As an organization that targets nearly everybody, the Islamic State should not be surprised that it has had a unifying effect on the world.

During the Cold War, science fiction writers and politicians like Ronald Reagan imagined that the threat of an invasion from outer space could break down ideological barriers and unify the world. The arrival of giant bug-eyed creatures bent on death and destruction would prompt world leaders to set aside their petty rivalries for the higher purpose of saving the planet.

As it turned out, the Cold War and the immediate risk of nuclear annihilation disappeared without alien intercession. Since that time, other divisions and rivalries have replaced the East-West schism. And other substitutes for an alien threat have appeared as well, such as climate change and global pandemics. But world unity has yet to emerge out of the fractiousness of everyday geopolitics.

The latest candidate for world unifier is the Islamic State (IS). Although many commentators have described IS as somehow less-than-human, it doesn’t come from outer space. It is decidedly a homegrown product of the turmoil that has engulfed two states: Iraq since the US invasion in 2003, and Syria since the aborted Arab Spring uprising that began in 2011.

The Islamic State has made a name for itself by killing just about everyone: American NGO workers, Japanese journalists, members of minority communities in Iraq. It doesn’t hesitate to kill Muslims either. As an organization of Sunni extremists, for instance, IS has specifically targeted Shiites, whom it considers apostates. But IS has also killed its own Sunni jihadi mercenaries if they have second thoughts about their mission and want to go home.

Cults and criminal syndicates can be similarly ruthless. But at the level of global affairs, there hasn’t been anything like the Islamic State since Genghis Khan left immense piles of skulls outside conquered cities and dared the world to gang up against his Mongol horde. Even Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin signed agreements and formed alliances of convenience, if only to ignore them later on. But Genghis Khan didn’t negotiate. The only word in his diplomatic vocabulary was capitulation. So too with IS and its dream of a caliphate of the oppressed.

Recently, IS has been in the headlines again for burning alive a Jordanian air force pilot who participated in bombing raids over its territory. In response, the Jordanian government has vowed to wipe IS off the face of the earth.

Jordan is not the only Muslim country participating in the anti-IS coalition. The Gulf States, Egypt and Turkey have all signed on. Defeating the Islamic State is also one of the few items on which Saudi Arabia and Iran can agree. And despite seemingly irreconcilable differences on a broad range of other issues, the United States, Syria and Russia are all on the same page when it comes to IS.

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In short, as an organization that targets nearly everybody, IS should not be surprised that it has had this unifying effect on the world. There are, of course, some individuals who continue to support IS. It has attracted foreign mercenaries and inspired affiliates in other countries such as Libya. Some money and arms flowed to IS initially from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, particularly from private funders. But both countries appear genuinely appalled by what the group has done in the name of Sunni Islam.

The case of Saudi Arabia is illustrative. As Patrick Cockburn writes in his excellent new book, The Rise of the Islamic State: “During February and March 2014, in an abrupt reversal of previous policy, Saudi Arabia sought to stop Saudi fighters departing for Syria and called on all other foreign fighters to leave that country. King Abdullah decreed it a crime for Saudis to fight in foreign conflicts.” At roughly the same time, the Saudi government installed a new intelligence chief, Mohammed bin Nayef, who had previously established a reputation for his programs of de-radicalization and counterterrorism.

The world is obviously taking IS very seriously. But must taking it seriously translate into a concerted military campaign to “degrade and destroy” the movement, as the Obama administration has promised?

The Rise of the Islamic State

There are a number of interesting conspiracy theories about the rise of the Islamic State.

In the introduction to Syrian Notebooks, a diary of his time with the Syrian opposition in early 2012, the writer Jonathan Littell speculates that the Assad regime directly helped cultivate the rise of the Islamic State to destroy the moderate opposition. He writes that Bashar al-Assad ordered the release of jihadists in spring 2011 and didn’t initially bomb areas controlled by IS. He goes on to cite other examples of the cynical manipulation of religious extremists by Russia (in Chechnya), Israel (with Hamas) and the United States (Afghan mujahedeen) to emphasize the point.

Of course, the release of jihadists was part of several general amnesties that Assad ordered in 2011 to appease the opposition. He may very well have hoped to sow dissension among the ranks of the opposition without necessarily expecting the extremists to forge a distinct faction of their own. Later rumors of energy deals between Damascus and both IS and the al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, suggest opportunism rather than an effort to prop up the jihadists. Whatever plans Assad might have had for IS at the beginning, he is now determined to eliminate the group.

The unhappy truth is that the Islamic State is not Assad’s creation. Rather it is a product of US intervention from the outside and sectarian rivalries on the inside.

US forces hammered away at a wide range of adversaries during the Iraq War. Those who survived, in true Darwinian fashion, were best adapted to carry on the fight. One of those survivors, IS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also spent time in a US-run detainment facility in Iraq, where he may well have been radicalized.

Meanwhile, the government that the United States installed in Baghdad systematically tilted the playing field in favor of the Shiite majority. That bias mirrors the situation in Syria, where a Shiite minority (in the form of the Alawite sect) rules the country. A Sunni backlash in both countries — and ultimately in a cross-border alliance — was inevitable.

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The other factor in the rise of IS was the painful reality that the Iraqi army barely existed. This was not despite huge injections of US funds but because of it.

“The army became a money-making machine for senior officers and often an extortion racket for ordinary soldiers who manned the checkpoints,” Cockburn writes. Ten years of US arms and training to the tune of $25 billion vanished into people’s pockets and overseas bank accounts. How else to explain how 1,300 Islamic State fighters vanquished a government force of 60,000 to take over the city of Mosul last June?

It’s a cautionary example as the United States contemplates pouring more arms into Syria, sending lethal aid to Ukraine and providing assistance to other hot spots around the world. “The Iraq experience underscores the fact that the United States often has little control over how its arms and training are ultimately used,” William Hartung writes. As for IS, Cockburn notes, it was always happy when arms flowed to anti-Assad forces because it could siphon off those munitions through “threats of force or cash payments.”

The Response to the Islamic State

When it was seizing territory at a rapid rate in 2014, IS seemed unstoppable. Residents of Baghdad braced for an attack on the capital city. The Kurds worried about incursions to the north. IS even set its sights on claiming the holy sites of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, an essential territorial gain for any caliphate worth its salt. In response, Saudi Arabia has built a 600-mile wall and ditch to protect itself from incursions from neighboring Iraq.

More recently, however, IS has come up against some challenges.

In Syria, it lost the besieged city of Kobane to a combination of air strikes and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters. The battle resulted in the death of as many as 2,000 IS fighters. Air strikes have killed as much as 30% of the total Islamic State force of 30,000. The jihadists have fallen back from the area northeast of Baghdad, giving the capital a bit more breathing room, and Iraqi government forces appear to be gearing up for an effort to retake Mosul. In all, IS has lost about 700 square kilometers, which isn’t much — about 1% of its total territory — but at least it’s no longer expanding.

There are some voices urging the United States to team up with Syria to fight IS. That’s a difficult pill to swallow.

For all the cruelty of IS, it has killed a relatively small number of people compared to the regime in Damascus. The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that the Assad government is responsible for killing over 100,000 civilians since 2011. The death toll in the conflict has now reached over 200,000 people. It’s one thing to give up on the idea of ousting Assad — which is bowing to the unpleasant reality of his political survival — but to actively cooperate with the dictator is realpolitik at its most distasteful. (Negotiating a peace settlement with him, however, is a different matter.)

It’s another variety of madness to assume that a US-led bombing campaign is going to eliminate the Islamic State. Washington presided over a much more thorough effort to change the facts on the ground in Iraq — with bombs and troops and billions of dollars in aid — and it has in the end produced only a failed state (Iraq), a barbaric state (IS) and a state of utter chaos (in the larger region). So why should a scaled-back version of the above have any greater success in eliminating IS?

Alas, IS has proven that there is always something worse lurking out there if you don’t address the underlying reasons for the anger and resentment — a Vladimir Putin behind a Boris Yeltsin and a Vladimir Zhirinovsky behind them both, an Abdel Fattah el-Sisi behind a Mohammed Morsi, and probably a military dictatorship behind Kim Jong-un.

And yet, for all its horror, IS provides the world with the same opportunity that 9/11 did.

When virtually the entire Middle East agrees on something, it’s a planetary alignment of epochal dimensions. The United States must learn from the mistakes of 9/11 and not waste this global unanimity on something so medieval as a campaign of revenge killings. It must rise to the occasion. The first step is to conclude a deal with Iran on its nuclear program and use that agreement as a springboard for convening a regional peace process that involves both Iran and Saudi Arabia and addresses the underlying grievances in Iraq and Syria.

There’s no better time for Sunni and Shiite to sit down together and address not just IS, but the injustice, intolerance and inequality that birthed it. The threat of Soviet communism pushed longstanding adversaries together in Europe after World War II. Perhaps the threat of IS can do the same for the Middle East. Until the day when those space aliens arrive with laser guns blazing, we won’t have a better opportunity.

*[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Peter R Foster IDMA / Valentina Petrov / Thomas Koch / Shutterstock.com