious Muslims. Many believed that apostates should be punished by the state and that fathers had an obligation to arrange marriages for their daughters.

If Bush had been more like Donald Trump and proposed banning all Muslims from entering the U.S., there is a good chance these Anbari sheiks would have concluded that the U.S. was as much of a threat to their villages as al-Qaeda. The sheiks who’ve survived the Islamic State today are reluctant to join the fight against them because they see the Shiite militias leading the Iraqi campaign against the Islamic State as a greater threat.