Making a State

by Iron and
Blood
Britain built an empire on the slave trade. Germany perpetrated the
greatest genocide in human history. Who says the Islamic State wont be a
U.S. ally someday?
BY ROSA BROOKS
AUGUST 19, 2015

The self-styled Islamic State has killed thousands in Iraq, Syria, and
elsewhere, and states and media outlets around the world continue to decry its
brutal tactics, which include a penchant for public decapitations, the mass
slaughter of unarmed prisoners, and the sexual enslavement of women and
girls.
Still, if Western history is any guide, the Islamic State could well be on its way
to global legitimacy.

History assures us that the commission of mass atrocities is no bar to future

success. During the reign of terror that followed the French Revolution,
Frances revolutionary government publicly beheaded an estimated 30,00040,000 people all in the name of libert, galit, and fraternit. In the
early 1790s, at least 150,000 other unfortunate French citoyens were shot,
burned to death, hacked to pieces, or deliberately drowned in
Frances Vende region. I crushed the children under the feet of the horses,
French Gen. Franois Joseph Westermann is said to have written after one
particularly brutal campaign. [I] massacred the women who, at least for
these, will not give birth to any more brigands. I have exterminated all. The
roads are sown with corpses. Well, tant pis! Mercy, Westermann
concluded, is not a revolutionary sentiment.
It doesnt make for pleasant reading, but it was all so long ago. Today, France
is a significant European power and major U.S. ally.
Too many years ago to count? Alright, consider Turkey. Between 1915 and
1918, Ottoman authorities killed more than a million Armenians in what pretty
much everyone except the Turkish state now calls a genocide. But a hundred
years have gone by, and today, Turkeys a vital NATO ally.
Ancient history? Fast forward to the 1940s. The death toll from the Holocaust
was some 11 million civilians, most of them Jews. But today, Germany is
our bester Freund in the European Union. No worries, Angela Merkel, all is
forgiven!
State formation and the consolidation of power more generally has
always been a bloody
business. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political
scientists know this well, but the rest of us tend to ignore it or just edit it

out of our history books. Still, pick a successful, enlightened modern nation
state and embark on some historical excavations: It wont take long before you
start digging up bodies.
The Thirty Years War, which leveled large swaths of Europe and killed off
nearly a third of the population in several regions, is often viewed by scholars
as having given rise to the European nation state. In the four centuries since
then, European state consolidation has killed off many millions more. It is
not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time
are decided but by iron and blood, Otto von Bismarck, the architect of
German unification, observed in 1862.
As it happens, the United States was learning or relearning the same
lesson, even as Bismarck gave his famous speech. Between 1861 and 1865,
hundreds of thousands of Americans fought for the right to enslave almost 4
million other Americans, and hundreds of thousands died before the issue was
resolved, leaving the U.S. central government more powerful than ever before.
And thats just the West and just a few snapshots from the last few hundred
years. Throw in the rest of the world, and its more of the same.
Beheadings? Check. Torture? Check. Massacres of unarmed
civilians? Check, check, check.
None of this excuses the present-day atrocities of the Islamic State or makes
them any less horrifying, particularly in this era of nearly universal
acknowledgment of basic human rights. But if we ignore the historical
continuities between the current behavior of the Islamic State and the past
behavior of dozens of other states we now consider exemplary global actors,
we risk misunderstanding the logic behind the groups seemingly senseless
violence and we risk increasing the odds that current U.S. efforts to end its
reign of terror will fail.

For one thing, failing to see the Islamic States actions in a historical context
allows us to sustain the comforting but false illusion that the Islamic State is
just insane or, as U.S. President Barack Obama put it in 2014, that it has
no vision other than slaughter and, in 2015, that it can never possibly win
[anyone] over by its ideas or its ideology because it offers nothing.
Dont make the mistake of believing this. Islamic State leader Abu Bakr alBaghdadi may be responsible for thousands of war crimes and crimes against
humanity, but hes no fool: As Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger note in their
recentbook on the Islamic State, his thinking has been greatly influenced by
the work of Abu Bakr Naji, whose short book, The Management of
Savagery, urged the calculated use of ritualized and well-publicized brutality
as a means of sowing respect and fear among both enemies and supporters of
radical Islam. Yes, the Islamic State is brutal, but it surely has a vision that
goes well beyond slaughter and notwithstanding Obamas dismissive words,
its a vision that has amply demonstrated its power to win over thousands of
young recruits from around the globe.
Its probably wise to assume that the leadership of the Islamic State
understands the pitiless lessons of history. Time softens the edges of even the
most brutal crimes: Let a few decades go by, and every atrocity can be forgiven
by the international community. As Turkey demonstrates, you dont even have
to say youre sorry (at any rate, you can wait 100 years to apologize, and
halfhearted condolences are apparently fine).
The United States is particularly infamous for its short memory and its
inability to take the long view: Were a nation fixated on the now and
increasingly incapable of developing or sustaining a consistent strategic vision
that lasts for more than a few years. But I wouldnt bet on the Islamic State
being the same. Its leaders presumably understand perfectly well that their
current level of brutality guarantees international enmity but they may be

gambling that if they can consolidate Islamic State control over enough oil
fields, ports, and other sources of wealth, as well as scale down the atrocities,
then they can sit back and wait for international forgiveness to follow.
If this is the logic behind the Islamic States current actions (and admittedly,
thats a big if see below), the international community might be able to
induce the Islamic State to abandon its more egregious forms of violence more
quickly through the simple expedient of leaving it alone.
So far, the U.S.-led military campaign against the Islamic State appears to
have achieved few positive results: Although U.S. officials say the campaign
has killed more than 10,000 Islamic State fighters, intelligence sources
have reportedly concluded that the Islamic State has not been
fundamentally weakened. At best, we are probably prolonging the status quo.
The U.S.-led air campaign against the Islamic State isnt enough to defeat or
destroy the jihadi group, but its certainly enough to increase the Islamic
States enmity against the West. (In fact, there is some reason to believe that
the military campaign has increased the Islamic States global reach
and boosted its recruiting efforts.)
But if Islamic State leaders aspire to eventually form a real state, one
acknowledged as such however reluctantly by other global powers, we
might do better to shift to a containment strategy instead of continuing our
current ineffectual attempts to degrade and ultimately destroy the
group.
Yes, this is a depressing thought but if we stop bombing the Islamic State,
perhaps it might tame itself faster than we can tame it. Or, less depressingly,
perhaps the Islamic State leaders will find, like so many brutal regimes before
them, that atrocities eventually generate internal disorder and rebellion.

Of course, maybe Baghdadi and his inner circle have no intention of ever
scaling back the violence. Maybe they intend to continue their current level of
brutality indefinitely and maybe they have no interest in exercising
permanent control over any physical territory.
And why should they? For much of human history, religion or blood loyalty
was a more important political organizing principle than control of fixed
territories (consider the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire), and
recent geopolitical changes are once again making nonterritorial forms of
allegiance, power, and control seem potentially viable. The Islamic States
leaders may not care whether or not theyre eventually pushed out of Iraq or
out of Syria, as long as they can gain new adherents and new sources of
wealth and power in other places, even if those places are changing and
noncontiguous. Indeed, Islamic State rhetoric suggests as much.

Regardless, recent events suggest

that the Islamic State wont
necessarily need to abandon its
brutal tactics in order to persist
and gain legitimacy.
Regardless, recent events suggest that the Islamic State wont
necessarily need to abandon its brutal tactics in order to persist and
gain legitimacy.
Consider the Taliban. From 1996 to 2001, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan
was isolated both diplomatically and economically; from 2001 to the present,
the Taliban has been targeted for destruction by the U.S. military and
intelligence communities. But though U.S. officials
havelong condemned Taliban brutality in much the same terms they now

use to condemn the Islamic State, Washington is currently offering at least

tacit support to negotiations with Taliban leaders. Continued rumors suggest
that U.S. officials may in fact be participating directly in such negotiations.
From this, Islamic State leaders can draw the obvious conclusion: As everyone
from Mao to Kissinger is said to have said, insurgents dont need to win in
order to succeed; they just need to not lose. Stick around long enough, like the
Taliban, and it doesnt much matter how brutal you are; eventually your
opponents will tire of fighting, and theyll either give up and leave, or give up
and negotiate. If they opt for negotiations, theyll satisfy their own need to save
face by pretending to forget about all those atrocities, or by claiming to be
focusing only on negotiations with moderates or reconcilables. (As far as
I can tell, the definition of a reconcilable Taliban leader is a Taliban leader
with whom we feel the need to negotiate.)
In other words: The Islamic State can keep right on beheading people, and if
we cant destroy the Islamic State, perhaps well eventually tire of fighting
them and decide to cut deals with them. And then, let a few decades pass, and
presto! The Islamic State will have a seat at the U.N. if the U.N. still exists
either as a new state or as a globally acknowledged non-state something or
other, and all those terrible atrocities will be politely ignored.
Needless to say, although history suggests that the commission of horrific and
widespread atrocities is no bar to entry into polite global society, history also
suggests that nothing is inevitable. Plenty of brutal insurgencies and regimes
have lived to see their crimes whitewashed and forgotten, but plenty of others
have gone down in flames.
When it comes to predicting the future of the Islamic State, there are lots of
wild cards. The 24/7 global media environment is quite new, and its

impossible to say how this or the universalization of human rights will

affect the Islamic States longer-term ability to sustain itself or the
international communitys determination to defeat the group. State
sovereignty is changing in complex ways, and its hard to know what forms
global, political, and military power will take 10, 20, or 50 years from now.
Elections in the United States may change American military dynamics; China
or Russia or any of a dozen other states could decide to cut deals of their own
with the Islamic State. Finally, the group remains relatively opaque to
outsiders; internal dynamics could also alter its trajectory.
Even so: If I were a bookie, Id put long odds on the Islamic State being
defeated by the United States. The White House can issue as many statements
as it wants claiming to have made considerable progress in our effort to
degrade and ultimately destroy the Islamic State, but I suspect the group will
still be going strong five or 10 years from now. (Im less sure about that seat at
the U.N., but give it a few more decades; you never know.)
I hope Im wrong.