Explanation Of ISIS In One Sentence By Mid East Architect

December 5th, 2015

Awake Goy

Lebanese writer, political commentator and architect Karl Sharro, provides a concise explanation of the rise of ISIS in a sentence contained within a tweet.

Vox Media reports:

Sharro’s tweet is, first and foremost, a brutal satire of simple explanations of ISIS’s rise — like Thomas Piketty‘s somewhat silly claim that ISIS is the result of economic inequality. ISIS is a multifaceted problem that arose from a number of deeply ingrained issues in the Arab world. It defies the simple one-line explanations that pundits like to gravitate toward.

Yet it’s also a really cogent, concise explanation of the big-picture story behind ISIS’s rise. Broken down into more palatable bits, Sharro is telling a story that spans from the early 20th century all the way to the present:

After the end of British, French, and Ottoman imperial rule in the early to mid-20th century, Arab leaders failed to establish anything like stable democratic societies. Instead, they imposed unpopular and brutal military dictatorships that prevented any real sense of national unity developing and squandered the region’s economic potential.

The Middle East’s progressive and democratic parties failed, due to a combination of incompetence and interference, to put together a viable alternative to these regimes.

This created a large population of people in the Middle East who were disenfranchised and looking for a new form of politics. During and after the Cold War, Islamism rose to fill that void: It appealed to an identity and a set of values that many in the Middle East shared and understood. This was part of a global revival of different forms of identity politics.

Some governments — like Saudi Arabia’s quasi-monarchy, quasi-theocracy — had an interest in helping spreading a fairly hard-line version of Islam, as it shored up domestic legitimacy. Radical Islamism also got a boost from foreign powers, as things like US support for Iran’s brutal shah and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created understandable resentment that radicals were well-positioned to support.

More recently, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring threw the Middle East’s normal geopolitical order into chaos, creating a vacuum in which sectarianism (encouraged by a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia) became a powerful force. ISIS flourished in this kind of religiously polarized chaos, bringing us to the point we’re at today.