On August 14, 2014 the first of three videos in a series was released showing the decapitation of US journalist James Foley by ISIS militants. The release of this video did exactly what ISIS insurgents had planned it to do; strike fear into the hearts of westerners and middle-easterners alike. To say that the Middle East is somewhat of a sore subject for the United States in the past few years would be a colossal understatement. ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), also known as ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), has swept through the Levant, a territory in the Eastern Mediterranean that includes Israel, Lebanon, and most importantly, Iraq and Syria.

Over the past several months, news agencies like CNN and The Washington Post have been covering ISIS and its plans to create a new “Islamic State” which includes the Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria. It is easy to gain the wrong impression about the terrorist group, assuming that because the faction has “Islam” in their name that they act in the name of the Muslim faith. This is fundamentally untrue. Islamic officials have publicly stated that they do not condone the violent and savage actions of the militant group and ISIS’s actions go against many of the central beliefs of the Islamic faith.

The president’s response to this crisis will determine the way the general public reacts to this dilemma. High School students don’t typically pay attention to foreign affairs, but when our Commander in Chief takes time out of his immensely busy schedule to address something, even the most apathetic of us can’t help but hear what he has to say. The way that Obama is going about this is right; at least when it comes to keeping up the military pressure on ISIS controlled areas. We need to make sure that they never have a chance to get comfortable and lay their roots any deeper. However, infrastructural revisions will be needed in addition to bombing runs in order to up-root ISIS properly. Right now many thousands of people in the Levant region are suffering under the theocracy that has been established under dictator Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In order to install permanent peace in this region we need to end the tyranny and take a genuine interest in putting together a democratic government that is beneficial to the people of the Iraq and Syria. Unless we can solve many of the fundamental problems that have plagued this region for the past few decades, dictator after dictator will come along and seize power “for the good of Islamic people.”

It’s not uncommon to hear the argument that we need to pull all support out of Iraq and Syria. People making this argument most likely have the memory of our disastrous campaign in Iraq a decade ago fresh in their minds. History teaches us that if we were to completely pull all support from Iraq and Syria, it could be a repeat of the Vietnam War. We left our foreign allies, the Southern Vietnamese, against a surmounting threat that eventually overtook and conquered them.

If we want to keep the Levant a terrorist-free zone, the United States must stay involved. If not for the thousands of innocent Syrian and Iraqi civilian deaths or the beheadings of three western civilians, than for the huge amounts of foreign oil that we would otherwise lose access to completely.