Making Sense with Sam Harris - #30 — Inside the Crucible

Episode Date: March 6, 2016

Sam Harris briefly revisits the Apple-FBI controversy and then speaks with Michael Weiss about ISIS and the ongoing civil war in Syria.  If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming I spoke to Michael Weiss, the senior editor at The Daily Beast and co-author of a New York Times bestseller about the Islamic State entitled ISIS, Inside the Army of Terror. And we focus primarily on ISIS and the civil war in Syria. And as you'll hear, Michael is just a fount of information on these topics. You might have to listen to this twice to get all the details here. Unfortunately, we had a few audio issues with Skype, so you'll hear a few irregularities

there. But I think you'll agree by the end that listening to Michael talk about ISIS and the Syrian civil war has made you much smarter on these subjects. And you'll come away with a much clearer sense of how complicated U.S. foreign policy and the war on terror now are. And now I give you Michael Weiss. Well, I'm here with Michael Weiss from The Daily Beast. Michael, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me on, Sam. Listen, I know you as a writer and editor for The Beast, but why don't

you tell me and our audience a little bit more about you and how you come to know so much about the Middle East, which is, I'm sure, going to be the bulk of what we talk about. What's your background? And tell us about your book on ISIS and all the rest. So my background is in journalism. I started writing about the Middle East about 10 years ago, I think. Some of it was on the Israel-Palestine conflict. A lot of it then became covering the so-called Arab Spring in 2011. I was working at a London think tank, the Henry Jackson Society, and of all the countries that had been covered, the one that wasn't, which was just then in its infancy of an uprising against the government, was Syria. So it literally one day my boss sort of dropped it into my lap and said, here, you need to sort of assess this and tell us what we need to know.

So it started with a survey of who the opposition on the ground was. We managed to get interviews with activists and leaders of the so-called local coordination committees from every province in the country. There's a misconception that the Syrian revolution started when a dozen kids scrawled on the walls in Deraa, but actually the earliest protests were registered in Damascus itself, in the old city. So, you know, in the very capital, in the heart of Assad's regime. And what struck me is, you know, we had seen in Egypt, to a lesser degree in Tunisia, although we can probably get into some of that, particularly how the media has covered groups like Ennahda. But we saw the, you know, sort of the late failure of radical hopes, teenagers turning out in the streets of Takara Square, protesting a pretty vicious authoritarian

dictatorship. And then, you know, it gets hijacked by religious extremists, or, you know, as they were depicted in the West, so called moderate Islamists. So now, Michael, you're talking about what happened during the so called Arab Spring? Right, right. And in Syria, what I was struck by was, you know, the people who were leading this uprising, I mean, they really were small d Democrats. And, you know, the people who were leading this uprising, I mean, they really were small d Democrats. And, you know, they had various views on which kind of country they wanted to model a future post Assad Syria on some said, like Turkey, others said, like Tunisia, some many said, like the United States or like France. But what we now, one of the things that bothers me, and one of the

reasons I wrote this book on ISIS was to try and sort of turn back the clock to the very beginning. Because for a lot of people, history began when ISIS stormed into Mosul in 2014. And essentially this was always a jihadist insurgency. It was always being led by al-Qaeda and other sort of elements. And one of the things that I'm most interested in in my work is the relationship between terror and state actors. And this is something that is just characteristic of the region. And it even goes beyond the region now. I mean, I've done a lot of work on Russia's facilitation of jihadism beginning in Chechnya, but also, you know, leading up to the Syria conflict. I mean, they've been sending jihadists into Syria

because better they blow stuff up in Aleppo or in Raqqa than they do in Dagestan. And all of this gets elided in the way that the West tends to cover these things. But anyway, Assad's relationship with the very element that now claims to be trying to overthrow his regime and establish an Islamic state, I find fascinating. So one of the leitmotifs of our book,

and I co-wrote it with a Syrian national called Hassan Hassan, is to kind of, you know, dredge up some of this occluded history of the way not only the Syrian government, but also the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein was, you know, if not necessarily a catalyst, then at least an underwriter of much of the unpleasantness we're seeing now. People forget, and you know, if not necessarily a catalyst, then at least an underwriter of much of the unpleasantness we're seeing now. People forget, and you know, it is true the Bush administration misrepresented and lied about a lot of the intelligence in terms of Saddam's relationship with jihadi groups such as Al-Qaeda, but it is also the case. After the invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf War, he inaugurated something called the Islamic Faith Campaign,

which was an attempt to marry the Ba'ath ideology with Salafism. And the reason for this was he saw the greatest threat to his regime, well, there were two. One was from Iran next door, with whom he had waged a brutal eight-year war. And the other was internally from Islamist elements, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood. So one of the unintended consequences of the faith campaign was people abandoned the Ba'athism and took up the Salafism. And a lot of these elements have wound up, or they did wind up in the so-called anti-American and anti-Iraqi insurgency from 2003 onwards. But now, funnily enough, a lot of these former regime elements are in the upper echelons of ISIS. You're looking at lieutenant colonels in the Iraqi army or agents of the Muqabirat intelligence services.

And some of the leading operatives, including those who constructed the ISIS franchise in northern Syria in 2013, they behaved very much like state-trained almost stasi-like intelligence operatives so this is something i think you know that needs to get addressed and this is not by any means and i'm sure you want to talk about this not to uh to undermine or dismiss the element and the currents of islamic fundamentalism that run throughout isis it's very much a prominent uh factor uh particularly amongst the so-called foreign fighters and the Mujahideen coming around from around the world who think they're going to usher in the apocalypse. My thesis is at the very high level, you know, you were being asked to presume that people who as of 2002 or even early 2003 were drinking wine, wearing military fatigues with epaulets they had never earned,

keeping their 12 mistresses and their eight mansions scattered throughout the state of Iraq, that as of today, now that they've got the long black beard and the dishdasha, they really want to usher in the end times? Or is there perhaps a political project that's underlying much of what ISIS is doing? And I think that that's something that needs greater discussion. And it's indeed, I mean, one of the sort of mainstays of my work is to try and figure out, you know, where the messianic or eschatological element ends and where the political, literal state building begins for them. Well, let's talk about that because it's just a truly complicated situation. Well, let's talk about that because this is just a truly complicated situation. It's kind of a challenge to figure out how to talk about it and which thread to pull first.

Just a few things I want to respond to, and then maybe we can figure out how to circle in on the details. But the first thing is that what you said about the Russians exporting their jihadists, I had frankly never heard before, so that's very interesting. And that's kind of analogous to what the Saudis have done on some basic level. And just to this point about secular people cynically using religion and religious ideology to manipulate, recruit, and otherwise advance their political aims, there are obviously instances of that throughout history and people often point to that as a sign that religion isn't really as important a variable as it seems. But what I always say at that point in the conversation is that it only works a cynical, actually secular

leader pretending to be devout only manages to whip up a mob or a political movement under the aegis of those religious ideas because the people on the ground really believe these things. I mean it's only a successful lever to pull because it's attached to something. So it doesn't embarrass my overriding concern about the potency of religious ideology to have it pointed out that some significant subset of any ostensibly religious regime is actually staffed by cynical Machiavellian mustache-twirling secularists who are just using the ambient level of religious sectarianism or religious faith for their political aims.

Feel free to respond to that, but as you do, let's go into just what you think the psychological and political reality is in ISIS. If they have these ex-Bathists who, in fact, aren't religious, in fact, may even be apostates, what has happened? Have they converted? Does al-Baghdadi just not care who these people are? I mean, al-Baghdadi is sort of an outlier. He has a Ph.D. in Islamic studies. Actually, it's called Saddam Hussein University, believe it or not. And the only way he could enroll in that program is if his family had Ba'ath Party connections. So, I mean, this is the thing. A lot of people join the Ba'ath Party

not because they were true card-carrying ideologues. And, you know, one of the stupider things the United States did after, of course, invading Iraq was was the debathification of the first three tiers of the party. So a lot of people, you know, engineers, doctors, professionals who had joined up just so they could get ahead in life and make a living, were rendered unemployed. With Baghdadi, he is an absolute true believer, by all accounts. He actually does think that, you know, the armies of Rome will clash with the armies of Islam. In Dabic, which is a town in Aleppo province, you know, the armies of Rome will clash with the armies of Islam. In Dabic, which is a town in Aleppo province, you know, this is the great sort of Chileastic conspiracy that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had put forward. And with Zarqawi, it was always about bleeding into Syria.

So that goal has been achieved. But, you know, I absolutely agree with you. Look, you know, life is complicated and messy, and even people who, you know, purport to espouse a totalist or pure ideology often have contradictory or alternative, you know, modes of thinking or systems of belief creeping in. So again, I don't know. I mean, are these bathists, are they quote-unquote secular or apostate? Not necessarily. They can have been radicalized or salified under the faith campaign or even just, you know, by the sheer brutality and chaos of living in Iraq, both pre and post Saddam. But I think it is one of the more fascinating issues of looking at ISIS. And look, I mean, I'm an atheist like you, and our dearly departed friend Christopher Hitchens

used to say that religion was just another form of totalitarianism. I think that was the kind of driving force behind his critique of it is that he had in some ways gone through it himself as a believing Marxist and Trotskyist. Raymond Aron called Marxism a Christian heresy. There are a lot of similarities, you know. And this is why, by the way, you find people who come from, you know, secular or temporal ideologies essentially swapping one, you know, totalitarianism for another

and taking up, you know, some extreme form of, or not so extreme form of religion. In fact, one of the leading evangelical Christians in the United States discovered Jesus in a Moscow hotel room when he found a stray Bible. Marvin Olasky is his name. He's actually Jewish, a Jewish Marxist who became an evangelical Christian. So things like that happen all the time. And this is not an attempt to embarrass, I mean, you know, I am a great admirer of your work and a co-thinker.

So it's not an attempt to embarrass it. It is an attempt, though, to try and fully understand. And again, you know, I want to show that ISIS does not exist in this vacuum of fundamentalism. It has state sponsors, or I should say not sponsors, but state accomplices. I mean, to this day, it's running all of Syria's natural gas industry and selling that natural gas back to Damascus, which claims to be at war with it. It runs most of the oil wells in eastern Syria and is selling oil not only to free Syrian army groups, but also back to Damascus and to smugglers in Turkey and Iraqi Kurds. I mentioned Russia, and the reason I do is people think Vladimir Putin is this great counter-terrorist, right?

I mean, he hates Islamic radicalism, and he went to war in Syria to destroy ISIS. Well, no. I mean, if you look at the metrics, 10%, according to the Pentagon spokesman Steve Warren, 10% of Russia's sorties have been going after ISIS. Now, the rest have been going after groups that range from nationalists to Islamists to jihadists, including the al-Qaeda franchise. But, you know, with Putin, the goal, I think, is quite simple. It's exactly what Assad and the Iranians' goal has been from the beginning, deprive the West of any attractive, credible alternative to the dictatorship in Damascus and make it a stark choice of the

Takfiris on the one hand or, you know, this secular war criminal on the other. And that's not really a choice because no one in the West, as much as they may loathe Bashar al-Assad and hold him responsible as well, they should for the destruction of the country. They don't think he's going to be flying planes into buildings in New York or Washington, D.C. ISIS would if it could. And one of the real challenges, Sam, is ISIS has broken apart or cleaved away from al-Qaeda. And I keep saying that, you know, we're now at a more dangerous point than we were right after 9-11 because the way that al-Qaeda is going to compete with ISIS is through blood and fire and terror. And that's going to play out on the streets of Europe. It already has. It's playing out in Turkey,

which has suffered more ISIS attacks than any other country. So that's a NATO member. And eventually it's going to come here. I mean, arguably it did with San Bernardino, although that was a case of people being inspired by rather than being trained up and dispatched as operatives. But yeah, you know, this is, we have underestimated them. At the same time, we have, have I think sensationalized them and treated them as as this you know apocalyptic bogeyman when in fact there is a pragmatic component to what they're doing I mean the way that they've managed to take terrain it's not because they're great fighters you know I did

this this long interview with a defector from one of their security services who told me they fight like lemmings going off a cliff. I mean, it's just sort of a human wave of cannon fodder, particularly when they go up against the Kurds in Syria. What they're good at is tradecraft, and also they understand the sociology of the region. So where they have imposed their caliphate, what I call the briar patch of ISIS, is the Euphrates River Valley, mostly eastern Syria, western Iraq, the villages and hamlets and townships along that sort of continuum. And these are areas that are

occupied by Arab tribes, which are essentially confederations of families that span across borders. Remember, ISIS is dedicated to the dismantling of Sykes-Picot, the artificial states that have cobbled up after World War I. Well, to some extent, they have a lot to work with there because the families and the constituents of ISIS are spread, fanned across the region. I mean, you've got tribes in Iraq that are also in Saudi Arabia or in Kuwait or the UAE and so on.

And the tribes have lived for hundreds of years through a very simple human political calculation. Whoever is the master, you cut a deal with. And that master could be Bashar al-Assad or before him Hafez al-Assad, or it could be Saddam Hussein, it could be the American occupying force of Iraq, or it could be ISIS. And it was just about how do we get our daily bread and how do we subsist? You know, the tribes have gray and black market economies. They need to make money. They need to be able to smuggle their goods and wares and so on and so forth.

And the way that ISIS's predecessor, al-Qaeda, was booted out of most of Iraq, it was so overweening and so brutal that the tribes, they didn't like the Americans, but they at least saw the Americans as a credible non-sectarian intercessory force that they could partner with to expel the Takfiris. Well, today there is no credible non-sectarian force because in Iraq you have either ISIS or, let's be honest, Shia militia groups, which in many cases are as bad as ISIS and are driven by the same kind of, you know, apocalyptic zeal. It's only from a different sect of Islam, backed by Iran.

Well, if you're a Sunni tribesman, you see these guys as pogromists. They're going to come in and they might expel ISIS, but then they're going to burn your house down and they're going to take your son as a so-called collaborator and throw him into a dungeon and take a power drill and stick it into his head. So then here you're, without spelling it out, again illustrating the mad work done by religion, whether it's religious belief or sectarian tribalism. When you ask why is ISIS so successful in gaining Sunni support and spreading,

the answers are at least twofold, and both are religious. Either the Sunnis support their view of takfirism, which you should probably define in a moment so as to not leave our listeners behind. But two, whether or not they support this extremist religious ideology, they are terrified of the Shia who, as you say, will show up based on their own religious tribalism and mistreat them horribly. And again, we just have, you know, whether or not any particular people in power are in fact religious maniacs who believe the prophecies that they're advertising, we have religion carving up the people's lives on the ground. So before you jump into further thoughts

here, just define takfirism, and then let's start with that. Just define takfirism for the moment. So takfirism is the ideology of excommunication. If I practice takfir, I claim that even fellow Sunni Muslims are apostates, and that's essentially a death sentence. If I call you an apostate, it means you're marked for death and I should kill you. ISIS is a Takfiri organization in the sense that if you are deemed insufficiently pious as a Sunni, you'll be exterminated. Now, that's the sort of marketing and how they present themselves. But again, there are exceptions. They don't necessarily go around and make sure that all Sunnis share the exact same religious construct as they, although it is true, you know, they will patrol the streets. They have a security unit called the Hizb, which is essentially like the Saudi morality police. And, you know, if you're not in mosque on Friday, you'll be punished

and thrown into jail. But, you know, Takfirism is a controversial conceit, even within the annals of Salafi jihadism. And in fact, you know, Osama bin Laden was always at odds with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS, when it was known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, over this issue. Because Zarqawi was a genocidal maniac, pathological. I mean, absolutely. I mean, there's no, I don't think anyone would really try to make it controversial that he was a true believer in all of this stuff. This is the guy who patented the dressing of Western or non-Western hostages in the orange Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib style jumpsuits. And then the beheading on video as he's reading these imprecations against the West and drawing moral equivalence between what the crusader infidel Zionist conspiracy was doing in Iraq and now what he is doing in retaliation. But what I find fascinating is, you know, bin Laden, one of the issues he had with Al-Qaeda, with his own franchise essentially, was when they were going around blowing up Sunni mosques and, I'm sorry, Shia

mosques and Husaniyas. Zarqawi's goal was very Machiavellian. You know, Sunnis are a minority in Iraq. They're the majority of Muslims worldwide, but in Iraq they're the minority. And the only way you're going to get Sunnis to reclaim the throne, so to speak, in Baghdad, is if Sunnis from around the world pour into Iraq and turn it into this sign of sure of all out total sectarian war and essentially exterminate the Shia. So his project was genocidal, kill all the Shia. And in doing so, you will, you will prompt or foment their radicalization. As you say, I mean, drive them into these sort of, you know, paroxysms of religious fervor. They'll be run or overseen by Iran, which is the mothership

of Shia Islam in the region, much the way that Saudi Arabia is for Sunni Islam. And these guys will go around and do what we saw them do for almost a decade in Iraq, form death squads, you know, the Badr Corps, a group called the League of the Righteous, the Hezbollah brigades, not to be confused with Lebanese Hezbollah, they were going around attacking American soldiers, but also attacking Sunni civilians, rounding them up and saying, what's your name? It's Omar, so you must be a Sunni. Show me your ID card, right? Okay, so we're going to take you under the cover, by the way, of being an Iraqi state institution. So if you were sick, the guy who drove the ambulance and who purported to take you to hospital would actually be a Shia militiaman in disguise, take you to some dungeon and torture you and probably

kill you. So Zarqawi wanted this to happen. He wanted the Shia to become, you know, religiously extremist and radicalized so that they would then attack the Sunnis and the Sunnis would be driven further into the fold of Al-Qaeda and then precipitate, of course, this what I call the international or global casting call for Mujahideen. So Iraq would become, in a sense, another Soviet-Afghan war. People from around the world, from the Gulf, from Indonesia, from, you know, Turkey would pour in and join the ranks of al-Qaeda and eventually al-Qaeda would subsume everyone and everything else, including other rival Sunni organizations. So remember, the insurgency in Iraq, you had groups that were Islamist. You also had groups that were nationalist, that just wanted the

restoration of the Ba'ath Party or wanted Sunnis to be back on top. So it was very complicated. But by, you know, look, we now know and we've seen ISIS became top dog because it had the most brutal methods. It became the wealthiest organization. I mean, people forget that there's a lot of nonsense in the ether about who's funding ISIS. Well, ISIS is funding ISIS. By 2006, because they were controlling so much of the oil and illicit arms and contraband smuggling, you know, networks in Iraq, they had actually become wealthier than al-Qaeda to the point where bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had asked them for a loan. So the subsidiary was meant to be financing the patron.

And this is how they get on. And again, the complicating factors here. ISIS, we have seen, takes anvils and jackhammers to priceless artifacts and archaeological wonders, world heritage sites, as defined by UNESCO. They also, though, what they don't smash up, they steal and they sell on the black market. Now, they justify this. And again, you know, it could be they absolutely believe in this sort of codification system for artifacts, or it could be, well, look, what's too large to smuggle out of the country has to be destroyed, and what's small enough to struggle, to smuggle rather, we can then sell and remunerate ourselves. But they justified it as follows. If it's idolatrous art,

paganist, pre-Islamic gods being worshipped, such as the Temple of Baal, that all has to go. If it's Babylonian or Sumerian coins, little trinkets that we dig out of the sand, well, we can sell that. They have a whole department. Actually, Abu Saif, the guy that was killed in the U.S. Special Forces raid in eastern Syria last spring, he was in charge of the antiquities smuggling for ISIS. And, you know, they do this like, I mean, it's almost like a Talmudic enterprise of defining what can stay, what can go, and how you have to handle it, and how you have to ask permission for stealing, you know, the cultural patrimony of Syria and Iraq. It's very sophisticated. I mean, and, you know, they, their pretensions of statehood are not really to be underestimated. We like to pretend like, no, they're just a guerrilla insurgency. They, you know, they really think, and again, whether it's motivated by religion purely or religion plus a sense of political restoration or Sunni revanchism, they believe that they are building a state apparatus

and the caliphate is a legitimate international project. There's no self-deception about that. So it's been widely reported of late that ISIS has lost a significant amount of its territory and is showing signs of buckling under the pressure being applied to it. What do you make of those reports? Are they true? Is that wishful thinking? It's true, but only up to a point. So IHS, which is a British defense firm, reckons that ISIS has lost 14 percent of its territory across Syria and Iraq in the last 15 months. Fourteen percent of territory is not that much, but it is significant in the sense that they have been pushed out of large quadrants of northern Syria by the Kurds.

They have lost some significant terrain, rocks such as Ramadi, which is a provincial capital of Anbar province that they had claimed last May. But what this does not account for is where else they have taken territory. So, for instance, ISIS has what's known as wilayats, which is the Arabic word for province. These are essentially affiliate organizations that predate ISIS' allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the organization. So Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist outfit in West Africa, has pledged allegiance to ISIS. With the stroke of a pen, one could argue, ISIS gained 20,000 square miles of territory in West

Africa with that pledge of allegiance. Now, does that mean that they have absolute control or, you know, the kind of terrain governance capability that they do in Syria and Iraq? No. But it does mean that they have people who into Syria and Iraq, and also, depending on who you ask, a fallback base in the event that Mosul or Raqqa should fall. And they're doing this since Sinai, the outfit that took down the Metrojet airliner, a Russian commercial plane killing over 200 people, that will lie at Sinai is essentially a colonial outpost, if you like, of ISIS. So that aspect of their international project really can't be discounted. By the way, their presence in Libya puts them about less than 500 miles away from the coast of Sicily. So you remember, I mean, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi says, if we're lucky, inshallah, we'll conquer Rome.

But they're not going to conquer Rome. And I don't think even the top ISIS guys believe that. But they can certainly come close enough to Europe. And as we know, and as we've seen in Paris and elsewhere, they're already in Europe with their sleeper cells and their sort of covert operatives, the invisible armies, as I like to call them. And this is the thing, and Sam, here is where absolutely religion plays a paramount role and what worries me the most. ISIS, if you're Baghdadi or if you're in his Shura council, you go to bed at night in Raqqa or Mosul or wherever you're hiding, and you know that you might wake up tomorrow and some guy you've never heard of

who could have been living in his mother's basement in Albuquerque might take an AK-47 and shoot up a school and do it in the name of your organization. You know, the remote radicalization project, the ISIS-inspired attack, that I think is going to be their stock and trade for acts of terrorism abroad. That, I think, is going to be their stock and trade for acts of terrorism abroad. Because, you know, people look to an organization that seems to be successful. It doesn't matter how ultra, in fact, the ultraviolence works in its favor for any kind of, you know, loser, lunatic element living in any part of the world, really. And, you know, they're state building. The reason that this has to be successful for them is because it has to inspire people to join their ranks. If they're seen to be on the decline or on the back foot, they're not going to inspire as many operatives.

So look, they've taken a battering. I know this is a very complicated answer to a pretty simple question, but welcome to the Middle East. They've taken a battering, but they've shown a remarkable degree of resilience. And I mean, as I'm talking to you, I just finished an epilogue to the second edition of our book where we've interviewed people living in Deir ez-Zor and again, the Euphrates River Valley, which is their strategic heartland. And people there say, look, you know, I don't like ISIS, but I have no alternative. In fact, because of U.S. airstrikes and the coalition bombardment, the way I made a living has now been rendered obsolete. So I am sending my youngest son to

join ISIS because at least he'll get a salary. ISIS pays like $400 a month to its fighters. And not only do they pay the fighter a salary, but they pay subsidies for the family members of that fighter. So if I were to join ISIS, I'd get $400 a month. My wife would get $200. And my 10-month-old daughter, I'd get money to pay for her baby food. So again, this is their hearts and minds approach. It's very sophisticated and it's been very successful. And they've lost money in the sense that the oil infrastructure has been pretty depleted, although, and again another Western misconception, they don't make most of their money from oil

sales. I don't know where this myth came from, but it's a dangerous one. They actually make most of their money through running a petty bureaucracy of taxation and surcharging. The reason they want territory, well, one of the reasons they want it is with territory comes people. And with people comes the ability to charge if they're Muslim zakat, if they're non-Muslim jaziya, which is an Islamic tax. And not only that, if you're caught smoking cigarettes, ISIS will throw you in a cage for three days, but they'll also charge you money,

cigarettes. ISIS will throw you in a cage for three days, but they'll also charge you money, charge you $1,000. You have to pay a fine. If you're seen to be a member of a rival organization or any kind of dissident or a resistance fighter to ISIS, if you flee a territory that they control, they'll take your house. It's jihadist eminent domain. They'll take your house, they'll take your property, all of your assets. If you run a business, they'll take your business and all of its inventory. So they run a mafia-style state in addition to a terroristic one. Right, right. Well, you made some interesting points there. One is that you bring up the topic of affiliate groups like Boko Haram suddenly magnifying the influence of ISIS. And as you spelled out, there's really no clear line between an affiliate group and what we tend to call lone wolf attacks, people who are just inspired

by the ideology of ISIS and join this global jihadist insurgency really entirely on their own devices, which anyone with a gun or an internet connection can now do. And I agree with you, that's my larger concern. Obviously, having people who are extremely well-trained and battle-hardened emigrate to the West and try to get martyred while killing as many people as possible, that is kind of the worst-case scenario. But it's good enough to sow terror just by being someone who gets radicalized in his mother's house and goes to a school and kills 20 kids. You can just imagine how few instances of that would be sufficient to accomplish a crazy overreaction and paralysis in any western country. So given that, as you just pointed out, the compelling narrative of ISIS

that will attract lone wolves and affiliate groups in perpetuity is anchored to their perceived success as a state, as a caliphate, well then why not just go in and destroy them to the last man in a month, which presumably is within the capacity of the United States or some coalition of Western powers to do. Now, I'm sure part of your answer will be an acknowledgement of how horrific the collateral damage would likely be in that case. But let's talk about what it would take to defeat ISIS in the most humiliating and decisive way. And why aren't we doing that? So there's two things I want to discuss to answer your question. First, the state building, nothing succeeds like success. That's a main element for sure. But there's another element

that I didn't address. The reason that ISIS has been so persuasive in its narrative, what is its narrative? I should define that first. During Ramadan, in his debut sermon in July of 2014, at the Al-Zanghi Mosque in Mosul, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gets up and he delivers this sermon. And he says, you know, we are facing a global conspiracy led by the United States and Russia, backed by Iran and the Rafida, which is the bigoted term that jihadis use to describe Shia, literally means rejectionist, and that this conspiracy is at war with Sunni Islam. And we, the Islamic State, are the only safeguards, the only defenders and guarantors of the Sunni Umar.

Now, that you might say, well, that's just par for the course for, you know, crazy messianic terrorist group. Everything's a conspiracy and everyone's part of it except them. The problem is, Sam, you know, in the last decade, if you're Sunni living in the region or just, you know, you're in a souk in Cairo or you're at some bazaar in Antakya, southern Turkey, what have you witnessed? The Uazaar in Antakya, southern Turkey. What have you witnessed? The U.S. goes into Iraq, topples the minority regime of Saddam Hussein, dispossesses, disinherits Sunnis from what had been a very pretty privileged and elite station, ruling one of the major capitals of the region for 30-plus years. Then revolution kicks off in Syria. Syria is a Sunni majority country, so between 60, 70 percent of the country is Sunni.

People are being barrel bombed. They're having Scud missiles dropped on their heads. They're having sarin gas deployed against them. They're having chlorine bombs deployed against them. Their women and sons are being gang raped in prisons, their whole families are being burnt alive. This is the thing. ISIS traffics and moral equivalence, they say whatever we do, we can point to other enemies of ours who do just as much, and if not worse.

There's actually truth in that. The Assad regime and its militias, many of them built by Iran, there's a consortium of them called the National Defense Force. They lock whole Sunni families in their house, and they set the house on fire and let the family cook inside. ISIS points to all this and says, well, how come nobody has come to the rescue of Sunnis? All you stupid democratic or secular pro-Western, you know, Uncle Toms, basically. You look at NATO and you look at Washington and you beg them for assistance and they don't come to your aid. And for a while, Sunnis are like, well, you know, it's because of Israel. You know, Assad, as bad as he is,

he's kept the Golan Heights quiet for 40 years so the U.S. won't intervene because of Israel. Then it became, well, no, it's because Obama wants to make this nuclear deal with Iran and he doesn't want to rock the boat. Now it's creeped up right to the point of the ISIS conspiracy, which is, no, actually there is a conspiracy against the Sunnis. The United States prefers the Shia. It wants to be in bed with Iran, and it wants the Shia led by the Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran and backed by the militias in Iraq and helped by Lebanese Hezbollah and helped now by Syrian militias that are being built as we speak, these guys to be the janissaries of a new regional order. And the people who are going to pay the price are the Sunnis. But we outnumber

everybody else, so we should pour into the ranks of ISIS. Or, if you don't like ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al-Qaeda franchise in Syria. And we have to defend ourselves. It's become a very, very compelling narrative. Now, in slightly churlish moments, I joke, it's hard to tell where ISIS conspiracy theory ends and U.S. foreign policy begins. Because if you listen to what President Obama has said, he gave three very evocative interviews, David Remnick of The New Yorker, Tom Friedman of The New York Times, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. In each of the interviews, he was basically asked, well, don't you think that Shia jihadism, you know, along the lines of what Hezbollah has got up to or the Quds Force has got up

to, isn't that just as reckless and dangerous as the Sunni variety? And he kind of fudged the answer and he made it seem like what Iran does, as awful as it might be, car bombings and so on, there's a rationale to it. They're less reckless, they're more self-interested. Whereas with the Sunnis, well, these are the guys who brought us 9-11 and the Taliban and they they're all barbaric crazies, and we really can't negotiate or parlay with them in any way. Sunnis see that as a legitimation of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's worldview. And I keep insisting, you know, the State Department, the U.S. government, all Western governments are putting a lot of money into the counter-narrative or essentially anti-ISIS propaganda. And in private moments, you talk to these diplomats in charge of the programs, and they tell you we're failing. to the counter-narrative or essentially anti-ISIS propaganda. And in private moments, you talk to these diplomats in charge of the programs,

and they tell you we're failing. And we're failing because we exhibit ISIS atrocities, but they exhibit their atrocities. And we don't understand. Why are people being driven into the arms of a group that's going to burn a man alive in a cage or blow up a car filled with guys with an RPG or drown a collection of innocents in a cage in a giant pool? And the answer is, you focus on the snuff component of those videos,

but you don't focus on the other 15 or 20 minutes. So let's take Muaz al-Qasasba, the burning of the Jordanian pilot. This was the video that shocked the world, in many respects even worse than the beheading of James Foley and Stephen Sotloff and the other American hostages. Who burns a man alive in a cage? Well, that's a 20-minute video. The last five minutes of it is the sort of violent pornography. The first 15 minutes of it is what?

what? Because Sazba sat at a table wearing the orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuit, essentially being interrogated, although it's couched as an interview. And he's giving up all the operational tradecraft, all the operational details of what Jordan and the other Arab countries of the region were doing against ISIS. So he was giving the number of sorties that the Jordanian Air Force was flying, the kinds of fighter jets they were flying, the names of other pilots he flew with, and the attack formations and so on. ISIS used that and counterposed that with images of dead Muslim babies and women and children being pulled from the rubble as they claim victims of these Arab bombardment attacks. To ISIS, there is no such thing as an Islamic or Muslim country in the contemporary Middle East. These are the so-called near enemies. These are apostate regimes led by defunct and corrupt and venal dictatorships, monarchies, Hashemite,

Wahhabist, whatever. But just to clarify here, this is a distinct complaint and allegation of conspiracy from the Shia-Sunni sectarian civil war. Many of these regimes are Sunni that they're complaining about being attacked by. And that's one of the ironies of hearing the ISIS narrative sort of taken up by Sunnis. Sunnis have been, you know, the dominant sect, just by sheer force of numbers. I mean, demography is destiny, right? But Sunnis are now behaving and acting and sounding like an imperiled minority, like the Shia had done for decades, if not centuries, because they are everywhere being besieged and embattled, and they feel like they're being taken over by them.

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