As Americans know well by now, a violent Muslim extremist group has overrun Tikrit, Mosul and other northern Iraqi territory liberated at great cost by U.S. and Iraqi troops and has proclaimed the founding of an Islamic state in much of northeastern Syria and large portions of Iraq.
Its leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, has proclaimed himself the emir of a caliphate - recreating the Islamic state that once stretched over much of the Islamic world. The group has already set about changing its name from ISIS - the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria - to simply the Islamic State.
Is this the final ending for our struggle in Iraq, and does it portend the outcome in Afghanistan? Was it avoidable? The historical evidence suggests that far from the climax, this thrust by ISIS looks like a coming attraction. And yes, it was avoidable.
Restoring the caliphate has been on the list of things to do for Islamists virtually from the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1916. It was then that two European diplomats - Mark Sykes of Great Britain and Francois George Picot of France - drafted what was initially a secret agreement that drew the boundaries of the countries of the current Middle East that became reality after World War I. Islamists regard the Sykes-Picot Agreement as a boil on the face of Islam, and have made every effort to eradicate those boundaries and to unite Muslims under the banner of their religion and the rule of Sharia law.
ISIS itself is a split-off from Al Qaeda, and differs from its parent only as to how to achieve the goal. Al Qaeda says that jihad, or holy war, must come first; ISIS has leaped ahead to proclaim the caliphate even as it wages war. » | Michael B. Mukasey | New York Daily News | Sunday, July 13, 2014
