Jordan Retaliates Against ISIS. Do The Ends Justify The Means?

My wife typically refrains from the hours of news information that I digest through every media outlet I can.  I even stream public radio through the headphones just so I can get the "old news" version of the daily news and not the slanted politicized national news that taints most television airwaves. When ISIS decided to up the ante recently by burning the Jordanian pilot alive, even my wife couldn't turn away.

My hunch is that ISIS hoped she wouldn't turn away this time since the beheading's- that we don't fully televise anyway- have lost their impact.  Beheading's are old school tactics, so the propensity to turn back tortures clock speaks of an organization reaching for anything that it can grab hold of.  For a while, the beheading's achieved the purpose, but eventually one blurry video of a dying victim in an orange suit starts to resemble the next blurry video.  President Obama is limping his way towards the finish line of his tenure and never believed in the idea of fanning the terrorism flame anyway.  He came into office with the mission of ending our middle eastern wars and he hardly intends to leave office with a battalion of US soldiers waiting to be brought home by some other president.  If we are to return to the battlefields of Iraq, and now Syria, it will not be from another beheading.

But has burning someone alive changed the game?

The burning certainly has my wife wondering why we wouldn't just go blow them up and be done with it.  Typically, our response to every provocation is to blow them up and try to be done with it, but ISIS is a 30,000 soldier (and growing) fighting force that has taken over lands occupied by well over 1 million people.  The easy way to get rid of those 30,000 is to get rid of the million as well.  Everything else is a surgical process of weeding the needle out of the haystack that leaves you stuck in the middle east for a long time.

The pilot was from Jordan but ISIS is attacking humanity.

This fight must be lead by those most impacted by it, but even they are vulnerable to react impulsively. One of the hostages that  Jordan decided to kill was an Iraqi suicide bomber who only became captured because her chest bomb didn't go off.  She is alive today as a result of technical difficulties and her release would have certainly given her the opportunity to fix that error.  Jordan may feel better for having killed an Iraqi woman (women are typically excluded from these horrific acts) but have they elevated the cause of those who oppose Islamic extremism?

Of significant note is the digital production quality of the video.  Though it may have been a Jordanian pilot that was killed, the video targets western civilization and western sensibilities.  It pursues the kind of barbarism that would enrage Jordan and provoke the west into doing something more than drone strikes and military aid to the Kurds.  This is Pearl Harbor for ISIS except they have to send their suicide planes one beheading- or burning at a time.  Nothing says legitimacy like inciting a world war, and if ISIS can pull it off, they solidify their place in the spectrum of terror groups as the leader of the pack.

As long as the world remains disjointed in their response to ISIS, ISIS wins this war.  Collectively we can easily defeat this foe, but collectivism is not a characteristic of worldwide politics.  Jordan has fed the monster with their response to ISIS and so have we.  We must accept the negative impact of giving ISIS publicity in order to counter it with properly weighted opposition.  Some of it will happen in a traditional way but much of our war with ISIS will have to be fought in a new way that has yet to be developed.  Deflating ISIS will require a combination approach of every military and non-military counter effort that we know of- and a few yet imagined. The rules of engagement will have to be altered to address an enemy that doesn't behave by rules.  They're not even afraid to be known.

We Know Who They Are!!
Defining the enemy could be an important first step if it were not for the willingness of this enemy to define themselves.  Their behaviors define them and the scene of their behaviors clarifies their location.  Defining war against radicals is difficult because who they are is an evolving definition.  They come from all areas of the world and will eventually make the entire world their battlefield if allowed to operate freely.  Stopping terror is as impossible as ending serial killers.  While terror tactics are harsh and enraging, their outcomes are about the equivalent of a serial killer.

Thinking Like Killers

When we begin to win against terror, we will behave much as it does.  That will demand the courage to stand tall in the face of the inevitable mistakes while extracting embedded terrorist', but it will also demand the courage to stand tall in the face of human rights groups who will scream about covert strikes that America reveals only after the damage is done.  Gaining secret intelligence and responding to it with secret force will put terror on the run but it will also send American's chasing for information.  Terrorists that we kill NEED the news report more than they needed the bullet in their head and our demand for information feeds their need.

Fighting a war of legitimacy demands an enemy, and while middle eastern radicals add the US to their vast list of enemies, we only legitimize their war by publicly acknowledging them as we do or by killing sympathetic hostages in response.  Did Jordan consider executing these hostages by fire and then creating a video as well? Even without similar nastiness, ISIS is using Jordan's retaliation as a recruiting tool so that they can gain 5,000 while losing 2 sympathizers.

In the face of any war, the ends have to justify the means.