The Islamic State lexical battleground: US foreign policy and the abstraction of threat

Abstract

This article suggests that President Obama's consistent references to the extremist Sunni group as ‘ISIL’ (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is not a trivial matter of nomenclature. Instead, the Obama administration's deliberate usage of the ISIL acronym (as opposed to other commonly‐used terms such as ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’ or ‘ISIS’, ‘Islamic State’, ‘IS’, ‘so‐called Islamic State’ and ‘Daesh’) frames the public perception of the threat to avoid engagement with the requirements of strategy and operations. Both the labelling and the approach could be defended as a response to the unique challenge of a transnational group claiming religious and political legitimacy. However, we suggest that the labelling is an evasion of the necessary response, reflecting instead a lack of coherence in strategy and operations—in particular after the Islamic State's lightning offensive in Iraq and expansion in Syria in mid‐2014. This tension between rhetoric, strategy and operations means that ‘ISIL’ does not provide a stable depiction of the Islamic State. While it may draw upon the post‐9/11 depiction of ‘terrorism’, the tag leads to dissonance between official and media representations. The administration's depiction of a considered approach leading to victory has been undermined by the abstraction of ‘ISIL’, which in turn produced strategic ambiguity about the prospect of any political, economic or military challenge to the Islamic State.

The Naming of Evil: Sovereignty, Security and Unlawful Warfare

“…Thus, the image of ISIS as evil was the product both of ISIS' deliberate conduct and war strategy and of western political and media reconstruction of that behavior. Further, the novel designation of the organization as 'ISIL' instead of 'ISIS' was also meant to delegitimize the political ambitions of this entity (Sinifer and Lucas 2016).…”

Action Not Words: Obama’s Opportunity to Transform U.S.-Muslim Relations

“…After significant territorial gains in Syria, it returned its attention to Iraq, taking vast swathes of northern Iraq in early 2014 (Aftandilian 2016). By July of that same year, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the captured territory in Iraq and Syria a caliphate (Frantzman 2017;Oosterveld and Bloem 2017;Siniver and Lucas 2016). Thereafter, ISIS continued to expand its territory and grow its cadre into mid-2015, while the international community slowly fashioned a concerted effort to contain the group (Blanchard and Humud 2017;Frantzman 2017).…”

“…Scholars argue that the manner in which a leader articulates their goals affects policy perceptions and implementation (Siniver and Lucas 2016). While articulating his foreign agenda, Barack Obama was perceived as more conciliatory in tone than George W. Bush (Totman and Hardy 2016).…”