Exactly. Putting aside for a moment what a **** Hussein was (like Assad) he showed exactly what it takes to stamp out groups like ISIS...and it wasn't "targeted airstrikes that minimize collateral damage".
So, following this model, we're going to have to basically annex Iraq as a US Commonwealth and maintain a constant and enormous military presence with severe engagement indefinitely. That does not sound like something I am interested in doing.
Constant? Yes. Enormous? Hyperbole. Annex? US Commonwealth? Laughable Hyperbole. Unless you consider us having "annexed" Europe, Japan, and South Korea when we did this after WWII and the Korean War. We have a track record of winning against fanaticism in our past. Both short and long term. Follow that track record.
Don't forget raping and torturing the local populations while taking away most of their civil rights. No problem!
Here he is, striking fear into our adversaries around the world: view-source:http://photos.upi.com/story/t/4974dcc3344c151a90780ecbf5f0195b/Obama-to-throw-Nats-first-pitch.jpg Or, then again, maybe not.
Fighting new wars as if they were WWII is a sure way to get your ass handed to you. Did we not just occupy Iraq with hundreds of thousands of troops for 8 years and have it become the worst foreign policy mistake in American history? I'm pretty sure that just happened. Let's learn from our mistakes, not double down on them.
[rquoter] [FT]Nothing to fear but fear itself? It is not clear that the US economy has suffered much from terrorism, even from the enormity of 9/11’ This article was published before the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris. On a long-haul flight recently, I was jerked from the usual concerns over legroom and a power socket by a memory. I recalled the flight I had taken a few weeks after watching the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapse on television. It was an eerily quiet journey from London to Cape Town. I was in a state of mortal fear. But despite occasional grim reminders that terrorists can kill, my dread then seems foolish to me now. Every violent death is an awful thing but there are many other ways to die a violent death, even in a rich country. Each year, one in 8,000 Americans kill themselves — and each year an American citizen has a one in 9,000 chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident, and a one in 20,000 chance of being a victim of murder or manslaughter. Even in 2001, the chance of an American being killed by a terrorist was less than one in 100,000. In more typical years the figure is one in 10 million. For Americans, terrorists are about as dangerous as lightning strikes. These dry statistics do not diminish the anguish of those who have lost a loved one to a terrorist attack. Terrorism is no trivial thing; but losing a daughter to suicide or a son in a motorcycle accident is not trivial either, and it is something many more people must endure. There are other costs to terrorism, deftly surveyed in Alan Krueger’s 2007 book, What Makes a Terrorist. In 2003, economists Alberto Abadie and Javier Gardeazabal published an estimate of what Eta’s terrorist campaign — which at the time had killed 800 people — might be doing to the economy of the Basque Country. Abadie and Gardeazabal estimated that the attacks had, over time, reduced the gross domestic product of the region by 10 per cent. A year later, Zvi Eckstein and Daniel Tsiddon applied a different method to a different country — Israel — but produced the same estimate of the costs: GDP down by 10 per cent because of terrorist attacks. If correct, these are very large costs. (Even the suspicion of an attack on a Russian passenger plane over Egypt — still unconfirmed as I write — is damaging the tourism industry in Sharm el-Sheikh.) But it is less clear that the US economy has suffered much from terrorism, even from the enormity of 9/11. Official estimates were that the attack on Manhattan destroyed more than $13bn of office space and damaged almost $17bn more. Perhaps 75,000-100,000 jobs were lost in the immediate wake of the attack, particularly in travel and tourism. Yet the received wisdom — summarised in a 2005 book, Resilient City — is that New York bounced back rapidly, recovering the obvious economic losses within about a year. Rebuilding physical infrastructure took longer but in a city such as New York, buildings are demolished and replaced all the time. In the interim, people squeezed into tighter spaces, or companies rented space in suddenly empty hotels while things were sorted out. New York adapted. This is encouraging and should not be entirely surprising. Natural disasters such as earthquakes can do far more damage, and economies recover from them, too. The classic study here is economist George Horwich’s analysis of the impact of the earthquake that devastated Kobe, Japan, in 1995. The earthquake destroyed 100,000 homes and made 300,000 people homeless. Yet 15 months after the disaster, Kobe’s manufacturing output was back to 98 per cent of pre-quake levels. The recovery was not complete: there was no serious effort to resurrect industries that were already under pressure from foreign competition, such as the plastic shoe business. But many of the industries that were flourishing before the disaster were flourishing again in time. Perhaps the true impact of terrorism is psychological — the clue is in the name. A few months after 9/11, a small plane flew into the Pirelli Tower in Milan. The news that this was not a terrorist attack provoked widespread relief. That relief (which I shared) is strange. The Pirelli crash killed three people; knowing that the crash was an accident does not make them any less dead. But it makes their deaths less unsettling. . . . There have been attempts to measure the psychological impact of terrorism. One plausible finding, from a team led by psychologist Roxane Cohen Silver, is that 60 per cent of Americans suffered some symptoms of anxiety in the weeks immediately following the 9/11 attacks — but that figure soon ebbed to 30 per cent within two months and 10 per cent within half a year. The attack seems to have had the same effect on the American psyche as it did on the New York economy: a severe but transitory impact. Despite all the evidence that even the most grotesque acts of terrorism have a transitory effect, it remains a popular tactic. The reason for that is perhaps best summarised in Eric Frank Russell’s 1957 novel, Wasp, about a terrorist. The title refers to the tale of a tiny wasp, armed with a sting it does not even use, causing the deaths of four people. They’re in a car; the driver, agitated by the wasp, crashes and kills them all. The terrorists’ best hope lies in provoking an overreaction. Too often, they succeed. [/rquoter]
Not slightly. You can't expect to overtake ISIS and hold down all sedition in Iraq and Syria without a very large amount of military resources. You cannot compare this situation to a traditional war between nation states (resources, territory, etc), especially not WW2. People really need to throw that out of their vocabulary, immediately. Are the Nazis still organizing, plotting, and recruiting inside Germany? Is Mecha-Hitler being resurrected? Are pockets of the Wehrmacht carrying out attacks on US bases in the region? Did I miss all that? Because that is what you'll be faced with from militant Islamists indefinitely in Iraq and Syria. No matter the amount of effort you put into an occupation, you're never going to successfully irradiate the area of the concept of Jihad with military force. And even if by some miracle you did, you'd have expended so much time and resources doing it (and be committed to that occupation without an end), the result would be a Pyrrhic victory.
What created ISIS was the Sunni's felt once the Americans left Iraq, nothing would stand between the Iraqi Shia government oppressing and killing them in the future. Sunni's turned to the only available allies they had...AQI. AQI went from being a mostly foreign based terror group and morphed into ISIS a mostly Sunni based Iraqi group. All of this because Obama insisted on pulling all the troops without thought to the repercussions leaving would have on the Sunni's and their likely reaction.
AQI, which stood for Al Qaeda In Iraq was "a mostly foreign based terror group"? My estimation of "Al Qaeda in Iraq" (al qaeda, btw, translates to "the base" roughly, IIRC is that since it was called "The Base, in Iraq" is that it was based IN IRAQ. Yours apparently differs. Where do you get your info? Dr. Ben Carson reading Wikipedia for you? You are the caliph of stupid. The man, but-for cause for the creation of today's Iraqi terrorist groups was the invasion of Iraq. The main, but-for cause for the creation of terrorist groups in Afghanistan was the invasion of Afghanistan. Did other causes and actors intervene in ways, foreseen and unforeseen, that assisted in their creation? Of course they did. But it's not remotely debatabe to say that these groups came into being immediately after and because of US (or Soviet, in the case of afghanistan) invasions. Neither of these two facts is controversial in the least.
There you go with your thick conservative head, its all black and white to you. For starters, if you want to help the innocent people caught in the middle of a war like you say you do...maybe you'd want to help the refugees? -Your stance----"**** the refugees" -Indiscriminately bomb the area and make more enemies. "well jeez guys....there is no other solution." It was this same republican warhawk mentality that got us into Iraq and left us with this mess. But hey...you guys probably won't get re-elected for a long time because you still have yet to make sense of it.
please tell me more on my view of the refugees. I haven't brought it up here, so pls tell me. Still waiting for you or DonnyMost to tell me your strategy of taking out ISIS without hurting any non-violent Muslims
https://www.quora.com/How-did-ISIS-form-When-and-where-did-ISIS-begin Now that we've established who uses facts, lets move on. The invasion of Afghanistan created terrorists? Huh. I guess the following happened somehow after 2002. https://factreal.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/list-of-islamic-attacks-against-america/ These are just some of the attacks and all listed were against US interests or personnel. Come on man. Either you're really ignorant or you type your thoughts poorly. I can't believe you think that terrorism against the United States began with the invasions of either Afghanistan or Iraq.
That would probably depend on exactly what you are talking about. As far as going in now and for a time period going forward? I would agree... probably northwards of 50-100k in troop deployments. That's assuming we couldn't arrange for a multi national force of course. But in 2011, President Obama (and his advisors and experts) was considering leaving a force of no more than 10,000 and later considered leaving a force of 1,500 behind in Iraq to help stabilize the country. I would assume 10,000 max would be sufficient in the long term once the country is stabilized. Again, it could be a multinational force if the US led the effort like it has in the past. Why? Because you said so? Were the Japanese as a people any less hostile in 1945 towards us than ISIS is currently? Did they not use some of the same suicide tactics and fight to the death mentality? Does ISIS not have resources (oil and refineries) territory (Mosul, Raqqa, much of Iraq and Syria) under its control? Why do you think after we won the WWII we didn't just pack up and leave? EXACTLY! We didn't pull out till we KNEW that country was de nazified once and for all. We left a presence there (along with the Soviets, Brits and French) to insure it was stomped out and not allowed to come back to power.
No worries DonnyMost. you don't have to answer. Podesta found out for you <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Hillary's strategy to defeat Isis: ✓Defeat Isis in Syria & Iraq ✓Disrupt & dismantle terrorist infrastructure ✓Harden our defenses</p>— John Podesta (@johnpodesta) <a href="https://twitter.com/johnpodesta/status/667375199780806657">November 19, 2015</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> Hillary's first step in defeating ISIS is to defeat ISIS. ****ing brilliant. I am sure all of this will implement the brilliant strategy you lefties have suggested of not killing/offending the good people.
