ISIS and the left's Vulgar Marxism problem

What is ISIS? What do its members want? What makes them tick?

These sound like basic questions. But it turns out that surprisingly few people have been trying to answer them — including, very scarily, within the U.S. government. And the White House's inability to understand ISIS and its ideology has severely hobbled the West's efforts to fight ISIS.

The celebrated reporter Graeme Wood, on the other hand, has tried very hard to answer these questions, in one of the most important stories to be written on ISIS. (Wood had already done impressive reporting on extreme Islamists.) ISIS, as it turns out, is motivated by a specific interpretation of Islam. And understanding the beliefs of ISIS's members helps to explain — and even predict — their actions.

For example, the main difference between ISIS and al Qaeda is not primarily over tactics or a clash of personalities, as we're often told, but over theology. Both ISIS and al Qaeda believe in apocalyptic end-times where an Islamic caliphate will face off against the forces of Christianity in an ultimate war. But while al Qaeda believes this time to be far off into the future, ISIS believes it is now. This is not an idle difference. This apocalyptic scenario requires the establishment of a new Islamic caliphate, and ISIS has been working to accomplish precisely this, seizing and holding onto territory instead of working as a decentralized underground network like al Qaeda. The centrality of the vision of the caliphate in ISIS's worldview suggests that the group will act in ways that are different from al Qaeda — and can be predicted.

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