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Robert McGarveyThe Trudeau government is following through on its promise to end Canada’s role in airstrikes against the Islamic State. Canada, instead, will increase its support for the allied effort. The number of Canadian military advisors in the region will rise from 69 now to about 220.

This shift reflects an election promise of the Liberals and is consistent with the prime minister’s expressed opinions on the war in the Middle East. He has on many occasions questioned the effectiveness of trying to bomb ISIS into submission, and raised concerns about the international coalition’s strategy in this conflict.

Military strategists seem to share some of these doubts.

Most Western military leaders, including Canadian chief of defence staff Gen. Jonathan Vance, appreciate that the conflict with ISIS is unconventional in the extreme. Although ISIS calls itself a ‘state,’ in military terms it’s not much more than renegade band of brigands. Its tactics are chaotic and its extreme religiosity makes ISIS’s larger objectives difficult to comprehend. Add to this the fact that coalition forces are employing their air power in support of irregular ground troops, like the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, that have complex military and political goals.

Clearly, the battle with ISIS is a military strategist’s worst nightmare.

The famous Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz once described war as “politics by other means.” In other words, war is the use of extreme violence in order to obtain a political end.

So what is the intended political end of this conflict?

From the Western coalition’s point of view, this conflict has been compared to fighting the Nazis in the Second World War. ISIS is clearly guilty of crimes of genocide, ethnic and religious cleansing, and brutality on an almost unbelievable scale. However, unlike the Nazi war machine, ISIS does not represent an existential threat to Canada or its immediate national interests. In terms of political realism, our response is limited by this fact.

But ever since the Second World War and the Holocaust, the politics of war have been informed by moral and not simply national interest considerations. By this logic, ISIS must be stopped because it is morally unacceptable. It condones the rape women as an act of war, slaughters non-believers and beheads innocent civilians with the slightest excuse.

From this perspective, the conflict is about eliminating a moral evil. ISIS must be destroyed because its values and behaviour are at odds with civilized values and — worse — the violence it incites in its adherents threatens world order through the export of terrorism.

But if victory is somehow the elimination of this extreme manifestation of Islam, we must also consider the political root causes of Isis’s twisted values. This means digging more deeply into the historical and religious grievances that lie behind the popularity of ISIS — even amongst certain Western Muslims.

The great irony of this conflict is that ISIS has completely rewritten Islamic history. It draws much of its inspiration from Islam’s earliest days, a period when Islam was ‘pure’ and isolated, therefore not compromised by external influences.

But ISIS conveniently forgets that this period of Islamic history was very short-lived. After the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, Islam entered its Golden Age and changed radically. Islam made peace with non-believers, embraced rational thought and by the ninth century, it was the most advanced civilization in terms of science and technology. Meanwhile, Islam’s vast trading networks grew to encompass the known world, and in the process Islam became one of the more tolerant and inclusive cultures of the era.

A purely military effort will not resolve the moral dilemma at the core of this great conflict. Certainly we must contain the ISIS warriors who seek to perpetrate their hateful violence, but we must also address the moral and political confusion behind it all.

This conflict is about how Muslims feel about themselves and their religion in the modern secular world. It doesn’t help that Islam is severely misunderstood by Westerners. It is made infinitely worse by the fact that ISIS represents a false interpretation of Islamic history.

Canada’s response to this crisis is probably the best we can offer given the limitations of our power and the ardent desire of Canadians to occupy the moral high ground and support, as best we can, the modernizing influences in Islam.

Robert McGarvey is an economic historian and former managing director of Merlin Consulting, a London, U.K.-based consulting firm. Robert’s most recent book is Futuromics: A Guide to Thriving in Capitalism’s Third Wave.

Robert is a Troy Media contributor. Why aren’t you?

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