Declare War On Pernicious Jihadism
Dr. Ameer Ali
The carnage in Paris yet again demonstrates how professionally organised the IS criminal enterprise is. The fact that it was able to penetrate Paris undetected by the nation’s security radar speaks volumes about IS’s intelligence and global reach. No decent human being can remain emotionally undisturbed by the horror of the satanic ritual that IS has displayed in Paris. It should be universally condemned in the strongest of words in any language.
In the aftermath of the Parisian infamy the crucial questions to answer are firstly, why did this happen, and what is the long term solution to this menace?
Had the Bush administration taken the most obvious and rational decision in 2001 to make Saudi Arabia accountable for what happened in S11 and continued to monitor and prevent the export of its Wahhabi ideology, instead of bombing and destroying Afghanistan and Iraq, the world today would have been spared of the murderous IS caliphate and the Parisians like others before them need not have fallen prey to IS’s sword. Bush’s soul mate Tony Blair’s mea culpa is too little too late to repair the damage.
Once again the world leaders while focusing on military retribution, which has already started and killing even more civilians who will not be counted because they are Muslims, and political solution to the Syrian chaos, which is yet to materialize, are about to make the same error of ignoring the fundamental problem of a fast spreading pernicious ideology.
No doubt the IS criminal enterprise must be eliminated, but is that possible having allowed it to become a virtual state with a sizeable territory of approximately 90,000 square kilometres with around six million people, a highly trained army with sophisticated weapons, ample economic resources, and a welfare administrative structure?
The collective disbandment of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni but secular Pretorian Guard by Bush’s US envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer, and after that the continued harassment, imprisonment and economic deprivation of the disbanded soldiers by Nouri al-Maliki’s Shia Government drove these military men into the arms of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi the self-declared caliph of IS. Even though many of them are now in their mid and late fifties or early sixties they are providing valuable security intelligence and military advice to IS. Given this situation aerial bombing alone by France and other Western powers is not going to wipe IS out of existence. To make the offensive effective the West needs boots on the ground but that would be a nightmare even to contemplate after what the U.S. and its allies experienced in the quagmire of Afghanistan and Iraq. Read More
