McCarthy: Our enemies have a strategic vision for a global conflict, but we don’t.

I keep reading ISIS referred to as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Andy McCarthy clarifies:

The acronym is derived from the jihadists’ self-proclaimed name: the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Al-Sham refers to “greater Syria” or the Levant, encompassing the neighboring territories of Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Cyprus, and Southern Turkey.

Jihadists, you see, do not recognize or much care about national boundaries drawn by Western powers. In the world, as they see it, they are pitted against everyone else — Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb: All must choose the realm of Islam or the realm of war. Significantly, al-Qaeda was not the first to revive this ancient Islamic-supremacist perspective. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the creator of Iran’s revolutionary sharia state, famously proclaimed:

We do not worship Iran. We worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [i.e., Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.

Because of the president’s delusional theory that the Muslim Brotherhood are “moderates” we can ally with, he quietly colluded with Qatar and the Saudis to arm and train the Syrian “rebels.” It blew up on him because the “moderates” are not moderate. The Brothers concur in al-Qaeda’s sharia goals and readily resort to terrorism if that is what is necessary to achieve them. So arming the rebels, as Obama helped do, necessarily meant arming anti-American jihadists. This has proved embarrassing, so what Obama has done, at least so far, is refrain from giving the “rebels” decisive aid — the kind he gave the “rebels” in Libya, to disastrous effect in Benghazi. That is hardly an aid vacuum.

As I argued throughout the Bush years, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has always been Iran’s guy, and under his regime, Iran’s tentacles were allowed to spread throughout post-Saddam Iraq — the State Department and the Iraq Study Group sharing the loopy conceit that Iran had an interest in a stable Iraq even as Iran was fueling both sides of Iraq’s civil war, supplying Sunni terrorists with IEDs, and running Shiite terror cells against our troops.

The biggest challenge, however, is the one to which Washington has been willfully blind for a generation: Islam, and in particular the supremacist interpretation of it that rules the Middle East. Its absence from the debate is the vacuum at the center of the vacuum claptrap.

Iraqis despise Americans. Their sharia jurists, Sunni and Shiite, called for violent jihad to drive the “occupiers” out, and Iraqis thus overwhelmingly demanded that our forces leave the country. Under pressure from his Iranian overseers, Maliki drove a hard bargain with Bush, insisting on an American withdrawal and refusing to grant our troops immunity from prosecution by Iraqi courts. Running out of time, Bush acceded to the demands that our forces be dramatically reduced by 2009 and fully evacuated by 2011. In so doing, he agreed to exactly what he had always rightly regarded as folly: hard withdrawal dates that would inevitably encourage jihadists to bide their time and reemerge as we vacated.

The principal challenge confronting the United States in the Middle East is Islam. As taught there, it inspires intense hatred of us from both sides of the Sunni–Shiite divide. President Bush could not make it go away by pretending it was a “false” Islam, and President Obama has made it worse by pretending we can ally with it. But neither of them caused the problem. We will never have a rational foreign policy until we fill that vacuum in our understanding.

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