Building a Consensus by Letting ISIS Be ISIS

The reason Saddam Hussein was so easily defeated in the Gulf War after he invaded Kuwait in 1990 was because almost literally the whole world -- including the rest of the Middle East -- was against him.

The United States led a coalition of international forces that prepared for months before attacking in January. By the end of February Saddam was completely defeated.

After the debacle of Vietnam the United States finally got one right.

Sadly, Dick Cheney, the Secretary of Defense who led the successful campaign to unite the world against a tyrant, completely forgot the lessons learned in the Gulf War when he and President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. W and Cheney were either duped by Iranian spies who wanted to destroy Saddam with the American hammer of death, or conspired with them. This resulted in another war in which the United States went it alone and invaded a country on false pretenses.

The American body count in Iraq was lower than the Vietnam war, mostly because of improvements in body armor and field medicine. But the worst outcome of the Iraq War was its effect as a recruiting tool for terrorists. Here was proof positive that the United States was a Christian nation (Republicans keep telling everyone America is a Christian nation) bent on repeating the barbarities of the Crusades, bombing women and children, torturing Muslims in Abu Ghraib, forcing Western culture (i.e., democracy) onto a Muslim country after ginning up phony evidence that Saddam was making a nuclear bomb and was involved in 9/11.

Since then, the same neocon chicken hawks who invaded Iraq in 2003 have been champing at the bit to invade other countries: Iran, Libya, Syria, and Iraq again; you name it. They have been relentlessly criticizing President Obama for "not doing enough."

But invading yet another Middle-eastern country without the support of the rest of the world would backfire just as surely as W's Iraq invasion.

The new threat that has Lindsey Graham convinced that "we're all gonna die!" is ISIS, a Muslim terrorist army of foreign invaders that have been attacking Syria and Iraq. ISIS has been financing its war with oil from captured refineries and ransoms paid for people they've kidnapped, plus cash from religious fanatics in countries that are supposed to be American allies.

Lately countries have stopped paying ransoms, and in response ISIS has been murdering people of all nationalities in grisly fashion: they've beheaded Syrians, Kurds, Afghans, Frenchmen, Iraqis, Americans, Britons, Japanese, Egyptians and even their own soldiers who deserted. They burned a captured Jordanian pilot alive.

In response Jordan and Egypt have launched air attacks against ISIS in Syria and Iraq and Libya.

The same sort of thing is now happening in Pakistan, which had long supported the Taliban in Afghanistan, sabotaging American efforts. Now the Taliban is murdering Pakistani schoolchildren by the hundreds.

ISIS is harder to fight than Saddam because it's not a country: it's just a terrorist group with cells all over the place. That makes it impossible to attack and defeat in a purely military fashion. A consensus has to be built to attack ISIS not just on the battlefield, but in the banking system, the oil markets, and on Twitter and Facebook.

What Republicans call "inaction" on ISIS is no such thing. President Obama is building a consensus in the world that ISIS is evil incarnate and must be destroyed.

True, ISIS is running rampant and killing innocent people in the Middle East: mostly Muslims in Iraq and Syria. And they're taking all the heat for it.

But if the United States had started a major bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq when John McCain demanded it, there would be thousands of innocent Syrian and Iraqi civilian deaths from collateral damage from mistargeted American munitions. That's just the way war is. We would be blamed for all those deaths, as we are for drone attacks that kill innocents in Yemen and Pakistan.

That collateral damage is what turns the residents of the Middle East against us.

It's likely ISIS has killed the same number of innocent people that would have died as collateral damage from American bombing had we invaded when the chicken hawks first started squawking. The difference is that the blood is on ISIS's hands.

It's sad, but we have to let ISIS be ISIS to convince the rest of the world to act against them. The actions that Egypt and Jordan have taken show that this course of action is working. Timing is important. If the rest of those countries don't act fast enough, they will be the ones to suffer. But they have to make the decision -- if the United States forces the issue yet again, it will backfire.

ISIS cannot be defeated until the recruitment of foreign fighters is stopped, their oil sales are blocked, and the cash flow is cut off from their financiers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar -- ostensible American allies.

And bombing the hell out of Syria and Iraq won't solve those problems.