In May, I visited Vietnam and met with university students. After a week of being love-bombed by Vietnamese, who told me how much they admire the US, want to work or study there and have friends and family living there, I could not help but ask myself: “How did we get this country so wrong? How did we end up in a war with Vietnam that cost so many lives and drove them into the arms of their most hated enemy, China?”
It is a long, complicated story, I know, but a big part of it was failing to understand that the core political drama of Vietnam was an indigenous nationalist struggle against colonial rule — not the embrace of global communism, but the interpretation we imposed on it.
The North Vietnamese were both communists and nationalists — and still are. However, the key reason the US failed in Vietnam was that the communists managed to harness the Vietnamese nationalist narrative much more effectively than the US’ South Vietnamese allies, who were too often seen as corrupt or illegitimate. The North Vietnamese managed to win (with the help of brutal coercion) more Vietnamese support not because most Vietnamese bought into Marx and Lenin, but because former Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and his communist comrades were perceived to be the more authentic nationalists.
I believe something loosely akin to this is afoot in Iraq. The Islamic State (IS), with its small core of jihadis, was able to seize so much non-jihadi Sunni territory in Syria and Iraq almost overnight not because most Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis suddenly bought into the Islamist narrative of the militants’ self-appointed caliph. Most Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis do not want to marry their daughters off to a bearded Chechen fanatic, and more than a few of them pray five times a day and like to wash it down with a good Scotch.
They have embraced or resigned themselves to the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, because they were systematically abused by the pro-Shiite, pro-Iranian governments of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and former Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki — and because they see IS as a vehicle to revive Sunni nationalism and end Shiite oppression.
The challenge the US faces in Iraq is trying to defeat the group in tacit alliance with Syria and Iran, whose local Shiite allies are doing a lot of the fighting in Iraq and Syria. Iran is seen by many Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis as the “colonial power” dominating Iraq to keep it weak.
Obsessed with communism, the US intervened in Vietnam’s civil war and took the place of the French colonialists. Obsessed with jihadism and terrorism, are we now doing the bidding of Iran and Syria in Iraq? Is jihadism to Sunni nationalism what communism was to Vietnamese nationalism: a fearsome ideological movement that triggers emotional reactions in the West — deliberately reinforced with videotaped beheadings — but that masks a deeper underlying nationalist movement that is to some degree legitimate and popular in its context?
I wonder what would have happened had Islamic State not engaged in barbarism and declared: “We represent the interests of Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis who have been brutalized by Persian-directed regimes of Damascus and Baghdad. If you think we’re murderous, then just Google ‘Bashar al-Assad and barrel bombs’ or ‘Iraqi Shiite militias and the use of power drills to kill Sunnis.’ You’ll see what we faced after you Americans left. Our goal is to secure the interests of Sunnis in Iraq and Syria. We want an autonomous ‘Sunnistan’ in Iraq just like the Kurds have a Kurdistan — with our own cut of Iraq’s oil wealth.”
That probably would have garnered huge support from Sunnis everywhere.
Islamic States’ online magazine, Dabiq, recently published an article titled “Reflections on the Final Crusade,” (transcribed by the Middle East Media Research Institute), which argued that the US war on the jihadist outfit only serves the interests of Washington’s enemies: Iran and Russia.
It quotes US strategists as warning that Iran has created a “Shia [Shiite]-belt from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut,” a threat much greater than IS.
Then why did Islamic State behead two US journalists? Because it is a coalition of foreign jihadis, local Sunni tribes and former Iraqi Baath Party military officers. I suspect the jihadis in charge want to draw the US into another “crusade” against Muslims — just like with former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden — from across the world and to overcome their main weakness, namely that most Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis are attracted to Islamic State simply as a vehicle of their sectarian resurgence, not because they want puritanical-jihadist Islam. There is no better way to get secular Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis to fuse with Islamic State than have the US bomb them all.
IS needs to be contained before it destabilizes islands of decency like Jordan, Kurdistan and Lebanon, but destroying it? That will be hard, because it is not just riding on some jihadist caliphate fantasy, but also on deep Sunni nationalist grievances. Separating the two is the best way to defeat IS, but the only way to separate mainstream Sunnis from jihadists is for mainstream Sunnis and Shiites to share power, to build a healthy interdependency from what is now an unhealthy one.
Chances of that? Very low. I hope US President Barack Obama has thought this through.
They did it again. For the whole world to see: an image of a Taiwan flag crushed by an industrial press, and the horrifying warning that “it’s closer than you think.” All with the seal of authenticity that only a reputable international media outlet can give. The Economist turned what looks like a pastiche of a poster for a grim horror movie into a truth everyone can digest, accept, and use to support exactly the opinion China wants you to have: It is over and done, Taiwan is doomed. Four years after inaccurately naming Taiwan the most dangerous place on
Wherever one looks, the United States is ceding ground to China. From foreign aid to foreign trade, and from reorganizations to organizational guidance, the Trump administration has embarked on a stunning effort to hobble itself in grappling with what his own secretary of state calls “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.” The problems start at the Department of State. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has asserted that “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power” and that the world has returned to multipolarity, with “multi-great powers in different parts of the
President William Lai (賴清德) recently attended an event in Taipei marking the end of World War II in Europe, emphasizing in his speech: “Using force to invade another country is an unjust act and will ultimately fail.” In just a few words, he captured the core values of the postwar international order and reminded us again: History is not just for reflection, but serves as a warning for the present. From a broad historical perspective, his statement carries weight. For centuries, international relations operated under the law of the jungle — where the strong dominated and the weak were constrained. That
On the eve of the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) Day, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) made a statement that provoked unprecedented repudiations among the European diplomats in Taipei. Chu said during a KMT Central Standing Committee meeting that what President William Lai (賴清德) has been doing to the opposition is equivalent to what Adolf Hitler did in Nazi Germany, referencing ongoing investigations into the KMT’s alleged forgery of signatures used in recall petitions against Democratic Progressive Party legislators. In response, the German Institute Taipei posted a statement to express its “deep disappointment and concern”
RSS