Bruce Newsome

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Bruce Newsome is an Assistant Teaching Professor in International Relations at Berkeley. Newsome reckons that the war we are currently waging isn’t apocalyptic enough and that America will never release enough hell for it to stick. He reckons it’s all a bit weak, but doesn’t really say we should be firing more bombs into Syria either.

“Western intervention of the scale and scope required to defeat ISIS will not happen, given popular aversion to further ground commitments of the type that failed to stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq already, and the elite’s political correctness and complacency about the true risks presented by a caliphate.

For the West to even consider the commitments necessary to defeat ISIS, it would need to be provoked by ISIS with some diabolical outrage many times more lethal or more proximate to Western homelands than any of its outrages so far. Almost certainly a terrorist outrage like that of 11 September 2001, in a Western homeland, would provoke Western invasion of the Islamic State. However, that is a terrible threshold for which to wait.

Politicians, even democratic politicians, have obligations to guide, as well as to follow, their citizenry’s popular will. This guidance should begin with honesty about both the ineffectiveness of the current strategy and the true risks of leaving an Islamic State to consolidate.”

Not much help there.