Complications

I heard an interview on BBC radio this morning with a Saudi journalist.  He was talking about ISIS and the current round of boomy-things that are happening in the Middle East.  It may be far too early to hope, but things seem a little bit different this time around.  First of all, you have the involvement of a lot of different people that are normally trying to kill each other (Iran and Saudi Arabia for instance) in what can only be called as a mutual self-interest in making ISIS no longer a thing.
The Saudi journalist said something like: ISIS is not just an anti Shia movement, or an anti western movement, they are against everything that is not them.  They are against moderate Islam, they are primarily defined by being against things.
A friend of mine in Plumville used to tell about the people he knew that he called, "aginners,"  For those of you who don't speak Western Pennsylvanian, that's people who are "agin" this, or "agin" that, "agin" is a form of the word against.  ISIS is apparently the ultimate group of "aginners."
Any rational person should quickly grasp that this is not a fruitful way of being a human being, but then again: Fox news is a thing, though to their credit they have not beheaded anyone yet.  The problem with defining yourself by what you are against only truly rises to the surface like the whitehead of an infected pimple, when you finally run into the rather difficult task of deciding what to do next, after you have purged the infidel from your presence, now what?
ISIS is now in full control of a swath of land that most of the world has officially decided to avoid.  We are having serious disagreements about whether or not we should even bomb it, and it's not an ethical discussion about whether bombing is right, it's a basic reality that it probably won't do any good, that centers our dilemma about whether to make the whole place go boom.
It's sort of like the black knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail, we have the military might to cut off ISIS' arms and legs and leave them nothing but a bloody stump, but the power of hatred would still leave them threatening to bite our kneecaps.  How does one deal with such an enemy?
I don't have an answer for that.
I am much more interested in the all too temporary shift in global politics that this has caused.  They are bad guys to absolutely everybody right now.  In the same way the Al Quaida was after 9-11.  The opinion of the world is against them, and that is more powerful than bombs at this particular moment.
This type of Islamic Fundamentalism needs a glorious and divinely sanctioned victory as its validation.  Up until now we have always given them some spider hole to escape into, prior to 9-11 they could flee to almost any nation in the world and find some refuge.  After 9-11, their choices were narrowed significantly, but they still had Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and virtually anywhere in the Middle East, except Israel.  If we had not gone all Conan the Barbarian on that whole segment of the globe, their hiding places may have diminished, but we didn't, we became another occupying army, largely validating the claims that the terrorists made against us, in the eyes of anyone who had their house blown up or their children end up as collateral damage.
We have a chance to take a different course this time around.  We have, for a moment, a unity of purpose shared by some very odd fellows indeed.  It will not last long though, and we need to remember that, and do everything we can not to be the goof that tips the balance.  I think Iran and the Saudis and even the Syrians, are invested on a lot of levels in making sure this ISIS thing doesn't continue, therefore we should do everything that we can to avoid reminding them that they really don't like the U.S. and Israel very much at all.  We need to know that these countries, while they may cooperate with out plan, are not going to suddenly become our best buds. When ISIS is gone there will still be a great animosity towards the west, and fertile ground for extremism to continue to grow.
This momentary pause does not mean that Sunni and Shia are finally going to resolve their differences, through the fight.  This momentary pause does not mean that Iran is going to give up altogether on trying to develop nuclear capability, or that the Saudis are going to stop trying to buy the world with oil.  It certainly does not mean that the Arab world is going to play nice with Israel.
But it does mean that we might not need to play the part of imperious imperial bad guys in this one.
Wouldn't that be nice?