October 26, 2017
THANKS, UR!:
The Ignominious End of the ISIS Caliphate (Robin Wright, October 17, 2017, The New Yorker)
"How far they've fallen. It's a striking contrast to three years ago, when they planted the flag, in the summer of 2014, and proclaimed God's kingdom on Earth had come again--and now they've evaporated," Will McCants, the author of the best-selling book "The Isis Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State," told me."There are other places for isis to go and survive, but there's something special about Syria and Iraq and the Fertile Crescent," McCants, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said. "It's the theatre of prophecy. It's where the apocalyptic drama unfolds. It's the heartland of the historic caliphate, and it's the scene of the final end-of-times drama, as predicted by Islamic scripture. Nowhere else in the Islamic world compares with it."
Sort of a simple takeaway : if your prophecy depends on the people you want to govern embracing barbarism, the Anglosphere ignoring you, and Christianity being false, you're doomed. But just because they were never a threat does not mean the UR and Donald don't deserve credit for crushing them so quickly.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 26, 2017 11:39 AM