What About ISIS, Dan?

Sitting in a restaurant in Yarnell AZ, listening to an older couple’s conversation over their breakfast. They were passing through to Pasadena, from where I did not hear but this is a frequent stop for them. They were talking about the three ISIS attacks just the other day in Tunisia, France, and Kuwait. ‘They have people in all the big cities and can attack us whenever they think they can get away with it,’ is a close paraphrase of their conversation. The other night in Aguila a liberal for these desert communities asked, ‘How do you do peace with ISIS?’ And in early May, even before I was a hundred percent committed to this trip, while traveling with two advocates for Health Care for All from Marin to Sacramento- we were lobbying for inclusive coverage of migrants in California’s Healthcare System- I began to explain my plans to ride across the US for Peace and Environmental Justice. I had laid out my premise; if we are serious about addressing global climate change then we need the cooperation of all of the world’s peoples, that cooperation is the hallmark of peacefulness, therefore we need to end war. The driver asked the rhetorical questions, ‘What are you going to do about folks like the Islamic State?’ ‘How long do you think you will keep your head if you walk up to them talking peace?’ These questions point to the success of the Islamic State’s propaganda, and that of Al Qaeda also for that matter. 

The fact of the matter is neither I nor anyone else has the answer. But I do have questions that we should be asking before we initiate military actions whenever the political pressure to do so grows irresistible. We have the greatest military on earth, but all military actions have limitations as to what can be achieved. Is Military action the appropriate preemptive action or response? Consider the Pasadena couple’s concerns about an attack on the Rose Bowl. Shall we bomb Pasadena? 

The simple answer is to understand the conditions under which groups like the Islamic State are formed and then work to prevent those conditions from happening. I went to St Mary’s College in Moraga CA during the escalation of the Viet Nam War. A professor from St Mary’s came and convinced me and a few other high school seniors that their program for finding truth was the best thing a college bound idealist could do. He was very smart yet he was also of the belief that the people of the world would be better off dead than red. Whether it is the Red Scare, or the Yellow Peril, or the maniacal  nature of some foreign regime, all national leaders of all countries will use the same tactic to gain political support for war. It is my belief as a leading democratic society it is our responsibility to counter these messages of fear and draw away from them their potency. 

Is the Islamic State truly a new state being born in the deserts of Syria and Iraq, or is it the spirit of the day for disgruntled and disturbed young men like our own home-grown Black Block of the left or various permutations of white supremacy on the right? Are there Saudi forces trying to establish a Sunni government to break up the crescent 

of Shite Iran, Iraq, and Syria? It seems to me that diplomacy and policing are the solution to ISIS. As Paul Krugman wrote in a NYTs piece last August, war is mostly a political affair for the benefit of the politicians that want to wage it.

“If you’re a modern, wealthy nation, however, war — even easy, victorious war — doesn’t pay. And this has been true for a long time. In his famous 1910 book “The Great Illusion,” the British journalist Norman Angell argued that “military power is socially and economically futile.” As he pointed out, in an interdependent world (which already existed in the age of steamships, railroads, and the telegraph), war would necessarily inflict severe economic harm even on the victor. Furthermore, it’s very hard to extract golden eggs from sophisticated economies without killing the goose in the process.”
…“The larger problem, however, is that governments all too often gain politically from war, even if the war in question makes no sense in terms of national interests.”

NY Times.com-Krugman-Why We Fight Wars - 2014/08/18

We fought two world wars and a forty year cold war in the twentieth century to firmly establish a global economy. It is our task now to end war so as to prevent that economy from destroying modern civilization on this planet. ISIS, Al Qaeda, and many other such groups are symptoms of the real problems we need to address. Environmental Justice means that it is not just the trees and frogs that need protections but that we need fairness in our economic system in order for modern civilization to survive.