This is the stark reality we now face in the turbulent era of the Islamic State:
"We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle," Graeme Wood writes convincingly at theatlantic.com, "that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of--and headline player in--the imminent end of the world."
And this is the challenge the moderate world now must contend with as it sees its sons and daughters flocking to take part in this ascendant and brutally focused quest.
Some might think that the U.S. and our allies have been drawn into a live-action apocalyptic video game, given the Islamic State's sophisticated penchant for social media and propaganda.
But the horrors committed by the Islamic State--or ISIS, or those reprehensibly unremitting Islamist extremists--are all too real.
Just as President George W. Bush's administration failed to see the 9/11 attacks on the radar, President Barack Obama's administration failed to recognize the rise of the potent force we now know as the Islamic State, George Packer, of the New Yorker, reminded a Kansas City audience last week.
In late 2013, Obama, now infamously, told Packer's boss, David Remnick, that the Islamic State was a mere junior-varsity player in the shadow of al-Qaida. Obama's basketball metaphors would be tiresome if they hadn't proved so dangerous.
"We were blind," Packer said. "We did not know what was happening."
Packer echoed the recent assessments in attempting to put the Islamic State in context. That task is made much more difficult for a journalist like Packer, who values on-the-ground reporting and itches to get such a story "under my fingernails." But he lives in the new reality where foreign correspondents are taken for ransom and beheaded.
The real wake-up call arrived last June when the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the resumption of the caliphate that disappeared with the Ottoman Empire 90 years earlier.
Amassing territory, oil fields, banks, corpses and subservient people in its path, this self-declared state sent shock waves throughout the region and began to redefine and complicate America's role and relationships in the region.
The Islamic State faithful are now destroying ancient artifacts and continuing to kidnap, terrorize and kill Christians, Muslims and others who dare to believe in alternate visions of God and society.
Few are optimistic about the near term, but these level-headed observers agree that a U.S.-led ground war would only add fuel to the raging fire.
The only real strategy, many contend, is to help Muslim allies in the region contain the Islamic State, to stop it from amassing more territory and to force it into a position where it collapses in on itself by failing to expand.
A very tall and sobering order.
Editorial on 03/04/2015