An American lawyer who previously advised the Palestinian Authority on negotiations with Israel now says that the West cannot defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) and should accept it as an “ugly reality.”
John V. Whitbeck, who previously has written that the 9/11 attacks probably were an “inside job,” wrote his latest thesis Saturday in the Palestinian Authority-based Ma’an News Agency, which noted that it does not necessarily represent the views of the website that is frequently quoted by foreign news sources.
He wrote that the ISIS massacres in France earlier this month “have not changed the priorities of the other states that might be concerned.”
The United States and Britain’s top priority is Syria, where Whitbeck asserts that the United States and Britain are primarily interested in “keeping Russia down, and keeping the Sunni Gulf states happy.”
He also thinks that many Sunni Muslims under the “harsh, austere and often savagely brutal rule” of ISIS actually prefer it to being under the aegis of “what are widely perceived by Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis to be Shiite-dominated or even Iranian-dominated governments.”
As for defeating the ISIS, Whitbeck says that the West has no chance. He wrote that bombing the terrorists is not successful and that sending “boots on the ground would be an avidly sought boon to the Islamic State…since the Sunni states of the region… currently show no interest whatsoever in deploying their own ground forces against fellow Sunnis.”
Here is his advice to President Barack Obama and other Western leaders:
Relax, accept that the Islamic State is an ugly reality that is here to stay (at least for some considerable time).
They should accept that containment is the best that can hoped for and achieved in the near term, and that containment can best be achieved by the Iraqi and Syrian governments and their own military forces.
They should sit back and wait for the Islamic State’s aura of excitement to wear off, for it to become a failed state like so many other regional states in which the West has previously intervened and for the peoples of the region to sort out their own problems in their own way.
He admits that it would be “desirable” for ISIS to disappear but that it cannot be done by force without Sunni Muslim countries sending in soldiers and that it won’t happen so long as the West claims “ownership” of the war.