Just two days after Donald Trump’s pep talk to the Muslim and Arab world about how the countries there must destroy ISIS, a second-generation Libyan born in Britain blew himself up at a concert in Manchester, killing 22 and wounding dozens.
The speech to the Muslim world — a tough-minded clarion call to chase the extremists from its midst — hit some of the right notes. But the address missed many others critical to the fight against ISIS. It’s highly unlikely that the President’s speech will do much to mobilize the region to destroy — let alone eradicate — the forces of jihadi terror.
Indeed, the terror attack in Manchester only reinforces the obvious: The ideology of ISIS has become a global problem.
Here are several politically incorrect points that somehow failed to make it into the President’s speech.
The Arab world is a mess
Sure ISIS evolved from a Sunni insurgency against the US in the wake of America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, but it has fed and thrived on the dysfunction of a region that’s likely to remain broken for years to come.
Four Arab states are in various phases of meltdown: Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen. And others, including Egypt, face enormous economic and political challenges that will facilitate jihadi activities.
Most Arab governments have yet to take ownership of the problem. And the president’s speech failed to take account of the sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shia, particularly the lack of empowerment of Sunnis in Syria and Iraq on which al-Qaeda and ISIS feed.
Turning a blind eye?
The Trump administration will continue successfully what the Obama Administration started — the dismantlement of ISIS’s Caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
But in Trump’s address, there was no acknowledgement — largely because of fear of offending key authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt — of the political grievances and economic inequalities that continue to provide fertile ground for extremist Islamist groups of varying persuasions.
The US cannot impose reform on these states, nor can it make human rights the central condition for aid in fighting these jihadis. But failure even to mention issues such as women’s rights, transparency, accountability, corruption and the aspirations of a younger generation prepared to dissent peacefully provides a license for these regimes to avoid any reckoning with economic and political change.
Saudi Arabia is part of the problem
Given the Trump Administration’s determination to buck up relations with America’s traditional US allies, the budding love affair between the Trump Administration and Saudi Arabia may be understandable.
Saudi Arabia can be helpful: it shares valuable intelligence on radicalized jihadi groups and can be an important security partner in the fight against ISIS and perhaps a partner, too, in an effort to restart a comatose Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
But Riyadh is also part of the problem. To talk — as the President did — about shared values between America and a state that is undemocratic, repressive, discriminates against women, and gays, whose political elite relies on a partnership with a clerical establishment that legitimizes, expounds and spreads a puritanical form of Islam that is anti-semitic, anti-Christian, anti-western and funds religious educational programs, mosques, imams and religious schools that do the same, not only enables the very forces the US is trying to defeat, but identifies America with a Muslim nation that hardly represents moderate or progressive views.
The Saudi royal family remains in something of a predicament and the Americans, through their support of Saudi Arabia, remains in one, too: the regime relies on the clerical establishment for its Islamic legitimacy but binds it to a militant Islamic ideology.
Horse is out of barn
The president’s speech rightly addressed the problem of extremist Islamist groups in the region, but only tangentially referred to the next phase of the battle that is already underway.
As ISIS loses ground on the Iraqi and Syrian battlefields, its fighters have not only spread throughout the region, but to Europe too. It is in essence the paradox of victory. As it loses, it seeks to demonstrate ISIS through inspiring potentially radicalized Muslims that it can win through attacks like those in Manchester.
Indeed, the President needs to give a companion speech like the one he gave in Riyadh to a European summit, though one that’s much more nuanced. But he seems unwilling to move in that direction. Indeed, to deal with the jihadis, he repeated his “drive them out” language to NATO leaders at the summit. The challenge of course is that many of these are attacks are carried out by European and British nationals, as was the case with the Manchester bomber.
What’s required is a strategy that involves the law enforcement and security sectors but also one that includes better integration and community efforts to identify the causes of radicalism and to pre-empt and prevent them. This is not the Trumpian way.
If the President wants to address effectively the problem of jihadi terror — both in the Middle East and beyond — he must begin to see the world not just the way he wants it to be, but the way it really is.