You have to address the root cause, which no one really wants to address. Everyone wants the quick and easy route or to use platitudes. Everyone wants to point out the problem and decry oppression of culture, but no one really wants to see the truth and actually address the root causes. And because of that, this thing will continue to spiral deeper and deeper. ISIS won't be the last terrorist organization, and just like ISIS made Al Qaeda seem like a bunny rabbit, the next iteration will be that much worse. It isn't just that there is extremism, the extremism is continually getting MORE extreme. People are ignoring the trend and just whitewashing answers over the whole thing. That's the travesty.
One thing clear is that going and deposing Asad no matter how much Saudi Arabia, Israel and their buds the neo-cons want will just lead to another Iraq style mess. The region has its own demons partly created by our meddling and history of selfish imperialism, but not one thing we have done in the last thirty has contributed to peace or pacifying those demons. Let the folks in the region fight it out with their own resources. Hopefully we can cut off arms to all sides. Ignore those who will immediate talk of "isolationism or Neville Chamberlain and Hitler. These types would have undoubtedly have had us involved in a nuclear war or two by now. Their nutty militarism has cost the average American money and for a fairly small group their lives, their health, their marriages. The only Americans who have truly gained are the military industrial complex, and select other grups such as the cable news stations, some politicians and others that traffic in fear.
If you look at the rise of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS they all share one thing in common: they were born out of a civil war where each side had extremists supported by outside Islamic countries. That should tell you something right there. These groups didn't just spring up magically, they were created and sponsored by state actors to fight against a secular gov't. Assad isn't the key anymore. The key is getting religious sects invested in fighting against extremists of their own sects. It's doable as General Petraeus has shown. You have to give each sect enough power that they have incentive to go against the extremists in their own yard.
Chaos always increases over the long run. Big countries are being split by autonomy movements, Muslims are dividing into more sects, the guerilla units are splitting down to the warlord level. And adding energy to the system via more available firepower just makes the reactions faster and more common. I don't think there is an end until all the energy is evenly distributed, though I can imagine what that looks like. Maybe 100,000 small states equally armed with only mini-clashes and no world wars? You know right now a lot less people are dying than when the great powers clash. This looks bad but there aren't atrocities happening on the million people scale or the existential scale for entire civilizations and that is certainly our past history, Hunker down, this is human life on the Planet Earth.
I meant energy more in the Entropy sense than the real world. I think human nature follows sort of the same principles as the rest of the Universe. Though you do lead to a point: that if all energy were equal ( like food, shelter ) their wouldn't be conflict to attain it. Think Star Trek, if all everyone had to do to get what they wanted was punch code in to a replicator, no one would be using violence to obtain things.
As always, there is a right way to do something and a wrong way to do it. Assad can be successfully deposed, but it would require a long term commitment to Syria....and the people of America are way to weak minded for that unfortunately so maybe it's best if we go the route of isolationism and pull back within our borders letting the rest of the world go to hell. France seems motivated, so maybe they topple Assad and ISIS making Syria a French colony again.
I'm still in a retributive haze about the attacks on Paris and had a thought yesterday. Please tell me if I'm completely wrong, but the best any of us can do right now is spit into the wind with our ideas. I visited the Buchenwald memorial two years ago and saw the remnants of the horrible concentration camp. The museum on the premises mentions how, after the camp was liberated, American troops forced residents of the nearby town of Weimar to clean up and dispose of the dead bodies of prisoners. The implication of this command was that it was unlikely the townspeople in Weimar, being so close to the camp, were ignorant of what was happening there for so many years. Their complicity and complacency allowed the Nazi regime to murder tens of thousands of people within a few kilometers of their homes. Their silence on the vilification of Jews allowed the Holocaust to continue as a matter of national policy. But, perhaps because the camp was hidden deep inside of a forest, it wasn't until the German people were forced to put their hands onto the rotting flesh of the dead that the Holocaust ceased being conceptual and instead became tangible. There's a photo floating around of the aftermath of the attack on Bataclan last Friday. The club's floor is littered with blood, body parts and human viscera. It's as horrific as you can imagine it would be. I'm sure that forensics teams carefully swept the area and began piecing together the carnage of that evening. But, I thought that once the scene was deemed for cleaning, why not round up as many known radical Islamists in Paris and force them to clean up the attack scene under armed guard, much like the Germans were forced to pick up the bodies of Jewish victims at Buchenwald? If French intelligence were aware of the attackers before Friday, and knew that they were French-born radicals, they certainly know of more in the city of Paris. Why not force them to come face-to-face with the bloody aftermath of an act that, perhaps, is still conceptual in their minds? If they're truly radicalized through the sermons of hateful clerics and online incubators, they should be forced to feel and touch the bloody reality they want to take part in so badly. Maybe some of them would be too far gone for introspection, but maybe some of them would see that the murder of innocents is not for them after they've been forced to wade in their blood. Again, I could be wrong. I'm just trying to wrap my head around it and make sense of a horrible situation.
The only way to truly defeat Isis is to uncover an ancient capsule in Mecca filled with extensive pungent body odor. It's like kryptonite for them. They have been destroying ancient artifacts in hope that this anti-Isis weapon is also destroyed and never found by their enemies.
Why do young Iraqi men join ISIS. Some interviews with captured prisoners. These guys are somewhat hard to find since many of our allies just routinely kill any ISIS fighters they capture. The guys interviewed in the presence of one of our generals who used to be in the occupation of Iraq give the answers he tended to get when interviewing prisoners there. Our invasion of and occcupation of Iraq destroyed their childhoods and deprived them of their dignity. http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/] ******* These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.
In short, because the US didn't finish the job. They just came in, blew stuff up and left...which is what the world did in Germany during WW1 and is why young German men joined the Nazi party. When you fail to finish the job, it breeds extremism.
It wasn't because of the war, it was because of the dishonor and great cost of the peace that came after. That's why General Marshall had a new idea after WW2. Today he'd be called a communist.
Sticking around long enough to provide security and stability until the country can be re-built and can stand on its own.
Bobby I think your idea of a long term commitment is excess of 100 plus years of occupation/colonialism. I suspect that this flows from your knowledge that you personally would submit to an occupation or being colonialized by a foreign power and would go along to get along. So sad the projection of your own weakness and submission to authority onto Americans as a whole. You are most likely seeking an American leader with an iron fist to whip the American people into shape also.
I think it's sad that you seem to think that Arabs are too stupid to be able to use help from a foreign superpower to make a better country for themselves. I wonder where this apparent racism comes from? Germans and Japanese were certainly able to do so...but I guess you just think those in the middle east are nothing but backwards goat raping morons. Personally, I see them as people just the same as any other and if they are provided with safety and security, they can create a very prosperous nation.... so I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
