To defeat ISIS, we need to put aside differences and adopt new thinking

Freedom fries.

Remember those? Changing the name of French fries to freedom fries was just one of the ways we derided France for not joining us in our 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Back then their reason for not hitching their horse to former President George W. Bush’s crusade to rid the world of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was that doing so would destabilize an already unstable region. It could also lead to an escalation of terrorist attacks around the world.

Ironic, isn’t it? Perhaps the French ability to predict the future resides in more than just their famed astrologer Nostradamus.

All kidding aside, we owe the French an apology along with our support and prayers for the dead and wounded in last Friday’s attacks in Paris. And the January attack on the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

In fact, the list of terrorist acts since our own day of reckoning Sept. 11, 2001, is long, spanning many countries. And that includes our own, in Boston.

We knew where the enemy was that attacked us in New York and Washington, and we went after them in Afghanistan. That was the course of action.

Not to say that Saddam Hussein should have been allowed to remain in power either. He was an evil man who deserved no leniency.

But the unfortunate truth, especially in the Middle East, is that sometimes to keep one evil in check you have to endure another. It sucks, but that’s the way it is.

The French were right, and now they — and we — are paying the price for our arrogance and hubris in Iraq with the emergence of a true evil in the form of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS. Or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL. Or Daesh, which is the French version of the Arabic acronym Da’ish, that according to a piece on the Raw Story website stands for al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq al-Sham.

All this is water under the bridge, however unfortunate. We have to move forward, because the threat posed to us and the world by ISIS is very real. Who they are and what they believe is described in a chilling and thorough piece in The Atlantic entitled “What ISIS Really Wants.”

“The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths,” author Graeme Wood writes in the story’s opening lines. “It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse.”

Wood’s piece is a must read to at least begin to get a glimpse of what the world faces in this latest edition to the Middle East’s legacy of violence and upheaval. The problem is most people will never read it.

The reason is it’s long — 44 pages. That’s a year’s worth of USA Today articles, and in this world of “just give me the quick overview, I’ve got to get to the gym” approach to news, it’s virtually “War and Peace.”

That’s unfortunate because the trait needed to read Wood’s story is one we as a country will need to defeat ISIS. More on that in a second.

There are other things the world needs to combat this evil that has arisen in the desert sands. An Op/Ed piece in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald outlines five: Think, Unite, Banish False respect, Preserve civilized borders and Destroy their base.

Like reading Wood’s article, it’s also going to take patience and perseverance. Those aren’t strengths I believe we possess in abundance. We want results quickly, especially before the next election cycle or budget appropriations committee meeting.

Case in point, President Barack Obama’s strategy to deal with ISIS through a process of containment involving regional militaries fighting on the ground while backed by U.S. and European air support. That may indeed be one of the pieces to the puzzle of eliminating ISIS, but it’s barely begun and already it’s criticized as not producing enough results.

In dealing with an enemy that believes it’s a divine agent for the end of the world, and is willing to go to sacrifice lives to see this through, it may take a while before any results are seen.

In the end though, our war with ISIS — and it is a war — is going to come down to one question: How much are we committed?

How much are we committed to making tremendous sacrifices in blood and treasure, and how much are we committed to putting aside our feelings of self-righteousness and embrace others not like us? Are we ready to open up hearts, including our own?

Have some French fries and think about it.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].