Who is the Intended Audience for the James Foley Beheading Video?

The video showing
the beheading of American journalist James Foley is gruesome in the
extreme.

But for whom is it intended?

Writing for BBC News, former Assistant Secretary of State P.J.
Crowley argues

the video’s primary target is actually the Muslim world, those
who already explicitly or tacitly support the Islamic State or
those, particularly westerners, who may be attracted to join the
twin conflicts. The narrator (who has a British accent) says their
group has been accepted by a larger number of Muslims
worldwide.

Taking a page from its previous experience in Iraq, Islamic
State wants Muslims worldwide to view the American military
campaign as a renewed war against Islam.

The Islamic State is unlikely to sway all that many minds
through this video. Notwithstanding its stunning successes in
recent months, there is little indication Muslims around the world
or even in Iraq want to live in such a repressive society.

But it does reinforce the primary concern that governments have
about the hundreds and perhaps thousands of young men from the
United States and Europe who are now thought to have joined this
“army”.

The experience they gain in Iraq and Syria, and what they think
and what they do once they go home, represents a potential
long-term security threat.

Crowley, who served in the Obama administration until let go
for making comments critical of the government’s handling of
Bradley Manning, says that the president has consistently tried to
narrow the focus of the war ont terror since taking office in 2009.
He continues:

[Obama] has tried to disaggregate the threat into discrete
tactical campaigns—reluctantly forced into overt military action in
Iraq while keeping Syria at arm’s length, a broad international and
regional approach to Nigeria’s Boko Haram, and nominally covert
campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen.

Read
the whole thing.

While I find Crowley convincing that the main audience for the
murder video is the Islamic world, I’m less convinced of his
depiction of Obama trying to narrow U.S. focus in any consistent or
coherent fashion when it comes to combating terrorism.

Obama’s actions in Libya and his attempt to start bombing Syria
without congressional authorization don’t seem in line with that.
Specifically, his statement regarding Iraq that the U.S. goal is to
make sure ISIS “is
not engaging in actions that could cripple a country” sounds
like an open-ended commitment. Those actions and statements may
mean something very different in the Middle East or the broader
Muslim world, but here they sound very much like a president who
has little sense of what to do next.

Given the relatively small numbers of true murderous extremists,
it seems certain that the most effective actions will be very much
on the granular level, of hunting down and killing specific
individuals and groups with a minimum of fanfare. As Crowley notes,
there is no mass constituency for violent, repressive rulers and
taking out such monsters on a case-by-case basis is going to do far
more to win over local populations than broad-based military
actions are likely to do.

For more about Foley, go
here.