Opinion Article: ISIL is Contained and That Should Be Good Enough

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You wouldn’t know it from the threat inflation (see here and here) by U.S. senior officials and politicians concerning the Islamic State — aka ISIL, ISIS, ISI, and AQI — but this terrorist threat is already successfully contained and poses little immediate or direct threat to American interests in the region or globally.

Yes, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel claimed that ISIL is an “imminent threat to every interest we have.” But let’s evaluate that assertion based on the evidence against the enduring national interests as articulated in the 2010 National Security Strategy.

Oil & Economic prosperity: ISIL has seized control of oil production facilities and is making money from illicit oil smuggling through Turkey, Syria, and Kurdish Iraq. But U.S. interests are primarily tied to the global price of oil and ensuring open access to the rich energy reserves of the region. This combination ensures competitively priced oil that literally fuels global economic growth. Oil prices continue to fall and the U.S. Energy Information Administration has revised its long-range outlook predicting prices “below $100 a barrel until early in the next decade.”

Homeland security: The barbarity of the beheadings of two American journalists and a British aid worker broadcast in videos viewed across the world have served dual interests of the these terrorists: to inspire fear among the public; and provoke an overreaction by status quo powers. Surveys suggest that (aided by threat exaggerations referred to above) a majority of the American public is convinced that ISIL has the ability to strike targets in the United States. But career-professional security and intelligence experts reviewing the actual evidence have drawn the opposite conclusion. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson earlier this month admitted, “we have no credible information that ISIL is planning to attack the homeland of the United States.” Meanwhile, National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen, in a speech at the Brookings Institute, stated that ISIL is not capable of carrying out large-scale attacks and noted that the United States is “so much better postured, in so many ways, to see, detect, stop any attack like what we saw on 9/11.”

Now none of these statements mean that there is absolutely no risk of attacks inspired by ISIL or its ilk. As reports from Australia suggest, there will always be a few psychopathic killers who will find perverse inspiration from the hatred and false religion espoused by groups such as ISIL. But the best solutions to these thankfully few and far between threats are essentially defensive: focused intelligence, professional law enforcement, and effective border controls.

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