The emergence of the terror organisation ISIS reminded me of the tag line on the Jaws 2 poster that reads: “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water”. Similarly, just when we thought that with the death of Osama Bin Laden terror as a major force is finished, here comes ISIS.
I was sitting with my cousin in his apartment in New York in April, 2001, watching George Bush on a talk show. I asked my cousin how a simpleton like Bush can head a country like the US to which my cousin replied that the US is so organised and so powerful that it doesn’t make a difference who is heading it.
Four months later, the 9/11 attacks happened and threw the country into chaos. Then after declaring war on terror and claiming to have finished all the major terror groups in the last few years once again as usual, US is overcome with shock with the sudden emergence of ISIS. As an avid researcher of terror organisations and their methods, ISIS, to me literally makes Al-Qaeda militants look like health care workers when compared to the brutality of ISIS leader Al Bakr Osama.
The situation in Iraq is deteriorating so quickly that it gives the impression of appearing ex nihilo. Or, at the very least, conservatives like us would like to believe that things had been stable until recently — that the war had been “won” before Obama pulled American troops out and before Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki failed to reckon with both the gathering strength of ISIS and the absurd governance within his own government.
Leaving aside the fact that the American public wanted completely out of Iraq, and that most Iraqis wanted them out as well, it’s morally evasive to categorise the recent violence as anything other than something, which caught everyone including the Americans as well as the Iraqis with their pants down.
In the context of ISIS, it appears to me as a commoner that the failure of America’s war on terror is of epic proportions. But to simply dismiss it as just a misstep, or to pretend there’s one thing or some things they could have done better that would have made it all turn out differently, is the worst sort of evasion anybody can do by oversimplification.
Yes, one has to wait and watch what will happen to the world because of ISIS or what will happen to ISIS because of the world but one thing is for certain — no one can predict anything.
