Amid all the mostly feigned uproar about US State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf's remark to MSNBC's Chris Matthews that taking on ISIS would mean tackling "root causes," what's being lost is that the top of the list of root causes was "jobs" and not that the fact that ISIS burst into prominence from its base in Raqqa, Syria, as part of the rebellion against the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad. No Bashar al-Assad repression, no ISIS.