The Brutal Truth about ISIS

My latest was published today in the Sunday edition of the New York Daily News. Here’s the first part.

It was inevitable: Our post-Iraq isolationist funk is finally ending. And it’s ending, of all places, right back in Iraq.

President Obama, a mere week after saying ISIS is a problem that needs to be “managed,” is now promising to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the terrorist organization that controls a proto-state in huge swaths of Syria and Iraq. He plans a “systematic campaign of air strikes” alongside support for the new Iraqi government and relatively “moderate” Syrian rebels.

The President is the most reluctant of warriors. He campaigned on ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even the most casual observer could see that he was spectacularly uninterested in doing the first thing about Syria’s civil war.

What forced his hand is the fact that the Syrian civil war is no longer the Syrian civil war. It’s a regional war that is exploding into Iraq and to a lesser extent into Lebanon. It long ago sucked in Iran and Hezbollah and is now dragging in Washington, kicking and screaming.

The erstwhile hawkish Republicans have been hardly more interested in getting involved than Obama, what with Syria’s terrorist-supporting President Bashar Assad battling it out with other terrorists. Sarah Palin summed up the mood of her party’s right wing when she wrote “let Allah sort it out” on Facebook.

Why not, right? Iraq has proven to be all but unfixable, and so has Afghanistan.

The reason we must reject the tempting tendency to close our eyes and hope this problem goes away is that Allah doesn’t always sort things out according to American interests.

Life is filled with things we don’t want to do but have to do anyway. No one wants radiation or chemotherapy, but if you get cancer, you’re going to have to take it despite the fact that it might not work and that it will certainly feel like it’s killing you.

Let’s not kid ourselves. ISIS — or ISIL as the President calls it — is cancerous. And it is not a benign tumor. It is metastasizing and will not stop growing stronger and deadlier until it is dealt with aggressively and, at the absolute minimum, contained.

Read the rest in the New York Daily News.