Taking them at their word. The war aims of evil

I am continually amazed by the extent to which Western observers, even now, grasp to understand the Islamic State and its motivations.  How dimly people grasp history.

Clearly I need to add a new, ninth, Holscher's Law of History.  And when I do, what that law will be is that "Radical Forces often bluntly declare their goals, and non radical ones do not believe them."  Or perhaps that's more properly a Law of Behavior.

Because that is in fact the case. Very often, the most radical, and evil, forces and movements are perfectly blunt about their objectives, and yet those in civilized nations go about not believing them.  Only when its too late, and the history of a topic is written, is that noted, often with retrospective disdain.

Take Hitler for example.  In 1924, in his work Mein Kampf, he made very plain his hatred for the Jews and disdain for any people who were not what he termed "Aryan".  He also made plain his disdain for Soviet Russia.  But when he stated "He who wants to live should fight, therefore, and he who does not want to battle in this world of eternal struggle does not deserve to be alive" people didn't believe him.  Indeed, it wasn't really until late in World War Two, when the death camps and concentration camps fell into Allied hands, that the full extent of the Nazis' insane hatred of anyone but themselves was fully understood. And yet, they never denied it.  All through the 1920s and into the 1940s that was evident for anyone to see.  The western powers, indeed the world, chose not to believe it, as it seemed so bizarrely impossible.

So too of the early Communists.  Anyone can read, and indeed an serious history student should read, The Black Book On Communism.  It's a fascinating, and yet horrific, read.  The early Communist made it plain that the price of contesting their rise was death.  But in the western world this was simply not believed, and indeed was not really believed until after World War Two when the Soviets themselves threw off the last of their revolutionary leaders, Stalin, and the full horrors of his rule became known, even though the meaning of Communist control was already known anywhere they'd been temporarily. Why wasn't that more fully appreciated?  Only because it seemed to horrific to be believed.

Also ignored in both of the above examples was their obvious and open expansionist goals.  Hitler may have denied German expansionist aims prior to 1939, but in 1924 Hitler stated:

Without consideration of traditions and prejudices, Germany must find the courage to gather our people, and their strength, for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present, restricted living-space to new land and soil; and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation. The National Socialist Movement must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our population and our area — viewing this latter as a source of food as well as a basis for power politics — between our historical past and the hopelessness of our present impotence.

 If that wasn't blunt enough, he also stated 

And so, we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre–War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the East. At long last, we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre–War period and shift to the soil policy of the future. If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.

How could, therefore, an invasion of the USSR have been a surprise?

And so to the early Communist.  The Communist Manifesto had always spoken of a revolution of the international working class, not the working class in one country.  Indeed, the official "socialism in one country" policy that the USSR adopted under Stalin was a departure from orthodox Communism which held that once the revolution came, it had to be global. That change came about as Stalin appreciated the failure of Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe after World War One and recognized that ongoing foreign expansionist efforts by the USSR, such as it attempted in Poland in the early 1920s, were likely to result in the collapse of the USSR itself.  It was that debate, in part, which brought about the downfall of Trotsky.  But Stalin's victory on that point never meant that the international goal wasn't there, but rather that it couldn't be brought about at one time.  When the Red Army went into Eastern Europe at the end of World War Two, therefore, it should have come as no surprise, and of course it really did not, that where the Red Army went, for the most part, Communism stayed. 

And so to, with the Islamic State.

The goal of the Islamic State is simple, plain, and stated.  It wishes to being about a global caliphate.  That is, a global Islamic state ruled by a single monarchical figure who has ties by lineage to Mohammad.  It seeks to bring about an apocalyptic struggle with "Rome", which it takes to be the Western world, and to win, bringing in the day of judgment.  Anyone, including other Muslims, who are not strictly adherent to their view of Sunni Islam is the enemy, and they have urged Muslims to kill non Muslims.

They mean it.

They mean to destroy every other religion in the world, including the Shia branch of Islam.

And supporting and bolstering them is the Koran.  It matters not that the Koran has a mixed message in these regards, nor does it matter to them that a majority of Muslims in modern times have not felt a violent call to that faith. There are, simply put, violent passages in the Koran and they rely upon them.  Ignoring their stated purpose and frankly ignoring the violent passages of the Koran is the same as ignoring the organic document of any major radical movement, as mistake.

Defeating an enemy of this type is not easy.  All prior historical examples demonstrate this.  Defending against the early Muslim armies was difficult and violent, and not achieved through negotiation or appeals to common sense.  Nazi Germany fought on for a good two years after it was obvious that it was going to loose the war (in contrast to Japan, which in spite of what people say, was rational enough to quit when it finally knew it couldn't fight to a negotiated conclusion, or the rational Italians which overthrew their fascist government).  The fall of Communism came about in 1990, after it had evolved out of radicalism, not in 1920 when it was fully still in it.

The ideology of the Islamic State is so radical that it's not going to evolve out of it, and the longer it's in control in any one place the more of that place is lost.  It is at war with the entire world.  The world needs to recognize that, and we cannot simply manage our way out of this one. That ought to be plain now, but then it really should have been earlier.