Assessing Al-Qaeda (merged thread)

[Bob's World]

Carl,

Who are "They"?

You are right that "they" in charge of ISIS, ISIL, Muslim Brotherhood, AQ, etc. choose to define the conflict in religious terms. As I have often said, this is the smartest and most effective way to recruit citizens to serve as guerrillas, as an underground, and as an auxiliary (in US doctrinal terms) in support of their agenda. But even those three broad groupings of the population only make up a small portion of Sunni populations of the greater Middle East and the entire planet writ large.

I suspect the majority of Sunni believe strongly that the governance they live under must change; but that a much smaller percentage believe they must act out illegally to effect that change; and a much smaller percentage still that believe that the future governance they should replace their current governance with is that extreme Islamist version is espoused by the "they" you seem so concerned about. The much larger "they" simply want fair opportunity, justice under the law, and reasonably evolved rights more in tune with the environment of the current day.

The Sunni revolutionary insurgencies are in full swing and will continue to play out. The most likely (and best, IMO) outcome in Syria and Iraq is a fragmentation into new states defined much more by common culture and heritage than by the desires and interests of Western imperialists.

It looks to me that the leadership of the Gulf States (where the revolution will spread to next if those governments to not stop simply attempting to buy down their populations with oil money), are conducting UW with various Sunni groups in Syria and Iraq to facilitate the formation of a Sunni state (or states) there. It looks like the US either tacitly or covertly supports that play.

No one knows what the future will bring, but most should be able to see that the current framework of governance in the region where the states of Iraq and Syria currently burn is untenable. The US does not need to control this, and any efforts to do so will not only be likely to fail, but will also only validate the #1 rationale employed by AQ and others to motivate their target audience to conducts acts of transnational terrorism against the US and the West.

Mitigate, shape, develop lines of influence - yes to all. But the more we attempt to control the less of all three of those more critical factors we will have.