Many critics, myself included, lament the fact that President Trump tweets so much. In truth, though, the problem is not that Trump tweets so much; it’s that so much of what he tweets is embarrassing, juvenile, and blatantly detrimental to his own political interests.
But just imagine, if you will, a president who had greater self-awareness, self-discipline, maturity, wisdom, savvy, and political smarts. Why, such a president could tweet regularly and often, but to much greater political effect. I thought about this when reading an excellent piece by Thomas Joscelyn in The Dispatch.
Joscelyn is a senior editor at the Long War Journal published by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He notes that, according to fresh reporting by Martin Chulov and Mohammed Rasool in The Guadian, the Islamic State’s new leader is Amir Mohammed Abdul Rahman al-Mawli al-Salbi, also known as Haji Abdullah; and he is not an Arab, but an ethnic Turkmen.
Salbi (or Haji Abdullah) became the leader of ISIS after their previous leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, blew himself up in a U.S. military raid in late October 2019. And the fact that Salbi is not an Arab, but an ethnic Turkmen is a real problem for the Islamic State: because it calls into question Salbi’s legitimacy as a ruler in the eyes of the jihadists whom he’s supposed to lead and command.
Why is that? Because ISIS’s claim to legitimacy its based on the fact that its rulers supposedly descend from the Prophet Muhammad; but such a claim is dubious, Joscelyn points out, if in fact, Salbi is not an Arab.
An earlier leader of the Islamic State, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, had much the same problem, he notes.
Jihadist critics argued that no one really knew Abu Omar’s true identity or background, so it was absurd for anyone to declare their fealty to him. Bin Laden had to answer this charge in both his private correspondence and public statements.
There’s more to the story, but the point is that this could be a real problem for the current Islamic State, which split off from al-Qaeda. But thus far the U.S. and its allies have done little to exploit it.
“If the U.S. and its allies were adept at messaging—and, trust me,” Joscelyn writes, “they are not—this is the sort of apparent discrepancy that would be trumpeted far and wide as part of a counterterrorist media campaign.”
Internecine Jihadi War. This is a great and under-appreciated point. Internecine ideological disputes within the Jihadist ranks are intense and very real—and taken quite seriously by the Jihadists themselves. The United States should be doing everything that it possibly can to exploit these divisions and keep the Jihadists divided and at war with themselves.
This is especially important because, as Joscelyn observes, ISIS is not yet dead. Indeed, despite the loss of its territory, the terrorist group retains an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 combatants in Syria and Iraq combined, including “key veteran personnel” such as Haji Abdullah.
Haji Abdullah, in fact, “is a founding member of the Islamic State’s first incarnation, with his jihadist biography stretching back to the days of al-Qaeda in Iraq (circa 2003-04),” Joscelyn writes.
An American President who understood this (not President Trump, obviously) could use his Twitter feed smartly and wisely to wage war agains the Jihadists.
And there is no need for heavy propaganda or editorializing either. Simply tweeting out a link to this Guardian article, for instance, and mildly asking some fair and legitimate questions about the ISIS leader would do the trick.
Unfortunately, Trump would rather tweet in juvenile and idiotic fashion about what he last saw on Fox News or how he was wronged by the “Deep State.” But the problem is not Twitter, which, in the right hands, can be used well and to good effect. The problem is the man—or the adolescent in a man’s body—behind the tweet.
Feature photo credit: The Guardian