The most important is the startling reality that Arab governments and societies, whose practices allowed dangerous phenomena such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS to grow, seem unable or unwilling to take decisive action to protect themselves when the moment of reckoning arrives – as it has now.
Most Arab governments seem logistically unable to play a direct role in attacking ISIS, or find it politically damaging with their own publics to be seen working closely with the U.S. in yet another assault on an Arab target.
ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the former Mehdi Army in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, half a dozen militias in Libya, and dozens of other armed groups that now strut on the battered stage of modern Arab statehood show clearly that the most serious underlying threat to most Arab countries is not primarily an itinerant reactionary movement of misfits such as ISIS.
If a coalition to fight ISIS does not simultaneously acknowledge and start to address these facts, the sheriff and the posses of our modern Middle East will be busy for many decades.
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