Don't Panic: ISIS, Terror and Today's Middle East

It took a quarter-century of bad strategy, including more than a dozen years of Western air attacks and invasions in the Middle East, to bring the so-called "Islamic State" into existence. Can we somehow manage to avoid the well-trodden path of overr... Read more

It took a quarter-century of bad strategy, including more than a dozen years of Western air attacks and invasions in the Middle East, to bring the so-called "Islamic State" into existence. Can we somehow manage to avoid the well-trodden path of overreacting to the provocations of Islamist extremists?With the rise of the so-called ISIS--alternatively called ISIL or the Islamic State--terrorist acts dominate headlines and airwaves with dispiriting regularity. But in "Don't Panic," Gwynne Dyer argues that the threat is overblown, and that the advent of a radical Islamist regime in the Arab world does not substantially raise the overall risk of major terrorist attacks in Western countries. Apart from oil, the Middle East is of no importance in the global economy--only three percent of global GDP. And no matter who rules the oil-exporting countries, they will still have to export their oil because they need the money. While ISIS does constitute the spearhead of a Sunni Arab offensive against the Shia regimes in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State is probably already nearing its maximum achievable borders. While ISIS-style takeovers in other Arab countries are not impossible, notably in Libya, their significance would remain limited. Rule one in the old anti-terrorism doctrine was "Don't overreact," and it's just as valid today. That means no ground offensives against ISIS--for which the troops are not available anyway--and preferably not even any bombing by foreign forces. Instead, it means waiting for events to take their course within the Islamic State. Regimes as radical and violent as ISIS rarely survive for long. This revolution will eat its children, as so many have before, and it will happen a lot more quickly if they don't have a huge foreign military threat to hold them together. Foreign interventions always make matters worse--which is why terrorists love them so much." Less