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I have not watched the videos of the execution-style murders of hostages that have quickly catapulted the Islamic State to the top of our international enemies list.

As a journalist, and someone who has worked closely with Christian organizations aiding civilian casualties of war, the killings have angered and repulsed me, but I can’t bring myself to watch them.

I have, however, seen the speeches of the politicians and talking heads from ideological interest groups who have been quick to draw conclusions from the slaughter of noncombatants.  In their view, the beheadings clearly prove the Islamic State and its supporters are evil monsters, so clearly beyond the pale that the U.S. and its allies have no choice but to again escalate our military intervention, hunt down and utterly destroy them as a military and political force.

In the long run, I’m afraid the latter will ultimately prove far more damaging than the former.

Another Rush to War

The beheadings are an especially horrific media spectacle, and their broadcast generates a visceral response whether you’ve seen them or, like me, leave them to the imagination. In their wake, rational policy debate becomes difficult. The sense is, once again, “something” — however ill-defined or ill-advised — has to be done.

The beheadings allow us, even encourage us, to dehumanize those who carried them out. They can’t be anything like us, because we would never do anything like that. They seem to leave us no choice except more military action. And, if polling results are accurate, the war-weary to support renewed calls to battle.

As a result of the beheadings, the need for a new Iraq war is being presented to the public as another black and white policy decision.

But should these beheadings be driving foreign policy to this degree? Is the practice really that foreign to our country and its allies?

Fact Check

Wikipedia’s entry for decapitation, “the separation of the from the body,” is a place to start. “Beheading” refers to “intentional decapitation,” by murder or execution.

“Decapitation has been used as a form of for millennia,” according to Wikipedia.

And the list of countries where beheading was an accepted practice is long and, to me, surprising.

The ancient Greeks and Romans practiced it, as did countries from Japan, Korea, and China, through Scandinavia and Europe.

The played its famous role during the French Revolution, and was used regularly into modern times. The last execution by guillotine in France took place in 1977, not long before capital punishment was outlawed in 1981.

A guillotine-like contraption was also used for executions in Germany since the 17th century, and was used right up until the abolition of capital punishment in West Germany in 1949, and in East Germany in 1966.

The list of countries where beheading was an accepted practice is long and, to me, surprising.

In England, one famous execution by beheading was of , the second wife of King Henry VIII and Queen of England from 1533 to 1536, but the technique was used much more widely. It was considered a “privilege” offered to high-ranking offenders as an alternative to more brutal forms of execution.

And U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia, has continued its use of public beheadings into the modern era. The   the Saudi government beheaded at least eight people last month who had been convicted of “nonlethal crimes,” including adultery and drug dealing.

There’s much more of this grisly history available, but the point is made.  The use of executions by beheading has been all too common over many centuries. We can, and must, look past these brutal beheadings by the Islamic State to appreciate both the complexities and the dangers of another round of military intervention in Iraq and Syria.

Unintended Consequences

The U.S. air campaign against the Islamic State is already yielding unexpected consequences. While the U.S. is trying to push the new Iraqi government toward increased inclusiveness in order to end the brutal sectarian civil war, Shiite militia fighters are reportedly using the military advantage provided by American bombing to spread their own brand of terror in Sunni areas recently freed from Islamic State occupation.

“The unlikely coalition of Kurdish peshmerga fighters, Shiite militias and the U.S. air force won a major victory when it broke a siege of the Shiite Turkmen town of Amirli last week and drove ISIS from 25 nearby Sunni towns and villages,” last week, writing in Lebanon’s Daily Star.

“But the aftermath is far from what the Americans envisioned. Smoke now rises from those Sunni villages, where some houses have been torched by Shiite militias. Others are abandoned, the walls daubed with sectarian slogans.”

A Shiite militia commander told Coles, “There is no way back for them; we will raze their homes to the ground.”

Other reports suggest Shiite militias have to target “suspected” Sunni insurgents  for kidnapping and execution, including.

Bombing, at least if history is a guide, is a pretty self-defeating strategy.

While more bombing can temporarily stall the Islamic State militarily, it doesn’t promise a way out of the trap we’ve created for ourselves in more than two decades of fighting in Iraq.

Bombing Iraq started back in the first Gulf War back in 1990-91, but never provided either a military or political solution, as recounted by retired Air Force Lt. Col. William Astor.

It may have started with arguably good intentions, but things quickly went awry.

“As these and subsequent bombing campaigns damaged and debilitated Iraq, contributing to Saddam’s overthrow in 2003, the Shia majority in that country found common cause with Iran, strengthening one branch of militant Islam,” Astor wrote in a recent essay,

“At the same time, the general destabilization of Iraq from a generation of air war and invasion has led to a Sunni revolt, the strengthening of an al-Qaeda-style movement, and the establishment of a ‘caliphate’ across significant parts of Iraq (and Syria).”

Bombing, at least if history is a guide, is a pretty self-defeating strategy. It doesn’t work when you’re dealing with low level insurgencies and asymmetrical warfare. Guys in pick-up trucks waving guns aren’t really suitable targets for cruise missiles and high-priced, high-tech weaponry. And yet here we go again.

It’s really a no-win situation. We are, once again, the foreign force, the occupiers. As , “if we prevail, we will win no friends, merely new enemies.”

There was a time, before the breakup of the Soviet Union, during which the Cold War arms race was seen as a way to defeat communism by bankrupting the Soviet economy as they tried to keep up with our war machine.

The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been put at , and the “sustained counterterrorism campaign” now being launched promises to break the budget once again, but without much public discussion of cost.

 It’s hard not to wonder whether the strategists of the Islamic State now see the Third Iraq War as a way to bring down the United States by further undermining our already weakened economy.

So what’s next? I certainly don’t know how we can extricate ourselves from this mess, but neither does anyone else, from the president on down.

One thing seems clear. An open-ended commitment to another American war in Iraq and environs isn’t a viable answer.