By Mike Matejka
The grim reports of terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernadinochill many Americans and spark calls for retribution. Stopping the mad men of ISIS before they strike again is on many minds. And many others are calling for the President to do more and to do it now.
The challenge with anything in the Middle East is how to effectively eliminate a threat, without creating another future threat. After 9/11, the United States invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq; here we are, 14 years later, and neither country is stable and safe. Israel and the Palestinians have faced off since the 1920s. It seems once we throw off a despot, like Saddam Hussein, new despots like ISIS arise, or in Afghanistan, the Taliban are momentarily defeated, but somehow resurrect themselves from within villages and their mountain hideouts. Groups like ISIS frighten even the Taliban, extremists the extremists see as too extreme.
As Americans, we are used to quick and ready solutions. Our military history looks to conflicts like the two World Wars, which were fought on battlefields with conventional military power facing off. In those kind of wars, American fire power, technology and bravery makes the difference.
But what do you do with an enemy that doesn’t fight conventionally, that doesn’t use tanks, but small groups of fighters buzzing about in Toyota pick-ups? How do you enter a village and know who is really the enemy or who are the innocent villagers? And if you accidentally kill the innocent villagers, have you just created another enemy?
We need to remind ourselves that many Middle Eastern nations did not naturally evolve. As the World War I victors, France and England looked at the world’s map, then drew artificial lines across the sands and labeled those as nations, lumping together people who did not have natural affinities. That is why we hear so much not just about Syrians, Iraqis or Iranians in the news, but also Kurds, Shia and Sunni. Those religious and ethnic ties run deeper than lines on a map.
Isis is a scourge and an affront to humanity. As we tackle this problem, we need to also do so patiently and cautiously, to insure that what we presume is a victory today instead creates a new problem tomorrow.
Mike Matejka is the Governmental Affairs director for the Great Plains Laborers District Council, covering 11,000 union Laborers in northern Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. He lives in Bloomington with his wife and daughter and their two dogs. He served on the Bloomington City Council for 18 years, is a past president of the McLean County Historical Society and Vice-President of the Illinois Labor History Society.
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