This is a good sign after letting those murderous thugs hang around way too long:
Islamic State's self-proclaimed caliphate was on the verge of final defeat on Friday, with Syrian government forces capturing its last major city on one side of the border and Iraqi forces taking its last substantial town on the other.
The losses on either side of the frontier appear to reduce the caliphate that once ruled over millions of people to a single Syrian border town, a village on a bank of the Euphrates in Iraq and some patches of nearby desert.
While it is true that many jihadis died or had their conviction ground into the dirt with unmistakable defeat, drawn to their doom by the existence of this territorial state; it is also true that many who never would have signed up for the jihad with a terror group were encouraged by the existence of a caliphate.
And a lot of people suffered for the chance to kill a lot of jihadis.
So I won't say that it was a good idea to take so long to defeat the ISIL state by letting it serve as a magnet for jihadis.
And remember, killing and defeating armed jihadis is only part of the Long War.
This fight is really an Islamic civil war about who gets to define Islam for all Moslems. Our military effort with allies--including Moslem states--is key to providing a shield to allow a victory for modern Islam over the forces of a violent, expansionist, and honestly a demented version that jihadis want to impose.
People who say that "true" Islam rejects the jihadi version miss the point that people decide what their religion is. So if the jihadis win, they will define what "true" Islam is.
Defeating the caliphate is but one step to winning the civil war as defeating the Al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan was a step and as defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq was a step.
If we can keep the territorial jihadi states down, we give the Moslem world a chance to fight the ideology that spawns these murder states.
And there is hope:
According to Arab Barometer, a pollster, much of the [Arab world] is growing less religious. Voters who backed Islamists after the upheaval of the Arab spring in 2011 have grown disillusioned with their performance and changed their minds. In Egypt support for imposing sharia (Islamic law) fell from 84% in 2011 to 34% in 2016. Egyptians are praying less, too (see chart). In places such as Lebanon and Morocco only half as many Muslims listen to recitals of the Koran today, compared with 2011. Gender equality in education and the workplace, long hindered by Muslim tradition, is widely accepted. “Society is driving change,” says Michael Robbins, an American who heads Barometer.
But so, too, is a new crop of Arab leaders, who have adjusted their policies in line with the zeitgeist. They are acting, in part, out of political self-interest. The region’s authoritarians, who once tried to co-opt Islamists, now view them as the biggest threat to their rule. By curbing the influence of clerics they are also weakening checks on their own power. Still, many Arab leaders seem genuinely interested in moulding more secular and tolerant societies, even if their reforms do not extend to the political sphere.
The Arab Spring failed to put democracy (with the vital rule of law often forgotten as the partner of honest voting) into the Arab world. But I was not discouraged at what has to be a long-term movement to democracy.
The Arab Spring was significant in that it showed people wanted an alternative to the traditional choices of autocrats or mullahs to run their lives. They may not have understood fully what democracy meant, but they knew they wanted it rather than their usual sad lot in life.
And the desire for democracy has undermined one fuel for extremist Moslems. In the past, Arab autocrats tried to bolster "tame" Islamist thinking to bolster their illegitimate dictatorships (or oligarchies or whatever) backed by sham elections. Even Saddam Hussein resorted to that last refuge of a scoundrel in "secular" Iraq.
But the "tame" Islamic clerics who backed despots could never compete on the field of religion with the "wild" underground Islamists who preached belief in God rather than loyalty to the state, which obviously was failing to help the people prosper as the rest of the world passed them by.
I've written about this problem many times over the years.
The depravity of seeing Islamists with power hasn't hurt the secular trend.
And with a more secular people and the formal institutions of democracy (I've noted that these states have the structure of democracy and rule of law with constitutions, elections, parliaments, and courts without having true rule of law and democracy), in time the powerless institutions of democracy may gain strength and weaken autocracy as that trend took place in Europe.
So count this secular trend as one of the first sprouts of the seeds planted in the Arab Spring (and the invasion and defense of Iraq, I'll add). Let's hope it bears fruit.
Let's do more than hope. Being the military shield of the change is a key but not sufficient contribution to the trend.
