Most Americans Now Support Using Ground Troops

The terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, earlier this month dramatically changed the American mood.

53 percent of Americans now think we should use ground troops against ISIS in Syria, Iraq or both.

I’ve been asked repeatedly over the last couple of years what I think might snap Americans out of the isolationist funk we’ve been wallowing in since the Iraq war and the economic downturn of 2008. I haven’t had the answer. I may be some kind of an “expert” on Middle Eastern affairs, but I don’t have a crystal ball that shows me the future of American politics.

I assumed a huge ISIS attack in the United States on the scale of 9/11 would change American public opinion. How could it not? Likewise, a series of smaller Paris-style attacks might do the job.

I never would have guessed that a single attack by two people who might not even have a direct connection to ISIS would swing the pendulum back to the hawkish side of the spectrum all by itself. 

Nothing has actually changed except the American mood. Using ground troops in Syria and Iraq is no better or worse an idea after San Bernardino that it was before.

The downsides are the same and at this point should be obvious. Lives will be lost, and some of them will be ours. American soldiers can’t fix what ails the Middle East. Sure, they can overthrow dictators. They can kill terrorists and push them out of territory.

But eliminating the appeal of a fascistic ideology is something else entirely. Replacing a totalitarian regime with some kind of functioning democracy in lands riven by ancient sectarian hatreds and hobbled by political and religious extremism is something else entirely.

Terrorism in the United States didn’t begin with ISIS, nor will it end with ISIS. Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik would almost certainly have taken up arms if ISIS didn’t even exist. Their desire and ability to murder American citizens was unrelated to who controls the streets of Raqqa and Mosul.

The upside of using ground troops may be a little less obvious. At least it was less obvious until recently. ISIS can be defeated militarily, at least temporarily. It has happened before.

ISIS began in the mid-2000s as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Back then, AQI, like ISIS today, controlled entire Iraqi cities. It resembled a state-within-a-state, like a more deranged Sunni version of Hezbollahland in Lebanon.

American ground troops, in an alliance with the tribes of Iraq’s Anbar Province, first destroyed AQI’s “government” in Fallujah and Ramadi, then destroyed AQI is a fighting force. It was reduced to a few dozen fugitives and an idea. Nothing more.

It came back, of course, under a new name in Syria, and then it exploded back into Iraq. The victory was temporary. The utopian jihadist idea lives on, and there are plenty of lawless and anarchic places in the Middle East and North Africa were the likes of ISIS can take root and metastasize.

You could say fighting them as like playing a game of whack-a-mole where they always pop back up somewhere else. You can say fighting them is like mowing the lawn. The grass keeps on growing relentlessly.

But that leads us to a couple of questions. Do you refuse to mow your lawn because it keeps growing? What will happen if you stop mowing the lawn? Are you better off with a weekly lawn-mowing chore or a jungle in your front yard?

Fighting these guys indeed looks and feels futile, but refusing the fight them—or refusing to fight them seriously and effectively—only allows them to grow stronger.

My guess—this is an educated guess, but it’s still a guess—is that we’re going to settle into something resembling an Israeli view of this problem. We will not indulge the fantasy that we can send in the Army and the Marines and end terrorism once and for all. It’s not going to happen. Not any time soon. But that doesn’t mean we’ll never send in the Army and the Marines, that we’ll sit back and wring our hands while one nation-state after another becomes Talibanized.

Some time is likely to pass before the American government registers the American mood shift. Barack Obama isn’t going to mount a ground invasion of Syria. Republican presidential candidates have likewise been falling all over themselves promising not to mount a ground invasion of anywhere.

It won’t last. It can’t. The American public won’t let it. Neither will ISIS. As Michael Walzer once wrote, paraphrasing Leon Trotsky, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”