This is a strategy that, in military terms, is fraught with risk, at the same time as being enormously confusing politically. Do we look sideways at Iran’s nuclear program for the sake of a successful campaign against Islamic State? Do we continue ignoring Qatari and Turkish backing for Hamas for the same reason?
And so I return to my original question: Who are we at war with in the Middle East? Islamic State is a breathtakingly brutal case of where Islamism can lead, but it is far from being the only Islamist force in the Middle East that is willing to kill Americans and other westerners. Assuming we are able to defeat Islamic State, we will still have to deal with a spectrum of adversaries that includes al Qaeda offshoots, the Muslim Brotherhood, and most of all the Iranian regime.
We need to be thinking now about how to approach these entities and states in the wake of an Islamic State defeat, much as British and American planners thought about postwar relations with the Soviet Union in the closing stages of World War II.
Doing so efficiently means not closing our eyes and ears to unpalatable truths. Most urgently, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that Iran won’t take advantage of the current situation or that its nuclear program is not a comparable threat to that posed by Islamic State.