Christianity Used To Be Like Islamic State

Ok, well not all of Christianity used to be that way, of course.  But the title is attention grabbing for a very good reason - that Christianity, despite being (in my view) A) true and B) the best hope humans have of genuinely understanding goodness, turned up some of the most ignoble fiends in history committing some of the most ignoble acts in the name of their faith.

BBC News had an account this week of what life is like in Mosul, Iraq's second city, a year after it was captured by Islamic State. It's sobering to think that Islamic State's ethos - violence, sexual perversion, forced conversion, oppression of women and megalomaniacal aspirations of global dominance - were once not much of a departure from certain factions of the Christian church in the Middle Ages (between about the 11th and the 16th centuries).

Living in Britain in the 21st century it's hard to imagine divisions of the Christian church once doing things comparable to what Islamic State is doing now. Yet they did, and one can't escape the irony that Christ's love and grace came to earth precisely because of the ignoble things we humans would get up to - including, sadly, those who claim to do those ignoble things in His name.

What to do about Islamic State?

It's a particularly perturbing spectre this Islamic State business. They are such an evil, ideologically-driven regime that any of the West's available options are troublesome. What are the options? One option is to have another Iraq situation circa 2003-2008 with thousands of mobilised troops, tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and no real forecasted plan for the future. That sounds like hell all over again. Another option is to deploy ground troops in a more strategic way, picking them off with on the ground combat. That's better than option one, but still futile because Islamic State is growing and spreading more quickly than our ground forces could manage to quell. Further, terrorist groups that spring up all over the place in different regions are particularly hard to subjugate.

Peace talks are obviously hopeless because Islamic State has no peaceful intentions - its intention is dominance and murderous establishment of their cause. This leaves two other equally undesirable options, both centred around a more detached approach - otherwise known as doing very little. Given that Islamic State will be nigh-on impossible to defeat, and that any military mobilisation will come at the cost of servicemen and women, and lots of innocent civilians, not to mention financial cost and cost of political unpopularity (apparently the USA has already spent more on bombing Islamic State than they did Iraq and Afghanistan), it may well turn out that any major involvement we have will turn into a quagmire that will be lamented for years to come.

A detached approach will probably bring about the eventual establishment of some kind of post-Iraq Islamic state region, with its people being utterly oppressed and maltreated - a nightmare state resembling an Islamic version of something between North Korea and Nazi Germany. That cannot be allowed to happen, particularly with the oil and gas in the Middle East, and the issue of the stability of all its other nations.

So resolution of this Islamic State business is an absolute horror to contemplate - it's in a region that is too culturally and politically complex for Western politicians to understand (as Iraq 2003 showed), and against opponents unbound in their scope of wicked and backward ideological aspirations - aspirations we just cannot allow to come to pass.

My gut instinct is that what will happen is a combination of many Islamic State fighters being picked off by Western/Iraqi armed forces, and that there will be enough implosions in the Islamic State camp with individuals and subset groups breaking away or dissolving to the extent that the terrorist group becomes a fractionated adjunct to its former self.

Whatever happens though, Islamic terrorism is here to stay, and in all likelihood we're going to have decades of hell before there are any signs of things getting better.