Religious Wars Are Simply a Means to an End

Commentaries about ISIS stress its religious fanaticism and extreme brutality, and the militants are often depicted as crazy. Can we instead rationalize what is happening in Iraq and Syria without invoking craziness or the ghosts of the 14th century? The current events are consistent with two opposite stories: (1) the real objective is conversion of all infidels, jihad, religious fundamentalism, while conquering power and resources in the region is an instrument, or a stepping stone, in that global direction; (2) the objective is power and maximum possible resources in the region for the group of fighters and civilians of the dominant group in the region, while the extreme terrorism, violence, and even religious fundamentalism are actually the instrument towards those power and resource control goals.

I argue that the second interpretation is the most likely at this point, and one that can give us greater heuristic ability in the short run.
Here are the main elements for the rationalization of what is happening assuming rational leaders: (A) the weak states and low level of state capacity in Iraq and Syria at this juncture create a window of opportunity to conquer power and resources in part of Syria and Iraq, and this opportunity to create an IS did not exist before, whereas the jihad extreme objectives have no reason to spike now; (B) the weapons taken from the Iraq army and from the help against Assad created at the same time a window of opportunity also in terms of relative strength; (C) The goal of power is consistent with the fact that Baghdad became the first target, while the interest in resource control is perfectly consistent with the focus on the Kurdish area; (D) even in Syria the targets have been targets of power control, including also infrastructures and state-building consolidations, whereas the movement south-west towards Israel has not been a visible objective of ISIS. Even the beheaded journalists and NGO members is a display of brutality aimed mainly to mobilize forces internally and externally with fear. Pushing the extreme ideology or extreme religiosity line helps recruiting determined agents and helps threatening internal defections and small external threats. Moreover, the beheadings of journalists can much more plausibly be interpreted as an attempt to deter US intervention rather than fanatically provoking it. The objective of power and resource control would be basically achieved the moment the international community starts really calling them the "Islamic State". Hence we need to deny their access to the status of State, and international containment strategy does not do enough: if what they want is to control power and resources in their region, only containing and protecting Baghdad and Erbil will eventually consolidate their area as a real Islamic State.

The international community has endorsed (directly or by inertia) a strategy of containment together with an attempt to de-radicalize the region internally, by for example pushing for a more inclusive government in Iraq. The de-radicalization component is actively countered by the recruitment of extremists even internationally, and hence I repeat that this inertial strategy will likely lead to the birth of a real State. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other regional powers have mixed incentives, and the super powers are unlikely to go for the full-fledged elimination of ISIS.
The best strategy seems to be a strategy aimed to reducing drastically the "value" of reaching their State power goal, for example by focusing attention on all the oil and gas producing areas. Only after all the oil and gas producing areas are given back to the control of others, only at that point the de-radicalization strategy of the civilians can work, at least in Iraq. Thinking of extremism as an instrumental strategy rather than as a crazy objective can help social scientists to connect more dots and to be able to compare the effectiveness of different third party strategies, and in this case I certainly welcome the current greater focus on disrupting the oil selling revenue lines.