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Paris and where the United States went wrong

David Rudderham

UML Student

The recent tragedies in Paris pose a difficult challenge to the West and could force the U.S. to rethink strategy in the Middle East. In some ways the media has merely become an endless cycle of rhetoric and opinion that proposes no strategy on how to defeat ISIS or any terrorist group for that matter. Not even the presidential candidates for either the Democratic Party or Republican Party have been specific on how to win the war on terrorism.

But I propose we look at history and find out where we went wrong. ISIS is a terrible group of people, no arguments there. But they are not the only enemy we have in the Middle East.

Bernie Sanders, to his credit, accurately accused the Qatari government of making no commitment to fighting ISIS and instead spending $220 billion on a World Cup soccer game. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have both been accused of either doing nothing to help fight terrorism or secretly funding terrorism.

Corrupt governments in the Middle East have pandered to religious extremists under two false promises. One promise is economic prosperity, and the other promise is Sharia law.

ISIS themselves make promises of more attacks against the West and a strict takeover to reinstall the Caliphate. The problem is both ISIS and the West do not really know what a Caliphate is.

The last Caliph to have real political power and not just ceremonial duties, ruled back in the 1920’s until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Governments in the Middle East, particularly ones that promote Wahhabism or muwahhid, have courted religious fundamentalists and the West to maintain political power.

This is where we went wrong. The United States, a country that claims to be practitioners of progressive thinking and political policy ultimately engages in international partnerships with countries that do the exact opposite.

Most people understand that we need oil and that we cannot completely remove ourselves from the world’s problems. But we also should not pick sides so easily and we certainly should not overthrow democratically elected governments. In the case of Iran, we have done both of those things.

When people say that only a fraction of Muslims actually subscribe to radical Islam, they are completely correct. But that small fraction of Islam achieved huge political power through corruption in the Middle East and by our own egregious involvement.

ISIS itself is just an opportunistic group that came to be when the U.S. left a power vacuum by removing Saddam Hussein. The U.S. also disbanded the Iraqis army which caused men of military age to be disenfranchised and unemployed.

Fun fact: Prior to the late 1970s the word “terrorist” in the media was not associated with Muslims but was associated with the Irish Republican Army. Another fun fact: Tehran, the capital of Iran, was once referred to as “The Paris of the East.”