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The Real Power of ISIS
The West has failed utterly to understand the appeal of
the ISIS narrative, much less to develop effective counter narratives.
By Scott Atran
— The Daily Beast
As U.S. troops and their allies stage commando raids to
rescue prisoners slated for slaughter by the so-called Islamic State,
and the Russians mount bombing raids to bolster the dictatorship of
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, it’s easy amid the kinetics to lose
sight of a central and potentially determining fact about the fight
against ISIS (or ISIL, or Daesh): This is, fundamentally, a war of
ideas that the West has virtually no idea how to wage, and that is a
major reason anti-ISIS policies have been such abysmal failures.
It’s not as if the core approach of ISIS is a mystery.
Required reading for the emirs of the Islamic State is Abu Bakr Baji’s
The Management of Savagery, a detailed manifesto, published a decade
ago, looking at the West’s debilities and the potential strengths of a
rising, ruthless caliphate. One typical maxim: “Work to expose the
weakness of America’s centralized power by pushing it to abandon the
media psychological war and the war by proxy until it fights directly.”
That is, suck U.S. troops into the fight.
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