Threat Inflation And The Case For War

Fred Cole tries to apply the Powell Doctrine to the ISIS war, asking whether defending Iraq from the jihadist group is a vital American national security interest:

If we were talking about the fall of Iraq, as ISIS capturing Iraq’s land and resources, then I could see how that could threaten the vital interests of the United States, in time. But, frankly, a few months ago ISIS was an army of technicals, guys in pickups with guns on the back. Now they’ve captured some better gear, they’ve captured some money, but they’re a long way off from being able to threaten the United States. ISIS is far more likely to threaten the vital interests of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey than the United States. … They’re willing to massacre civilians. They’re willing to massacre prisoners. They’re willing to behead journalists. But hyperventilated claims of ISIS as an existential threat to the United States are nonsense. ISIS is unlikely to touch us here. They can’t capture Baghdad. They’re certainly not an existential threat to the United States.

Doug Mataconis draws the same conclusion:

Notwithstanding the hyperbole of the media, it seems rather apparent that IS is not an immediate threat to the United States despite the threats that they have made to bring the battle to America’s shores.

In no small part, this is because it seems clear that, leaving aside their military success against an Iraqi Army that doesn’t seem to want to fight and “moderate” Syrian rebels that are clearly weaker than IS forces, they don’t have the capability to strike in the same way that al Qaeda did (and even in  that regard it’s worth noting that that 9/11 attacks took several years of planning.) Additionally, though, it seems clear that IS’s ambitions lie elsewhere at the moment. If anyone should be concerned about the immediate threat from IS, it should be nations like Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, which bears at least some responsibility for all of this given their role in providing arms to the Syrian rebels regardless of whether they were “moderates” or jihadists. Given that, it seems fairly clear that describing IS as an immediate and grave threat as much of the current rhetoric has done is extremely hyperbolic to say that least.

But of course, the war cheerleaders are describing it just so. Nick Gillespie calls them out:

As with al Qaeda back in the day, our fears of ISIS suffer from massive threat inflation at every possible level. At the start of the summer, the number of ISIS fighters in Iraq was somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,000 to 10,000; those numbers have doubtless grown but they still face off against more than a quarter of a million Iraqi troops and somewhere between 80,000 and 240,000 peshmerga soldiers. Even the much-maligned Free Syrian Army numbers 70,000 to 90,000. And, it’s worth pointing out, ISIS is facing intense opposition (and some cooperation) from other jihadist groups, including and especially al Qaeda. If the Iraqi armed forces are in fact incapable of fighting successfully against ISIS after years of training and resources given them by the United States, there is in fact little we will be able to do to change things in Iraq[.]

Even among those who don’t overstate ISIS’s capabilities, however, some still favor going to war in order to preempt a future threat:

[I]n a thorough presentation on Sept. 3 at the Brookings Institution, outgoing director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Matthew Olsen, presented a less scary picture. ISIS has no cells in the U.S., Olsen said, “full stop.” Further, Olsen said, “we have no credible information” that the group “is planning to attack the U.S.” ISIS, Olsen said “is not al Qaeda pre-9/11.” …

[But] the potential threat of ISIS targeting the U.S. in the future is real, administration officials say. More conservative observers like Olsen agree that it is better to go on the offensive against ISIS now than to risk them becoming a bigger threat to Americans later. “ISIL poses a multi-faceted threat to the United States,” Olsen said at Brookings, and it “views the U.S. as a strategic enemy.” He says ISIS, “has the potential to use its safe haven to plan and coordinate attacks in Europe and the U.S.” Foreign fighters joining ISIS, “are likely to gain experience and training and eventually to return to their home countries battle-hardened and further radicalized,” Olsen says.

Weigel takes it all in and parts with this wry observation:

Does anybody remember the last time we were told that Iraq had produced an “imminent threat” to American lives? Better to just stain the sheets and hit the panic button, I guess. The long Democratic dream, from Kerry to Obama, of reducing terrorism from an existential threat to a managable nuisance, is just not an election-winner.