Tuesday, May 19, 2015

My caliphate for a horse

Fred and Kimberly Kagan in today's Washington Post, only a couple of months after proclaiming what a good job the Iraqi Prime Minister was doing against ISIS --

Had the Islamic State been dealt a rapid and crushing blow in Iraq, one might have hoped for a collapse in support for the organization and the dwindling of these various movements, all of which were preexisting organizations that swore allegiance to the Islamic State opportunistically in the hope that they would prove to be early backers of what Osama bin Laden liked to call “the strong horse.” The Islamic State’s success against the United States in Iraq makes the group look, indeed, like a strong horse and is likely to strengthen its efforts to recruit individuals and groups to its ranks.

Here's an attempted intellectual history of the strong horse philosophy of Middle East politics: Bernard Lewis to Dick Cheney to George W. Bush. Not a word about WMDs.

No comments: