After the Paris attacks, people in places like Washington and London are
understandably nervous, games are being cancelled, extra police are being
hired, political figures are striving to outdo each other in proposals to “smash”
ISIS militarily (at a cost of how many billions more dollars?), and there are
serious debates about how much to trust our Muslim neighbors. All of it exactly what ISIS wants, and what
feeds and supports its recruiting drives.
Come on folks, let’s get real. ISIS has perhaps at most 100,000 mostly
poorly-trained and poorly-equipped fighters with a tenuous grip on a few of the
more populated places in a wasteland desert in Iraq and Syria and a few small
outposts in places like Yemen. It has no industrial base, no advanced weapons,
no aircraft or even anti-aircraft guns, a few tanks it captured but no spare
parts for them. It is led by a few charismatic sociopaths who are wonderfully
effective at selling the fantasy ideology, but are unlikely to be world-class military
strategists. It wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell against a real
Western army on the ground in a straight-up army to army faceoff. But of course
it is smart enough never to get into such a faceoff (as we discovered in a
decade of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan).
What it does have is an enticing vision and narrative –
enticing at least to frustrated and disillusioned out-of-work young Sunni Muslim
men – and a wonderfully adept propaganda machine on social media to recruit new
members around the world. It is of course these locally recruited fighters that
are of real concern to Europe and the US.
The Boston marathon bombers were locals, apparently radicalized over the
web. Most of the Paris attackers identified thus far appear to be French or
Belgium citizens, again probably radicalized over the web and through social
media. If there are more attacks in places like the US, they will probably be
launched by local citizens who have been recruited and radicalized, and perhaps
even largely trained and organized and directed, over the web and/or through
social media.
Even if the very worst imaginable scenario – a nuclear weapon
smuggled into a major city and detonated – were to happen, it couldn’t defeat the
US or any major European power. This is not like facing a fully armed Nazi
German or Soviet Russia with a massive army and an industrial base to
support it.
What can defeat us, though, is succumbing to the propaganda and
failing to mount an effective propaganda counterattack against ISIS. We will
begin winning when our own propaganda efforts begin seeding fear and distrust and
disillusionment among ISIS followers, rather than the other way around. So far Western
governments, including our own, seem not to have understood that. We are so wonderfully adept at selling people things they don't need through advertising, and packaging flawed political candidates into election-winning images that I can't believe we can't do this job better.
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