Central Command Twitter feed. But the Al Qaeda core still mostly produces variants of the same tired old content it has been putting out since —long videos featuring senior Al Qaeda ideologues pontificating about various aspects of jihad and quoting extensively from the Koran. Compare this to the video released by the Islamic State titled Flames of War, which features rousing music; dramatic explosions; clips of Barack Obama and George W. Bush overlaid with CGI flames; footage of jihadists firing RPGs in the midst of battle; graphic, blood-soaked images of dead enemies; and a voice-over in English, of course, with Arabic subtitles detailing the glorious rise of the Islamic State.
Which do you think is more likely to attract the attention of an eighteen-year-old dreaming of adventure and glory? Unlike Al Qaeda, it looks like a winner: triumphant in Iraq and Syria, taking on the Shia apostates and even the United States at a local level, and presenting a vision of Islamic governance that Al Qaeda cannot match. Yet this ascendance may be transitory. Like its predecessor organization in Iraq, the Islamic State may also find that its brutality repels more than it attracts, diminishing its luster among potential supporters and making it vulnerable when the people suddenly turn against it.
The good news is that the Islamic State is not targeting the American homeland—at least for now. Its emphasis is on consolidating and expanding its state, and even the many foreign fighters who have flocked to its banner are being used in suicide bombings or other attacks on its immediate enemies, not on plots back in the West.
Its military presence is roiling Iraq and Syria, and the threat it poses extends to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and especially Lebanon. The more than ten thousand foreign fighters under its banner are a recipe for regional instability at the very least, and U. Ideologically, the sectarianism it foments is worsening Shia-Sunni tension throughout the region.
The United States and its allies should try to exploit the fight between the Islamic State and Al Qaeda and, ideally, diminish them both. Efforts to stop foreign fighters should stress this infighting. Playing up its atrocities, especially against other Sunni Muslims, will steadily discredit the group.
Military efforts also matter tremendously. For Al Qaeda, the constant drone campaign has diminished its core in Pakistan and made it harder for it to exercise control over the broader movement.
For the Islamic State, defeat on the ground will do more to diminish its appeal than any propaganda measure. Washington should also work with regional allies to ensure cooperation on intelligence and border security. Some degree of continued infighting between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State is the most likely outcome. As such, the United States should prepare to confront a divided foe.
This piece originally appeared in The National Interest. Enter the Islamic State. Related Books. By , an estimated one thousand foreign fighters were joining ISIS every month, far in excess of new al-Qaeda recruits. War is not a sports match where one team wins and the other team loses. Instead, each side has its own separate tally. But a sober assessment of the last 20 years suggests that the United States lost the broader war.
But Americans have paid an exorbitant price for the two-decade campaign in strategic, economic, and moral terms. Austria-Hungary used the attack as a pretext for war against Serbia, triggering a cataclysmic conflict, World War I, in which four empires collapsed—the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austria-Hungarian. Recounting the costs is numbing: over 7, Americans killed, tens of thousands of soldiers seriously wounded, trillions of dollars expended, and over , civilian deaths in Iraq alone.
ISIS is an even more ruthless and capable adversary. If we consider the United States on defense, the success of the homeland-security complex in making Americans safer is highly debatable.
A trillion dollars has poured into counter-terrorism programs, but to what end? There have been some genuine payoffs. But as Steven Brill described in The Atlantic , the spigot of homeland security expenditure also produced a carnival of waste, endless turf wars between bloated federal agencies—and, in many cases, remarkably little additional security.
Tens of billions of dollars were poured into programs like FirstNet, a telecommunications system for first responders, which may never be built. But Brill notes that more air marshals have been arrested themselves for example, for drunk driving , than have carried out arrests in airports or onboard a plane. In , undercover tests found that airport screeners across the country failed to detect explosives and weapons about 95 percent of the time. Another core U.
If that happens, the United States will be at war with the entire Muslim world, and very likely, will be facing decisive failure. Bin Laden never succeeded in rallying Muslims into a single internationalist bloc. Bush visited the Islamic Center in Washington D. It—guided by ideas in scapegoat theory, religious theory, and rationalist theory—taps into survey data to fully investigate the demand side of determinants contributing to the popular approval of bin Laden.
Neither sociotropic dissatisfaction nor personal economic frustration robustly explains the variance of support for bin Laden. Most users should sign in with their email address. If you originally registered with a username please use that to sign in. To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above.
Don't already have an Oxford Academic account? Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account. Conversely, in the Palestinian territories, the proportion of Muslims worried about extremism has declined 14 percentage points since , the last time the question was asked there.
However, the proportion of Nigerian Muslims worried about extremism has dropped 14 percentage points since Widespread Muslim concern about Islamic extremism is generally coupled with rejection of suicide bombing and other forms of violence in the name of Islam.
However, in some countries, substantial minorities of Muslims say attacks on civilians are at least sometimes justified to defend Islam from its enemies; in the Palestinian territories, a majority of Muslims hold this view. Half or more of Muslims in most countries surveyed say that suicide bombing and other acts of violence that target civilians can never be justified in the name of Islam. Overall, support for suicide bombing and related forms of violence has declined in the last decade across the Muslim publics surveyed.
Since , the percentage of Muslims who say suicide bombing is at least sometimes justified has dropped 41 percentage points in Lebanon, 31 points in Jordan and 30 points in Pakistan. In Nigeria, meanwhile, support has declined 26 points since Across most of the countries surveyed, gender, age, income and education are not closely associated with support for suicide bombing.
Egypt is the only country surveyed where views of suicide bombing vary by income level. Generally, Muslims who say they pray five times per day are no more likely to support targeting civilians to protect Islam than those who pray less often.
Overall, views of extremist groups are negative across the Muslim publics surveyed. A median of about a third or fewer have a positive view of al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, or Hezbollah. And in no country polled do any of these organizations receive majority Muslim support.
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