 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Erin Powell. And I'm Trevor Burris. Joining us today is our colleague Emma Ashford. She's a research fellow here in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Welcome to Free Thoughts. Great to be here. So we're talking about ISIS. Where did this thing come from? There's a lot of things underlying the rise of ISIS. And I think when ISIS first burst onto the scene in June 2014, they took the city of Mosul and Iraq. Everyone was really shocked. But the roots of ISIS go back more than a decade further than that. ISIS was itself a splinter group of al-Qaeda. It operated inside Iraq as al-Qaeda in Iraq for a number of years. They had many internal disagreements with sort of al-Qaeda central, with bin Laden disagreeing with the leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq about how they should proceed. The group had many members that were captured and put in prisons during the U.S. occupation, got friendly with lots of former Ba'athist officers that had worked under Saddam Hussein. And they didn't do so well during that period in the mid-2000s. Then the Syrian civil war let them grab some territory, extend the reach into Syria, and eventually they sort of came back into Iraq, splintered from al-Qaeda and declared themselves as this independent entity. So we think about al-Qaeda. I think we have to define al-Qaeda here because so al-Qaeda, as I understand it at least, is a loosely connected group without geographic territory, with different cells throughout that plans attacks. I don't know if it's only against America or if they mostly focus on America. And they're not as doctrinaire on their ideology regarding Islam from what I understand. A doctrinaire compared to ISIS. That is probably true. Or perhaps it might be better to say they're not as extreme and they're kind of willing to put off some of those more extreme goals like achieving a global caliphate until tomorrow. They're much more happy to focus on today's tactical goals of defeating Arab governments that are unfriendly to them that they think are un-Islamic or defeating the U.S. and other Western powers. ISIS is definitely more extreme. And I think particularly there's a really interesting element of apocalypticism underlying a lot of ISIS' philosophy. They think that they have to found an Islamic state today in order to be ready for when the final battles before the apocalypse come. And that's something that you really don't find in thinking of sort of Islam of bin Laden and a lot of those other traditional leaders of al-Qaeda. But there are some other big differences between ISIS and al-Qaeda, I think. And one that really bears pointing out is al-Qaeda was, as you suggested, more of a network with cells operating sort of independently of one another, but they would report back to the central authority whenever possible. They would ask for instructions from the leaders of al-Qaeda. They would carry out attacks in conjunction with their orders from their superiors. So it was very much a hierarchical structure with leaders of different groups around the world sort of bending the knee to bin Laden and to Mullah Omar in Afghanistan. In the context of ISIS, it's not quite the same. What we see is this sort of very geographically focused group inside Iraq and Syria where they're building themselves up to be much more of almost a state or a proto-state. And then they have these affiliates in other countries, but what those basically are is existing terrorist groups that rebranded themselves under the ISIS umbrella. There's not this central structure in the same way. How much responsibility does America bear for the rise of ISIS? That's, I think, an interesting question. Certainly, we bear some of the responsibility for the creation of ISIS. If you go back to when ISIS declared its first Islamic state, it was actually in 2006 during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. That was when the group first tried to seize and hold territory and obviously they failed partly as a result of the American surge of troops into Iraq in the late 2000s. So is that, I'm picturing this as moderately comical because I can see someone going to, and maybe this is why Obama called them the JV team, but I can see someone going to Northern Idaho, which I think there probably are and saying, this is my free state. I'm declaring this as a state of separate from Idaho and we would just sort of say those people don't have the resources to hold it. They're just sort of asserting something and then the army just moves them aside. Is that kind of accurate, do you think? Yeah, that's extremely accurate, particularly if as I say, you look at this sort of first instance where they tried to create a state. They really didn't have the capacity to do it. They didn't hold any territory. They had delusions of grandeur just far above what they were capable of doing. It's kind of a testament to the turmoil that has existed in Iraq and Syria over the last sort of five to seven years that they were actually able to later come back and seize territory. But I wanted to finish addressing Aaron's question about what responsibility the US bears for the rise of ISIS because we really can trace a lot of this back to the US invasion of Iraq. Without the Iraqi civil war, there would have been no need for a major al-Qaeda splinter group in the country. The opening for that group just wouldn't have existed. Without the US invasion of Iraq, we wouldn't have had the sectarianism that came about in the Iraqi government under Maliki, which again drove a lot of people to start supporting the Islamic state as an alternative to the government in Baghdad. And so there are other causes, things like the Arab Spring, things like authoritarianism among Arab leaders. But the US definitely bears some responsibility for the rise of ISIS. And a terminology point we hear, we're calling it ISIS but it also gets called ISIL as well. What's the difference? It's gone through a bunch of iterations of naming during its existence. So variously throughout the period we're talking about it's been the Islamic state, the Islamic state in the Levant that's ISIL, the Islamic state in either Iraq and Syria or Iraq and Al-Sham depending on which language you wanna put it in. And then there's also this word daish that gets thrown around particularly by leaders in the Obama administration which is a much more sort of derogatory way of referring to the group in Arabic. And I think US leaders under the Obama administration thought, well, if we use the more derogatory term for them maybe we're gonna make them feel bad about it. But I think ISIS works as a shorthand. I've also heard regarding our complicit in creating them that we have armed them. You hear this a lot. And most I generally imagine that means that unintentionally American weapons have gotten to their hands but is there what you call that not an accurate claim that America has armed ISIS? Yeah, this is such a ridiculous rumor. It really is. You're right that US weapons absolutely fell into the hands of ISIS. So when ISIS seized Mosul in 2014 the Iraqi army that we armed and trained and equipped at such huge expense during the occupation dropped all their weapons and fled. And ISIS was able to seize those things so much so that during the air campaign against ISIS sometimes people in the Pentagon would refer to it as operation due to that's my Humvee referring to the equipment that they had left behind after the occupation. But there are other reasons why people say that we might have armed or funded ISIS. And it mostly has to do with our alliances with some of the Gulf States, with Saudis, with Turkey, with the United Arab Emirates or Qatar all of which have provided some support to extremist groups inside Syria during the civil war against Bashar al-Assad. Now, none of them directly funded or armed ISIS but what we saw over and over was them giving weapons to groups that would either lose their weapons in fighting or perhaps they'd switch sides and join up with ISIS. And so again, a lot of those are American weapons found their way into the hands of the group. What's their end game? Like what are they hoping to accomplish besides that they've claimed some territory and they want to expand that territory but do they have some grand vision of where this all leads? Well philosophically speaking, ISIS does have a grand vision of it, a globe circling Muslim caliphate that will ensure their passage through the apocalypse. Now I am no theologian so I don't entirely understand the roots of some of this theorizing. But that is their ultimate goal, is to conquer and take a bunch of territory and ISIS has been really adept at sort of building on a variety of messianic prophecies that are found in the Arab world to argue that their military successes mean that they're predestined for success. It helps that a lot of the places named in these prophecies actually are in Syria. Imagine it's like if we had a conflict in the land that's around Israel or Palestine right now, there's a lot of biblical prophecies that you could sort of tack onto that and say, well our victories mean that the end times are coming and ISIS has been able to do that quite effectively. But on a more practical level, shifting down from that kind of very ideological approach, ISIS wanted to seize and hold territory and prove that they could run a fundamentalist Muslim state that would be an example to others elsewhere. And in that for me, I mostly think of the Soviet Union when I think of ISIS in this context. I think of the Soviets thought that their state would be a example that would encourage people in countries around the world, the workers to rise up and overthrow the state and build their own utopias. And I think to a large extent that is what ISIS hoped to do, to build a functioning state that they could then hope would grow up elsewhere. Well, it makes me think of various Christian sects that have not necessarily now, but in history have done similar things. The ones that most come in mind are the Anabaptists who siege the town of Munster in Germany in a desire to create a new Jerusalem and run it according to their opposition to infant baptism. So a stricter version of Christianity or a different one and an apocalyptic desire to bring about, to make a move that brings about the return of Jesus and what they want in religiously. Because Christians have done this stuff too. And when you say that they're running like a fundamental place, you mean the law? You mean that nothing in the Quran can be ignored, every rule, it's like going to Leviticus and saying, okay, now we have to follow every single law on Leviticus and we're gonna set up a territory that does this and we're gonna eventually take over the whole world and doing that. Yeah, and one of the really interesting things about the way that ISIS has governed the territory that they've taken is it is not strategically wise. They have implemented a whole bunch of these very unpopular kind of Quranic punishments for crimes, things like cutting the hands off of thieves, lashes for people who are convicted of adultery. And you see some of that in Saudi Arabia. But in Saudi Arabia, it's hidden and it's not in public view. ISIS actually set it up so that people would have to show up and stone their neighbors for their crimes, these very strict absolutist interpretations of the Quran. And that actually cost them in public support, but they believed that implementing it was correct and so they did so even though it cost them. What does life look like then in this state? So I mean, we hear about the horrific things that they do and we see videos of them and we know about the attacks that they carry out or claim to have carried out throughout the world, but in the day to day, like how much like a state do they operate? Do they provide infrastructure? Do they provide services? Well, they're a pretty good Twitter account so they have Wi-Fi, I imagine. And also I wanna add on to Aaron's question, which is how much of it is people who came because I know they called Muslims to come and how much of the people who were already there or then of course, I'm sure people fled too. Yeah, so ISIS tried to provide a lot of the trappings of a state, especially when they were kind of at their peak in that 2014-2015 period. They really did try, they set up infrastructure, they set up police, they set up schools. One of the commonly bandied around facts actually is that ISIS didn't bother writing their own textbooks, they just downloaded the Saudi textbooks because those were actually extreme enough for them. But so they really tried to prevent, to present this range of social services and keep the people under their rule, I guess, happy and wanting to stay there. The problem is they didn't really have the resources to do it and so they started rationing goods, rationing food, rationing money and a lot of that went to people that were their strongest supporters. So the people who came in from outside, as Trevor asks, the foreign fighters, they got great housing and good food and cell phones and all this stuff. And then a lot of the people who were locals who'd been forced to stay in these cities, oftentimes they were starving, they didn't get very much food, they would suffer from brutality from the enforcers of these very strict laws. And so they really did try to create a state, but being so constrained by the US and coalition attacking them, being constrained by all the fighting around them meant they didn't have the resources to do it. So you'd mentioned that part of their appeal is that they position themselves as fulfilling a set of prophecies that speak to other people within the Muslim world and that part of that was, you know, look, we're having the kinds of victories that the Koran says are the important victories. Does that mean that as they fail, as they get defeated more often or as they cease to have an ongoing stream of victories that their support will dry up? Certainly, we have seen the stream of foreign fighters drop off dramatically. During that, again, 2013 to 2015 period, ISIS was getting a lot of foreign fighters coming into fight for them. And so even though we were killing substantial numbers of fighters in airstrikes during that period, even though on the ground they were losing a lot of personnel, their numbers remained pretty much stable about 30,000 fighters because they kept replenishing them. But over the last year or so, as they have started to suffer more defeats, lose their big cities, we've seen the number of ISIS fighters drop pretty much precipitously. And so they're just not able to recruit in the way that they were before. How common is this level of fundamentalism, a strictness to doctrine to the Koran in the Arab world, in the Islam world? Because it's an important point that I think a lot of, well, Republicans and many of them who are in the White House don't understand. They just think, oh, they're all Arab extremists. They're all the same. They don't understand that al-Qaeda doesn't really like ISIS. ISIS doesn't really like al-Qaeda. And then if you move away from these very strict doctrines, if you make one sin, then you're not good enough for ISIS. So it seems like most of the Arab world should not like them at all because two ISIS, most of the Arab world are part of the problem at the very least. Would that be accurate, do you think? Most of the Arab world doesn't like ISIS. One of the reasons why ISIS is doing so badly is everyone hates ISIS. There is no country in the world that thinks that ISIS is a good idea, and that's actually pretty rare in civil wars more generally. There's always someone willing to prop up an extremist group, and ISIS has as no one. I mean, the Russians, the Iranians, the US, we're all kind of on the same side here, which is very unusual. But if we're gonna talk about sort of public support in Middle Eastern countries, do Arab populations in the Middle East support this kind of fundamentalism? The answer is no, not really. There's always a small proportion of people who support this level of extremism. And I would say ISIS and al-Qaeda probably both fall on the absolute extreme end of the spectrum. ISIS is perhaps more brutal and less strategic in how they pursue their goals, but they both believe broadly similar things. They're both very extreme. But then there's a lot of people in the Muslim world who have a more moderate attraction to political Islam, and that's a much more moderate political philosophy. In some cases it might be extreme, but in other cases it's probably more akin to sort of Christian Democratic parties in Europe over the last couple of centuries. And so you'll find a lot of people in Poles in the Middle East say that they, yes, they believe in aspects of Sharia. That's a common sort of conservative shibboleth about this. But they don't mean that they support ISIS, these populations. What they actually mean is that they support some integration of Muslim values with their governance systems, and that could vary pretty widely. So in the West, in the US, ISIS is the big scary thing right now. And since right after September 11th in those years, before the rise of ISIS, al-Qaeda was the big scary thing. And what was scary was not that they were doing horrific things in the Middle East, which should have been more concerning to more people, but that it was that they're carrying out terrorist attacks against us, that they represent an existential threat to us. Are there differences between the two groups in the way that they plan and execute attacks or the kinds of attacks that they carry out? There is a difference, but perhaps it might be better to compare al-Qaeda historically in planning operations with ISIS and to some extent al-Qaeda today. In part, what we're seeing with attacks in the West, and actually, as on a side, I probably should note by far the vast majority of victims of ISIS in particular, but also of al-Qaeda live in Muslim countries. There are people living in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Tunisia and Libya. They're the people that are mostly dying of this Western attacks are actually pretty rare. But if you look at the way that these groups sort of carry out their attacks in the West, today that's very much the result of all the counter-terrorism work that we have done over the last decade and a half since the September 11th attacks. Back then, al-Qaeda was capable of putting together a very complex plot involving multiple people converging on planes and taking them over and carrying out this huge attack that killed over 3,000 Americans. Today, it's hard for terrorist groups to get hold of explosives. It's harder, though not impossible, for them to get hold of weapons. And so a lot of the attacks that we see are either sort of more lone wolf attacks from people that weren't under a lot of surveillance and they were working pretty much alone, or it's coordinated attacks, but it's coordinated attacks aimed at soft targets like nightclubs or schools using weapons that are relatively easy to get. So it's much harder to stage these big explosive attacks today, and that goes for both ISIS and al-Qaeda. Well, on that point, when one of these attacks takes place and there's a wondering if it was ISIS, which seems to me to be a strange question in terms of anyone could just say, yeah, I'm with ISIS and tweeted out and I'm doing this for ISIS and we would all think that ISIS did that. But it seems that, I know that some people in ISIS think that Muslims who are not in the land who have not come to the Caliphate are problematic, that your duty is to come to the Caliphate. But when ISIS plans an attack, do they do it? Do they say, all right, you're over there in Paris, get a cab, get a bus, drive it into a crowded place, we'll pay you and compensate your family. Is that something like that or is it just some guy does it and then says I did it for ISIS? Well, one of the big differences between ISIS and al-Qaeda, and actually the big disagreement that really led to them schisming eventually, was the fact that al-Qaeda, particularly under bin Laden, liked to keep really tight control of its operations. People had to be vetted and approved before they'd be admitted into the group. Often they would have to go specifically for training before they could be trusted to do this kind of thing. Al-Qaeda held its brand really closely. They were worried about damage to the brand if they perhaps hurt a lot of Muslims or alienated the population. ISIS, in contrast, is basically willing to lend its brand to anybody. And so part of their claiming a lot of these attacks in the West that's just sort of one guy with a knife is them saying, oh, look how broader our reach is, we reach everywhere, we have supporters everywhere, and they're willing to claim these people even if they had no explicit ties. But there's a framework. I think it was David Gartenstein Ross wrote up a framework for how to understand links between terrorist groups and attacks in today's day and age that I think is very helpful here. And he says there's sort of four levels of attacks. In the first place, you have these large planned exercises where the people are trained in a camp in Yemen, sent overseas to carry out a planned mission. In the second place, you have people carrying out an attack and the plan originated with a terrorist group like ISIS, but the planning was mostly carried out, say over social media or email. They were never actually in those countries. In the third place, you've got people who carry out an attack and had been influenced by a terrorist group or had contact with them before, but the group didn't actually plan the attack. And then in the fourth place, you've got these genuine lone wolves, people who just read some stuff and go out and attack someone. And I think that's a really helpful framework because it shows you that there is a range. These groups operate in a lot of different ways and attacks maybe any or all of those subgroups. Why do we seem to see, so these attacks, the kinds of attacks that ISIS is either carrying out or claiming responsibility for saying this happened under our brand are in recent years have been things like knifings and random shootings and driving a truck into a crowd. So these are like very easy to attacks to carry out, don't really require any resources and are almost impossible to prevent. Yet, while we've seen a fair number of them in Europe, we've seen very few in the United States and it seems like if they really wanted to hurt us, they ought to be able to. It would be easy enough for someone to walk a bomb onto the subway or whatever. So why are we seeing more in Europe and fewer in the US and is it harder to attack the US or is that they just simply wanna blow up Europeans more? I don't think anyone wants to blow up Europeans more and from my accent you can tell I'm pretty relieved about that. But again, I think this is really an interesting question because you would expect given that the US is taking the lead in the campaign in Iraq and Syria, I think we've done three quarters of all the airstrikes there, that the US would actually be the primary target. And a big part of this is the difficulty for these groups of recruiting people that actually have access to the US that can come here, that can live here. There are much larger Muslim populations in Europe and particularly much larger populations of unintegrated Muslims. So think of the suburbs of Paris where you have Muslim communities that go back three generations but many of the people still live in poverty and can't fully integrate into the system and that kind of thing helps. It's a breeding ground for radicalism and extremism and so the pool of people to carry out this kind of attack is just much larger in Europe than it is here and I think it's probably worth noting here that nothing that the Trump White House has proposed that the refugee ban, the stopping immigration from various Muslim countries, nothing they've proposed will really change that equation. Well, actually it seems to me that what they've actually proposed and also people like Le Pen in France with saying the refugees or connected ISIS are gonna be terrorists and creating further separation between the Islam world and the Western world is exactly what ISIS would want. They don't want there to be moderate Muslims living in Western world who are influenced to be more peaceful and secular and to deal with modern life. They would like to have there be at the very least before they take over the whole world there be a completely Islam world and a Western world that doesn't pollute their world. Absolutely, I mean to be honest Al Qaeda, ISIS's worst nightmare is somewhere like Dearborn, Michigan where there is a large population of moderate Westernized Muslims who are integrating into society the way immigrants always have done here. What they would much prefer is marginalized Muslims that feel like they're not accepted by Western societies and the rhetoric of people like Marine Le Pen or even of some of President Trump's advisors, people like Steve Bannon really actually probably hurts more than it helps. And the refugees themselves who are leaving it would be wrong to presume they're probably fleeing ISIS. They're fleeing the civil war, the Syrian civil war but I'm sure that a lot of people don't want to live under these regimes where you get stoned in the streets and you get your hands cut off and all this stuff. And so they're running away and then we're calling them the terrorists which seems to be strange. Yeah, one of the very sad things about the discussion about the refugee crisis in Europe and particularly in the Middle East where it's worst is that a lot of this discussion ignores the fact that people really are fleeing from terrible violence and in a lot of cases these sort of totalitarian, very brutal regimes whether it's Bashar al-Assad's torture apparatus in the Syrian state or whether it's somewhere like ISIS. And a lot of the time another thing that you don't hear is that the people who live in the territory controlled by ISIS, many of them are forced to stay there. ISIS had a lot of its population start to flee as the US and coalition groups started to advance on their territory so they started preventing civilians from leaving and today in Mosul the Islamic state is basically using civilians as human shields. So the picture of ISIS then that gets given to, gets presented to Americans by Fox News, by then Donald Trump and his people. After you heard it on Fox News. After you heard it on Fox News. What's, so I mean, yes, we know so that they wildly overestimate the threat of ISIS sneaking refugees in and shooting up American cities but broadly speaking what do they get wrong about ISIS as an organization, ISIS as an ideology? I think they overestimate sort of ISIS's global reach and this was particularly true about a year ago when there was a lot of conversation about ISIS. You know, now it's operating in 21 countries and we've got to do something about it. The fact is that if you'd looked at that number, you know, two weeks before ISIS would have been operating in, you know, seven countries and the groups that got added to ISIS in that timeframe had existed for many years. So Boko Haram in Nigeria, for example, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, these groups apparently weren't a security threat to the US or not a big one prior to joining ISIS but the minute they took the ISIS name, suddenly it was a global threat that we had to push back against. And so I think there's a real tendency to take what these groups say at face value and then extrapolate that into a much bigger threat that actually exists. Now, Trump has said some things about ISIS including in his inauguration speech which he said eradicate or we will destroy ISIS. Aside from whatever he thinks about ISIS which I'm sure changes by the second if he has any coherent beliefs but what do people like Steve Bannon and advisors to Trump think about ISIS? There's two key groups within the administration that really matter on this. Actually, let me say three key groups inside the administration. So there is a small group of fairly standard, classic Republican foreign policy elites. People like General Jim Mattis, people like Mike Pence, the vice president who have fairly conventional Republican views on foreign policy, fairly hawkish but not crazy. But there are two other groups inside the Trump White House that you don't often find in presidential administrations. And one is a group that we might call Jacksonians like the historian Walter Russell Meade proposed. Jacksonianism is a strain of American foreign policy thought that is fairly domestically focused but also believes in military greatness and if anybody attacks you, you crush them. And that's I think the approach that Trump himself and some of his advisors are taking to ISIS. They hurt us, we will go out, we will crush them but we won't stick around to do nation building or anything like that. And then there's this other group surrounding Steve Bannon. And if you look at Bannon's films, he was a filmmaker before he went into politics. His films talk about Islam itself and particularly the phrase radical Islamic terrorism as a global threat on the level of fascism in the 1930s and 40s, on the level of communism during the Cold War. And he genuinely thinks that America is going to be engaged in a generational war to try and defeat radical Islam. And that's a view that I find very disturbing to have so close to the president. And it implies that even after ISIS is defeated in Iraq and Syria, he may go looking for broader opportunities to try and push back against what he sees as a global problem. So what is wrong with that view? Because we do have radical Islam in the form of ISIS and the form of al-Qaeda and the form of other groups that does have either global aspirations or at least global reach in its attacks. We do have a Muslim world that seems to be plenty of countries that are fundamentally against the basic liberal principles that we at least like to think we uphold in the West. So shouldn't we see this as a real conflict? Well, I think first of all, this viewpoint really conflates the extremism of groups like ISIS with that much more moderate political Islamism that you see in countries across the Middle East. And that's not to say that these political parties often affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood or other groups, it's not to say that they're moderate or liberal, it's not to say that I agree with what they propose. I think a lot of what they propose would drag us back to the dark ages. But they don't pose any security threat to the US. They don't want to fight us. They don't want to attack us. They want to be left alone to run their political systems. And if those populations can reach for more democracy, more economic rights, that's great, but they're not engaged in some sort of struggle against the West. And when it comes to the more extreme groups, again, I think this viewpoint really just overstates the level of the threat. We know there are a lot of statistics out there now, some of them from my colleagues at Cato talking about how limited the threat of terrorism really is if you live in a Western country. It's extremely small. And instead, what we do is we go out and we fight what we think is this global threat, something that could really be better dealt with through intelligence and law enforcement here at home. We go out, we engage in military campaigns which cause future problems. And I really do think the 2003 invasion of Iraq is the quintessential example of this. We are here today talking about ISIS because of the invasion of Iraq that was itself designed to prevent a threat to America. What about then a, I guess, softer threat that so these other groups that are not as extreme as ISIS but are politically Islamic, I guess, those views are, the view that Islam should have play a large role in politics is much more popular in the Middle East and among Arab populations than it is in the Western world. And so this notion that, okay, even if they're not going to attack us, right? And even if, like, say the refugees coming in aren't going to all shoot up nightclubs, that their views, even if the more moderate sort are themselves kind of in conflict. And so Islam is growing quickly. Is it the fastest growing religion? And so if we bring that in, then over time the Western world would begin to look more like the Islamic world, even if it doesn't look as bad as the territory ISIS controls. Well, I think people said that about Catholics coming into the US in the early 19th century, right? And I come from Scotland as a Protestant country. We have a long history of political struggle over Catholicism and Protestantism. But when Catholics started immigrating to the predominantly Protestant US, people said, well, they're beholden to Rome, they can't be trusted, they'll be traitors to the US, they will bring in their very authoritarian religious ideas. And so I think the idea that we face some sort of insider threat through immigration is nothing new. But that's predominantly an argument about immigration and about culture. That's not an argument about security threats. And you could, I think, make a very coherent argument that says that there is more threat to liberal values and more concern about keeping religious values out of politics from Christian far-right religious groups in the US than from Muslim immigrants that are coming in today. It seems that part of ISIS would want in some of the supporting groups and similar groups like al-Qaeda would be okay with an attack, another invasion by America to go and fight them where they are because it fits into their narrative. It could be good for recruiting. And it just proves that they're right the whole time, that there's a crusade coming in a war and there will be a point where they fight on some sort of battleground and they win and then Islam will be triumphant. So you've seen them actually goading on President Obama and saying, come get us. On that level, it would be an extremely bad idea to go in there, it seems like, just on that. For many reasons, a bad idea, but it's what they want. They certainly did go the Western powers, but I think ISIS, perhaps distinctly from al-Qaeda, was actually a lot less focused on Western, public opinion and Western governments when they started their campaign inside Iraq than they were with local governments. They really wanted to focus on, say, overthrowing the Saudi state or overthrowing the Jordanian state. And so try to build up these sort of gains in the region. What we have done, and you say, if we go in against ISIS, the fact is we are already engaged in a massive air campaign against ISIS and the number of troops in the region on the ground fighting them is growing by the day at this point. So in the campaign against ISIS, what we are doing is elevating them above the rest of the players in the Syrian Civil War. We're saying that they are worthy of our attention, that we should be fighting them because they are a genuine major threat to the US. And there are other ways to deal with that kind of problem. And I think policymakers, perhaps, didn't adequately consider those ways. What has Trump done so far in the first three months of his presidency? Trump has stepped up the campaign against ISIS. We've seen several thousand more troops deployed to Iraq. We've seen at least a thousand more deployed to Syria, more are reportedly under consideration. And so what Trump has basically done is take the Obama-era campaign against ISIS, which was relatively cautious, relied mostly on local partners on the ground and was actually a fairly sane approach to ISIS. Trump has taken that approach and he's basically put it on steroids. So he wants to bring victory against ISIS much faster. And if he can't find a political solution in the region, in the local conflict that lets him do that, he won't bother with considering arming the Kurds or building up a local moderate group. Instead, he'll just send more US troops to get the job done. And so his approach really appears to be very military focused. The problem with it is, the reason the Obama administration was so cautious and planning for a long-term campaign against ISIS was the political problems that caused ISIS to rise in the first place haven't been resolved. The Syrian civil war is still going. If we clear ISIS out of that area, someone else will just come in and hold that territory and we don't know today who that's gonna be. It seems a pretty frightening prospect about if you have Trump as the Jacksonian, as you mentioned, and that seems accurate to me, like, let's get this done. You know, it's kind of like making a deal. Let's go in all the way and get this done. And you have banning as the clash of civilizations the inevitability of war between the West and Islam. That's a pretty potent combination for placing some amount of odds on another massive military engagement in Syria within the Trump administration. Would you agree? I think so. And perhaps not necessarily in Syria. It could be elsewhere. One idea that is becoming increasingly popular in sort of conservative foreign policy spaces is the idea that after ISIS is defeated, we need to pivot to restraining Iran's, you know, quote unquote malign influence in the Middle East. This is what a 40 year war we're talking about. There was a report out from the Institute for the Study of War, which is sort of a DOD linked think tank. And they advocated a strategy for defeating ISIS that would step up US troop commitments to the fight that would try and defeat them pretty fast, but that then would focus on a region wide effort in Yemen and Syria and elsewhere in pushing back against Iranian influence. And so this may end up becoming just part of the same conflict if those recommendations are followed. So what should we do? I mean, you've kind of tied into it and said, we shouldn't be doing this, we shouldn't be doing this, we shouldn't be doing this. So what should we be doing? Oh, look, I'm out of time. No, it's a very difficult question. And I think the problem with ISIS and with the Obama administration's campaign is they went into this with no good options. The Syrian civil war is a quagmire. Nobody is going to come out of it having won anything. The Assad regime will retain like a small rump section of Syria. The Russians have spent a lot of lives and money and equipment in order to retain that and a small port on the Mediterranean. And we will have defeated ISIS, but we won't have solved any of those political problems that gave rise to it in the first place. What I advocated towards the end of the Obama administration was that they continue with the strategy that they were pursuing, which is limited air support for a local coalition that would go in, that would try and control the territory, but that it would be very slow and that we would try and build the political blocks to hold that territory as we went through the campaign. Parallel to that, though, and I think this is where the Trump administration has just gone completely off the rails, I would advocate that we need to find a political solution to the Syrian civil war because that really is the root of this. We can't fix the ISIS problem or any other extremist groups that rise in that area if we're just leaving a bunch of Syrian territory uncontrolled where they will grow up again. And so the solution for that is the talks in Geneva or now the Russian-led talks in Astana, depending on which way you go, where we try and find some sort of solution that will either create a negotiated settlement in Syria or even consider some kind of soft partition to let different groups control different areas. If you can solve the Syrian civil war, this problem gets a lot easier. Well, what about so Trump, when he was campaigning, offered some concrete proposals of sorts to solving the problems? One was bomb the hell out of them. Turn off the internet, isn't that one of them, too? But two of them were first take their oil and then the other one was his big, beautiful green zones that we would set up and defend. Are those two proposals, is there anything to them? Are they unworkable? Are they flat out insane? Let me start with the first one, the take their oil because that is, if not flat out insane, then close to it. Trump has said this a bunch of times during the campaign, then he even said it at a talk that he was giving at CIA headquarters two days after he was inaugurated or three days after he was inaugurated. And he said, you know, we should go back to Iraq and we'll take their oil. Maybe we'll get another chance to do so. This is massively damaging for the US as it tries to work with the Iraqi government to push back against ISIS. It's technically really difficult. If you want to take Iraq's oil, you basically need to occupy and hold that territory for the time it takes to pump the oil, which is a long time. So no one really knows where he's going with this, but he continues to repeat it. I think I guess it just sounds good and makes sense to him. I am more concerned about the big beautiful green zones idea because this is an idea safe zones or no fly zones that we have seen mentioned a bunch of times and even since inauguration, it keeps coming up. Rex Tillerson made comments about it a couple of times. Trump himself has both said, you know, we will do safe zones and we won't do safe zones. The reason I'm concerned about this is that would transition us from a fairly limited campaign against a terrorist group in a known location to the job of protecting civilians in a multi-sided civil war. That would require not just air support, it would require massive on-the-ground forces. Those probably aren't going to come from local states, so we're talking about, you know, 50,000 US troops easily. It's extremely difficult to protect civilians on the ground as UN experiences and Bosnia and other places have shown, and at the same time, we're not resolving the civil war that actually caused these civilian problems in the first place. So this is just an incredibly bad idea, but keeps coming back, and so I think it's something that really bears watching. So is it possible to then just defeat ISIS? You can defeat this iteration of the group, sure, but I promise you that you are not going to defeat the ideas that underlay them, or the factors that caused people to get radicalized in the first place. You know, the very fact that ISIS itself rose out of al-Qaeda, other splinter groups like Al-Nusra in Syria also came out of al-Qaeda. The al-Qaeda network itself is still there. This is not something that you can defeat. Terrorism is not something that you can send the US military out in an aircraft carrier and destroy. You can kill individual terrorist leaders, but all we have learned from our experiences over the last 15 years tells us that that doesn't resolve the problem either. It just makes the people who are left more violent and a little less organized. You can bomb training camps, and sure, that helps in the short term, or you can rely on intelligence and law enforcement to prevent attacks from happening here at home. And that is almost definitely the better approach. It doesn't involve us in large open-ended military campaigns against an idea which is unwinnable in the first place. It doesn't create any of the backlash effects, so we don't see populations in the Middle East who almost overwhelmingly hate the US as a result of our campaigns in the region. You don't get people being radicalized by, say, drone strikes in their nation, as we see particularly in Yemen. So all of those backlash problems, they go away when you focus on the problem at home instead. And so if you're gonna talk about defeating ISIS or defeating terrorism, defeating radical ideologies, it's much more about playing defense than offense. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more, visit us at www.libertarianism.org.