Incompetence is a better explanation than conspiracy in most human activity.
Peter BergenRead
Adding to your list of enemies is never a sound strategy, yet ISIS' ferocious campaign against the Shia, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, and Muslims who don't precisely share its views has united every ethnic and religious group in Syria and Iraq against them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Creating enemies can lead to a united front against oppression or violence.
The quote highlights how ISIS's aggressive actions and relentless campaign against various groups have inadvertently fostered unity among those diverse communities in Syria and Iraq. Instead of dividing these groups, ISIS's tactics have resulted in a collective resistance, illustrating that enmity can sometimes galvanize solidarity against a common threat.
Themes
EnemiesUnityConflictIsisDiversity
In practice
Example use cases
During a geopolitical discussion on how conflict can lead to unexpected alliances.
More from Peter Bergen
All quotes →The deep problems that afflict the Middle East are not easy to fix, but they must be dealt with if we are not to see a son of ISIS, or even a grandson of ISIS, developing in the years to come.
Peter BergenRead
The diagnosis that poverty, lack of education, or lack of opportunities have much to do with terrorism requires a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This diagnosis leads to the prognosis that all we need to do to solve the terrorism problem is to create societies that are less poor, better educated and have more opportunities.
Peter BergenRead
If the Arab Spring was a large nail in the coffin of al-Qaeda's ideology, the death of bin Laden was an equally large nail in the coffin of al-Qaeda the organization.
Peter BergenRead
Pakistan's key leaders have succumbed to the assassin's bullet or bomb or the hangman's noose, and the country has seen four military coups since its birth in 1947. Yet the Pakistani polity has limped on.
Peter BergenRead
The Sunni militants that make up ISIS are not the underlying problem in Syria and Iraq, but rather they are a symptom of other deeper problems.
Peter BergenRead
Similar quotes
No state of society or laws can render men so much alike but that education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some differences between them; and though different men may sometimes find it their interest to combine for the same purposes, they will never make it their pleasure.
Alexis De TocquevilleRead
To kill, in war or in any circumstance, creates a silence. It is right that silence should surround the taking of life. After all, the life taken is not ours to take.
Stanley HauerwasRead
And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.
Milan KunderaRead
Many...have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.
Thomas HardyRead
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
George SantayanaRead
There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
Herbert MarcuseRead