The conclusion:


In other words, Obama seems to believe, correctly, that Shiite extremism is every bit as dangerous as Sunni extremism—except that the latter is embodied and employed by non-state or sub-state outfits, like ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda. That’s what concerns Obama--not extremism per se, but the extremism of regional actors that is not susceptible to the traditional instruments of statecraft. Regardless of how badly Iran acts, on Obama’s view, it is a nation-state, and therefore a rational actor with interests that can be engaged, deterred, contained, or if necessary, bombed. Organizations like ISIS, as Obama said in his UNGA speech, can only be met with force.

This White House is eager not to make the mistakes it believes the previous administration did, for instance, by disbanding the Iraqi army. This is why administration officials frequently speak of preserving Syrian “state institutions”—meaning of course not institutions tasked to collect garbage or keep on the lights, but security services, interior ministries, militaries. As Obama told Remnick, he wants to “work with functioning states to prevent extremists from emerging there.”

The problem is that Obama seems not to have wrestled with the question—what happens when extremists control state institutions? After all, most of the suffering humanity has endured throughout history has been inflicted not by non-state actors, but by states, like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, and China in the last century alone. What if Obama’s campaign against the non-state murders in ISIS is empowering a graver threat from the murderers who run a state in Tehran?




What a freaking mess.