Understanding the roots of terrorism

Evil doesn’t come from some otherworldly portal spewing tentacles. Evil is a human behavior, committed by people against people.

When we see Christians being executed in Libya or people being burned alive in al-Baghdadi, Iraq, we naturally want to eradicate the (all too human) culprits. “What’s the point trying to understand their point of view, their motives, or to try reasoning with them? They’re irredeemable, just get rid of them.”

{mosads}And then when we hear someone like Marie Harf – deputy spokesperson for the State Department – talk about how “we cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups,” it strikes us as ludicrous.

But amid all this violence – rather, the related and almost identical violence in Iraq’s civil war – is a perfect illustration of why we should try to understand why people commit acts of cruelty and injustice.

Iraq’s Anbar province is dominated by Sunni Arab tribes. These tribes were dismayed when the US deposed Iraqi President (and fellow Sunni) Saddam Hussein in 2003, paving the way for a Shiite-led government. Friction between Anbar and the Iraqi government followed in the form of a Sunni-Shiite civil war, with many Anbar tribes siding with Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Death squads, car bombs, and neighborhood torture chambers proliferated.

But, by late 2006, the carnage and chaos led many Sunnis in Anbar to switch sides. Forming the Anbar Awakening, they allied with US forces against AQI. As the Iraq Surge unfolded in 2007, AQI suffered heavy losses, and violence against civilians plummeted.

Although AQI never recovered, it transformed. After the U.S. left in 2011, the Shiite government under Premier Nouri al-Maliki never made good on any rapprochement with Sunnis. They once again became disaffected, and eventually sided with AQI’s successor, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Now, is this a case of people going from being evil incarnate to noble warriors for good to going back to being evil incarnate? No. The members of the Anbar Awakening didn’t switch back and forth like that any more than they switched from one religion to another.

Instead, Anbar’s Sunnis had different motives for either joining or turning against AQI. Revenge for the death of a loved one (either at the hands of AQI or the US) often played a role. Money did, too, as tribes saw more cash coming from either the US or AQI. Islamic ideology also factored in, with some Anbar militants admiring AQI for setting up an Islamic state, while others (or even the same people, but later on) were angry that their religion was being used to implement brutality and injustice.

Without a doubt, some former members of AQI, just like some current members of ISIS, are Islamists who want the entire world to live according to hard-core sharia, and they will kill anyone who stands in their way. There’s no jobs program that’s going to deviate them from their mission, the only thing to do is kill them first.

But not every member of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party was committed to Hussein or his ideology; many of them joined in order to hold a government job, or to avoid suspicions about their true loyalties. The same was true of many members of the Nazi Party in Germany. And, just as not every Nazi was involved in the Holocaust, not every jihadi or member of ISIS is dedicated to worldwide sharia or has taken part in atrocities. Some of them are lower-level couriers or spies who – like the Anbar militants who went after AQI – can be turned.

President Obama has been wrong about an awful lot on Iraq: he was wrong to say that the Iraq Surge would make violence worse, and he was wrong to send Vice President Biden to triumphantly declare that “politics has broken out” under Maliki.

But Obama’s administration isn’t wrong to say that political and economic solutions play a role in fighting ISIS. If you can peel supporters off of A-Qaeda in Iraq, you can do the same to ISIS.

“Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop;” sometimes a job really can make a difference.

Denvil runs the Civil Debate Page [URL: civildebatepage.blogspot.com] and can be contacted via Twitter @AlasdairDenvil.