From
yesterday's "Face the Nation" transcript. Peggy Noonan threw something forth as an idea — or as the transcript has it "fourthism (ph) idea":
[S]uppose ISIS hit the United States, as everybody fears. What would we all be thinking the next day was absolutely the right, urgent, strong thing to do?... What would that look like to us? And what would be the proper response at this point?
WaPo's David Ignatius gave this answer:
I -- certainly if we're hit directly, the public will support and even demand retaliation. I think there -- there are two roots [SHOULD READ: routes] that -- that we would follow in that case and should think about following now. One is to augment the direct action strikes that our special forces are already making every day inside Syria and Iraq. We are killing dozens of people who get back in touch with would-be attackers in the United States, who come in on -- on social media. And if you call -- if you get a call back, if you're one of those people who's trying to direct an operation, we'll try to kill you. And so -- you know, that's already going on. It should -- it should be augmented. The second, harder question is, whether to add ground troops. I mean from all the talk from McCain and Graham [who were on the show earlier], there is not an Arab ground force that can clear Raqqa or any of these places reliably. Are we going to provide that? Will we do that with NATO, with the -- with air -- a coalition of Arabs? Those are the kinds of questions that we would ask the next day and we should ask now.
In short, what we'd do then is what we should do now.
Posts
99 comments:
When, not if, ISIS attacks US mainland, the first thing to do will be to wait until our current Commander in Chief is replaced, because nothing will change in policy or actions until that happens.
Thanks, Obama, for your consistency in fighting terrorism. It has made the world, from Afghanistan to Africa, from Norway to the US, realize your moral superiority to the rest of us, who rather than respect those who wish to destroy us, simply wish to stop them from doing so.
There is no sign at present that Obama is doing anything serious about ISIS. The RoE are ridiculous. 75% of sorties are not allowed to use their weapons for fear of "collateral damage." The story about warning the oil truck drivers is only part of it. We did not attack the trucks earlier because they were supposedly supplying oil to cities and we did not want to hurt the residents.
Obama is not serious and is an ally of Iran which supports Assad. This is all theater.
His military has been purged of generals who want to fight and all that is left is political generals who tell him what he wants to gear.
Ignatius should have mentioned that 'direct action strikes' will inevitably result in civilian casualties, possibly civilian casualties that are too horrific or too unconscionable to bear unless we have suffered a Paris or Mumbai style attack.
Send in the realist Putin. He has a resolve to win. He even talks like Trump about the very real danger from the ugly hatred coming from Islamic believers in the areas of the old Caliphate that Turks ruled as a base for world raiding extending the allah religion BS as a cover story for the cruelest murder of Christian forces and industrialized kidnapping of Christians to be their sold slaves.
I don't get the answer.
We KNOW these answers.
No, there isn't an Arab state who will deal with ISIS. No, NATO won't do much, either. It is all on us. Period.
It's down to "If Europe will commit suicide by importing them, how is it OUR concern?"
For a guy with all his credentials, and despite all the novels he's written, I'd have to say David Ignatius is neither particularly creative nor particularly able to think outside a very narrow box.
One word:
Arclight
aka B-52H strikes on Raqqa. As I recall a single B-52H can carry around 140 - 500lb bombs
Make it 9 H's for a load of 1260 bombs
alternately a 10k glassy hole
PS: Apparently the WH Rules of engagement today put a lawyer in the firing loop on every bomb dropped over Syria resulting in 3/4 of our sorties never dropping anything...
More bombs and baby parts!
Michael K,
"His military has been purged of generals who want to fight and all that is left is political generals who tell him what he wants to gear [sic."
Really? Who are these generals who want to fight who have been purged? I keep hearing conservatives say this, but I can never seem to get more than one name out of them- sometimes two, although one of them was retired.
A Paris type attack in the US and Donald Trump is the next president. All immigration -- student visas, travel visas, refugees, work visas --- from Muslim run countries will be halted. All Muslim activists in the US will be ignored and Muslims will be shunned.
We could wipe out ISIS in 6 months with <20k troops - if we were willing to do what it takes to win. Since we're obviously not it's better we don't try.
Leftists everywhere:
The answer is more taxes, more regulations and more power to the state.
What was the question?
Hillary would tell us to bow to her UCK buddies, and Bernie would blame the crusades.
Bernie and Hillary would call for more glacier viewings and windmills.
As much as I hate to admit it, Michael K is spot-on.
I mean from all the talk from McCain and Graham [who were on the show earlier], there is not an Arab ground force that can clear Raqqa or any of these places reliably.
There is one, but it won't be used.
Jordan's Army is head and shoulders above the rest
non-Arab? The Kurds of course
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Jordanian_Army.png
There are nearly 1,000 active FBI investigations of ISIS here in the US.
It’s not all about going somewhere else to fight this battle anymore.
Retaliation would most likely be composed of military attacks along with a ban on Muslim immigration and a serious effort to remove and deport foreign born Muslim radical elements from the US.
Why do journalists sit around filming themselves talking about things that they arent experts on as if they are?
I find it fascinating how these people talk to very important, knowledgeable, intelligent people in the military or other areas and then they think they know as much as those they've interviewed.
But even more fascinating is the people behind the scenes agree. If I produced a show like face the Nation, why would I want to hear from David Ignatius when I could hear from a general instead?
"In short, what we'd do then is what we should do now."
Except that we should admit more Muslims. That will teach ISIS not to attack us.
I'd assume that over the time period of a military campaign, potential collateral damage is inversely proportional to the amount of collateral damage risk you currently take in targeting the enemy.
That is, by targeting the actual enemy you start a process of de-collateralization.
Conversely, by not incurring that risk now, you increase the collateral damage risk associated with any future military action.
I think that in no small way explains the Obama policy failure vis-a-vis ISIS.
"the WH Rules of engagement today put a lawyer in the firing loop on every bomb "
Maybe we could ship 10,000 lawyers to Syria. That would really fuck them up. Six months later we could walk in.
" I keep hearing conservatives say this, but I can never seem to get more than one name out of them- sometimes two, although one of them was retired."
The poor lefties have to have their hands held. Start with McChrystal and look at every general who has retired since then.
"No, there isn't an Arab state who will deal with ISIS. No, NATO won't do much, either. It is all on us. Period."
'Twas ever thus.
"It's down to "If Europe will commit suicide by importing them, how is it OUR concern?"
Because if Fortress America wasn't a viable strategy in 1915, it certainly isn't in 2015.
Bobby said...
Really? Who are these generals who want to fight who have been purged?
LTG Mike Flynn, the ex-DIA Chief
Gen Stan McChrystal, CG A-Stan
In addition to striking back, we need to find out how they got into the country. If they walked across our porous borders left largely unguarded by Obama or were brought here as part of Obama's Syrian refugee resettlement program, you'll see a cry to actually enforce our borders like you've never heard before. Candidates like Trump who've made illegal immigration an issue will surge at the polls.
If they're home grown, like that kid who used a knife to attack college students a few weeks ago, then that's a different problem with a different solution.
Day of Paris attacks, Bernie's Twit feed had I beluieve one reference to that..something akin to "we must defeat Isis", then went on with usual shiite.
If it happened here, maybe he'd light a roll of Berno for effect and accidentally light his hair on fire. Maybe he'd call for lights out.
Yeah, so basically, the challenge here for the Obama White House is that they view the IS problem set not in the context of it being a "counter-terrorism" campaign, but in what professionals call a "humanitarian intervention"-- that is, they see the horrors that Daesh is committing on the local population and believe that the international community should intervene in order to save lives [an increasingly isolated Samantha Powers is probably the only member of his national security coterie who would say we "must" rather than "should" intervene, which is very important in a different context].
So having made that determination, they're having a very hard time justifying a Russian-style aerial bombardment campaign that would flatten, say, Raqqa, killing thousands of innocent civilians and merely substituting IS-caused deaths with US-caused deaths. As they see it, that would defeat the very purpose of intervening.
At the same time (some due to ideology, some due to domestic political purposes), they reject the introduction of US conventional ground troops- which is really the only practical alternative to a solution of rapidly reducing Daesh fighters- on the grounds that it would not be a long-term solution. That is, since we've deemed local proxy forces unreliable and unable to "hold" any territorial gains, US forces would drive out Daesh only so long as US troops remained. And so, after one-year of decisive ground combat operations, the US would spend billions and suffer dozens (perhaps hundreds) of casualties, only to withdraw and leave behind a vacuum that would, in some time thereafter, likely be filled by Daesh or some Daesh successor.
Now there's some logical problems with this approach- for starters, one could easily argue that reducing Daesh to a point where remaining Assad and anti-Assad forces would be strong enough to fight off IS (while remaining in a civil war against each other) would be a "win" of sorts (albeit, not an absolute one). That is, just taking out Daesh and leaving behind a civil war might very well be preferable to the current situation, which is a civil war with a strong Daesh as party to the conflict. But that is further complicated by the presence of Russia, who would presumably have no problems using their air power to keep Assad in power at great humanitarian cost to the population (which is, after all, what they're doing now), and so again, we're back to not having a clean solution to this complex emergency.
None of this should be read as my endorsement of or opposition to current US security policy- I won't get into that, my duty is to execute government policy whether I agree with it or not, so it's irrelevant to this discussion anyway.
The correct, pithy response would be to bomb them until the rubble bounces, then pump their countries dry of oil, and store it in our depleted strategic reserve. The candidate who promises that will win.
The Drill Sgt,
"Jordan's Army is head and shoulders above the rest"
I served three tours alongside Jordan's TF Nashmi in Afghanistan, where they were part of our Coalition in two Provinces (Logar and Helmand). I went on numerous mounted and dismounted patrols with them. They brought some very interesting capabilities to the battlespace there and I appreciated the contributions of all our Coalition partners, but in terms of conventional fighting- they're probably not as good as you think.
It's true that they're better than the other Arab conventional militaries, but that's not saying a whole lot. Perhaps with appropriate augmentation (chiefly, fire support, C4ISR, and mobility engineering), they could win some battles, but it would be costly, and Jordan doesn't have the political will to support that, anyway, so it's a moot point.
But don't take any further actions domestically?
Just keep the borders wide open, and keep pretending that there is no support for ISIS from Muslims in the U.S.?
Michael K,
"The poor lefties have to have their hands held. Start with McChrystal and look at every general who has retired since then."
Not everyone who disagrees with you is automatically a leftie; I most certainly am not. But I will take your reply as evidence that you're just parroting other people's talking points and don't really know what you're talking about.
The Drill SGT,
LTG Mike Flynn, the ex-DIA Chief
Gen Stan McChrystal, CG A-Stan
I'm a great fan of Mike Flynn- his CNAS article advocating that the military intelligence community needed to adopt population-centric instead of enemy-centric models was spot on and something that the Army in particular needed to hear (and, frankly, refuses to accept to this day). But keep in mind he was Military Intelligence- as I'm sure you know, the Army typically promotes only Combat Arms officers (infantry, armor, artillery) into their four-star positions and it's unlikely they would advance a non-warfighter as a candidate for Combatant Command. His career had essentially culminated, which was why he was so willing to say what needed to be said.
Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, CENTCOM commander and outspoken critic of the Obama administration, is another fighting general who was purged.
See http://nypost.com/2013/01/24/exit-another-fighting-gen/
The question is, what do presidential candidates think about how to respond to a Paris style attack here, and the answer from some journalists is, bomb somewhere else? Don't even ask the candidates, ask the electron-stained wretches? A domestic response isn't even thought of, doesn't even enter their mind or discourse.
The ultimate levels of Dumb are accessible only to those with certified high IQs.
Tell Turkey to get bent and start arming the Kurds on a scale large enough to make them a state.
Roughtcoat,
Mattis is great, but he had 44 years of service when he retired. He'd only even stuck around through JFCOM command because he was being considered to replace Conway as Commandant- that went to Amos, and instead he got CENTCOM when Petraeus dropped down from CENTCOM to ISAF. He was definitely marginalized as CENTCOM commander (though this was, at least in the Afghanistan part, the product of having Dave Petraeus as his "subordinate"), but timing alone made it clear that there's no way he was going to be in consideration for a third COCOM command.
Per Bernie, an attack by ISIS on U.S. soil would just prove that the AGW alarmists were right all along. The attack will be blamed, ultimately, on climate change deniers and a greater push made to lock such people up. As the NY Times argues, climate change deniers are bringing on the next holocaust. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/opinion/sunday/the-next-genocide.html?emc=eta1 If we can just lock up the deniers and put them in camps -- call this the "Climate Solution" -- then everything will be nice again. The rise of the oceans will begin to slow and our planet began to heal. . . that will be the moment when we end the war and secure our nation.
Tim Maguire,
But the Kurds have indicated that they're not interested in clearing and holding Arab-dominated villages. For one thing, they see that as an Arab problem. For a second, it would put them in the position of having to occupy ethnically Arab villages and they're firmly convinced (and probably rightly so) that Arab nationalism would make that untenable. Thirdly, politically and diplomatically, they're seeking more of a cooperative relationship and mutual co-existence with the Turks (and Baghdad, for that matter) rather than outright independence.
The Kurds absolutely have a role in defeating Daesh in Iraq and Syria. But they probably won't be liberating all of Syria for us. They're just not interested in it.
What David Ignatius actually thinks we should do in the event of an ISIS attack on the continental US, is suspend the 22nd Amendment so Obama can be elected a third time. And that is also what David Ignatius thinks we should do if ISIS doesn't attack the continental US. It is, in fact, the only thought that ever rattles around in his empty skull. Why anyone pays any attention to that blathering hack is a stone mystery to me.
As to what we should actually do, it doesn't matter, we aren't going to do it. We are nowhere near mad enough yet. They are going to kill a lot more of us, before we get mad enough to get serious about dealing with the Muslim problem. They are going to take Americans hostage, and torture them to death on video. They are going to shoot missiles at airplanes. They are going to murder hundreds with machine guns. They are going to set off bombs in crowds. And yes, the Muslims in NJ will cheer each time it happens. Allahu akbar!
What I am going to do, is start practicing with my hand gun. I have always figured, that about 90 percent of the time you need a gun, you don't actually need to hit anything with it. The asshole who is bothering you thinks you are unarmed. When he discovers his mistake, he will go away. Rapidly.
But I don't think that will work on a Muslim.
Nerobama would take time away from fiddling to declare martial law. He could then focus on repressing Americans while continuing to plunder the country's wealth on behalf of his friends and his ideology. The candidates don't matter. Elections will be cancelled until further notice.
Second order of business: Reaffirm the importance of climate change and it's cause and effect relationship to terrorism.
"The Foreign Minister of Germany once said to me 'Your country does not dare do anything against Germany, because we have in your country 500,000 German reservists who will rise in arms against your government if you dare to make a move against Germany.' Well, I told him that that might be so, but that we had 500,001 lamp posts in this country, and that that was where the reservists would be hanging the day after they tried to rise."
James W. Gerard, Ambassador to Germany, 1913-1917
If there is a substantial and successful terrorist attack here in our country, on the scale of a 9/11, the latent police state in which we presently live will immediately become the overt police state that we are already becoming...although only in increments at present.
mccullough: A Paris type attack in the US and Donald Trump is the next president. All immigration -- student visas, travel visas, refugees, work visas --- from Muslim run countries will be halted. All Muslim activists in the US will be ignored and Muslims will be shunned.
Huh? More like: "All immigration -- student visas, travel visas, refugees, work visas -- from Muslim countries, after a brief restictive blip, will be ramped up. Muslim activists will have their butts smooched more than ever by the MSM, academia, and the U.S. government, and all non-Muslims will be subjected to more, and more obnoxious, haranguing about their 'Islamophobia', than ever before."
That's pretty much what came to pass in the years after 9/11, so why would a "Paris type attack" result in any of the things you mentioned?
There is some non-zero probability that the US will be struck by foreign terrorists. We can act like hysterical maniacs and invade random middle east countries, running our finances and our military into the ground, or, we can act like adults and attempt to minimize the risk though a combination of targeted strikes and diplomacy.
Not a hard choice when you think about it.
"Not a hard choice when you think about it."
Depends on whether you are a fool.
" But I will take your reply as evidence that you're just parroting other people's talking points and don't really know what you're talking about."
Boy, you sure sound like a leftie. I tried but the bullshit seems to be impermeable.
The obvious baseline for the solution is the Counterinsurgency "Surge" that defeated AQI in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reports that Iraqis don't believe the US wants to defeat ISIS in light of their recent memory of the US defeat of AQI.
"There is some non-zero probability that the US will be struck by foreign terrorists. We can act like hysterical maniacs and invade random middle east countries, running our finances and our military into the ground, or, we can act like adults and attempt to minimize the risk though a combination of targeted strikes and diplomacy.
"Not a hard choice when you think about it."
The "wrong" choice will be made, as it will be the right choice for those in power.
AReasonableMan said...
"We can act like hysterical maniacs and invade random middle east countries, running our finances and our military into the ground, or, we can act like adults and attempt to minimize the risk though a combination of targeted strikes and diplomacy.
Not a hard choice when you think about it."
No, but a false one. Most of the Paris killers came from a Muslim slum in Belgium. The Muslims festering there had been imported by the Belgian government, for reasons no one can quite determine. It was a given that some percentage of them would become "radicalized", and would attack the society that supported them. I am sure it won't be long before the Muslims of France return the favor to their Belgian confreres. As we all know, being raised a Muslim makes you prone to that sort of thing. That's why there are so many of them around. They kill whatever does not kill them.
I can think of lots of things we could do to avoid having that happen here. None of them involve "diplomacy", although a few "targeted strikes" might play a role. The most important thing is to keep them out, and suppress the ones already here. Stop importing people whose fundamental worldview makes them want to kill us all. Close the terrorist recruitment centers that the Saudis are financing all over our country.
Blogger Lauderdale Vet said...
There are nearly 1,000 active FBI investigations of ISIS here in the US.
--
I'm still surprised how little mention that gets. of course, doesn't mean all those are dangerous..or that the number is true..but neither is it assurance there aren't potentially many cases of evading any scrutiny.
Again...all that seems worthy of a lot of public discussion about now.
or, we can act like adults and attempt to minimize the risk though a combination of targeted strikes and diplomacy.
How has diplomacy worked with AlQueda, Taliban and ISIL so far? Strikes are usually targeted. We found out early on that just shooting cannons an dropping bomb randomly doesn't work out real well.
Robert Cook said...
If there is a substantial and successful terrorist attack here in our country, on the scale of a 9/11, the latent police state in which we presently live will immediately become the overt police state that we are already becoming...although only in increments at present.
Boo!
oderint dum metuant
("let them hate, so long as they fear")
- a Roman Emperor
The major problem with the Obama WH is that they have convinced our enemies that they have nothing to fear by attacking us.
Michael K,
"Boy, you sure sound like a leftie. I tried but the bullshit seems to be impermeable."
Hahaha... Okay, so the only name you could throw out was McChrystal and yet you "know" Obama has "purged all the generals that want to fight and all that is left are political generals who tell him what he wants to hear"?
So let's try the second part of that -- who are these political generals who only tell the President what he wants to hear?
JCS Chair Gen. Joe Dunford, USMC?
CENTCOM Commander, Gen. Lloyd Austin, USA?
ISAF Commander, Gen. John Campbell, USA?
SOCOM Commander, Gen. Joe Votel, USA?
AFRICOM Commander, Gen. David Rodriguez, USA?
PACOM Commander, Adm. Harry Harris, USN?
None of those four-stars are warfighters and all of them only tell the President what he wants to hear -- that's your thesis?
AReasonableMan,
"or, we can act like adults and attempt to minimize the risk though a combination of targeted strikes and diplomacy.
Not a hard choice when you think about it."
Provided that those targeted strikes only kill their intended targets and anyone who happens to be with them, right? I mean, we wouldn't want to violate anyone's civil rights and put them in Guantanamo, right?
Walter said:
> of course, doesn't mean all those are dangerous..or that the number is true..
This is where I found that number, and I agree, I think it's pretty attention-worthy.
Eric,
"The obvious baseline for the solution is the Counterinsurgency "Surge" that defeated AQI in Operation Iraqi Freedom."
And that could certainly be a starting point, but the situations are not as congruous as we'd like. For starters, COIN- which is defined as "military or political action taken against the activities of guerrillas or revolutionaries"- is all about promoting the legitimacy of the central government; in Syria, our guys are the revolutionaries, and the cnetral government is Assad and his Alawites. There's not yet a political framework for the opposition forces to establish a new government that would be amenable to them. In other words, how would you promote the legitimacy of institutions that don't even exist? We'd have to rewrite FM 3-24 on the fly.
A second factor that led to the success of the Surge was the Anbar Awakening which, in short, occurred when the indigenous Iraqi Sunni turned on the non-Iraqi Sunni foreign fighters (AQI). They never had a marriage made in heaven (the Iraqi Sunni were primarily ex-Baathist socialists and never really onboard with the Islamist goals of AQI), so when US Army and USMC commanders were able to promise them pay and political support if they switched sides, they did. In Syria, we're already partnered with the non-Islamist Sunni parties (that's called the Free Syrian Army). There's almost certainly some candidates with Daesh who would switch sides if they believed we could guarantee to back them, but- frankly speaking- after what we did in Iraq in 2011, it might be difficult to convince them that we wouldn't bail on them again in the future.
A third factor that contributed to the overall success of the Surge was the Muqatda al-Sadr overreach in Karbala in the summer of 2007, when his Jaysh-al-Mahdi accidentally shot up a bunch of pilgrims, turned Shi'a political opinion against him and forced him to temporarily stand down his militia (which gave al-Maliki's Dawa the space to go after him, which they did). Not sure if we can expect to see something like that happen here.
The remaining factors- and there's a myriad of them (nothing frustrates me more than Americans thinking "the Surge" was only about the introduction of 30,000 more troops on the ground)- probably line up fairly well.
I'm not saying it's not a good starting point- I am saying simply thinking "it worked once means therefore it will work anywhere we apply it, so let's just do it again!" is a false lesson that Che Guevara learned in Africa and (especially) Bolivia, and that we've probably come to realize from Afghanistan. Perhaps a better starting point on which to base the model would be the Downing Plan.
Could somebody, anybody, explain to me why Hillary, Kerry, and Obama all think we should be trying to overthrow Assad? WTF are we doing there? We should be joining the Russians and supporting this guy. Wasn't that the lesson of Iraq?
Bobby,
From your contributions to this thread and others, it is fairly clear that you are employed by an organization based in DC, and devote your working hours to efforts to counter terrorism. This puts you in an excellent position to puncture the bubbles of the rest of us with detailed information about those efforts. Which is fine as far as it goes, but you don't seem to be willing to go beyond popping bubbles. If your posts advocate anything, it would seem to be more of the same. You seem to be saying that what we are doing now is about all we can do, and perhaps all we need to do.
Or do I misunderstand your position?
tim in vermont,
"Could somebody, anybody, explain to me why Hillary, Kerry, and Obama all think we should be trying to overthrow Assad?"
Israel has asked this same question since the very beginning- even back when Daesh was not a significant party and the only call overthrow Assad was coming from John McCain. I believe the Obama Administration's reasoning is that the Alawites, being just 12% of the population, represented an unviable regime over the long-term, and that a democratic solution would sweep a more inclusive government into power (this was certainly what the Bush Administration believed when they initiated MEP). Some of this is an unfortunate ignorance of the complexity of the Ba'ath Party coalition that ruled Syria continuously from 1963 -- it was never just about the Alawites, as it was organized as a Socialist party, and included secular Arabs of all stripes, including many Christians, as well as the Druze (of course, the Alawites were first among equals). However, it's unlikely that Assad can put this coalition back together again since, you know, he gassed them. On the other hand, I suppose it's possible that some underling, not connected with the more recent repression, could knock off Assad and glue the egg back together- I don't know.
1. Be legally armed and shoot down terrorists.
2. Declare Islam a criminal-terrorist ideology (As based on its unchangeable teachings and 1400-year history of violence) and list all Mosques and Muslim associations/groups (eg CAIR) in the same class/category as the KKK and various NAZI groups.
Jupiter,
" If your posts advocate anything, it would seem to be more of the same. You seem to be saying that what we are doing now is about all we can do, and perhaps all we need to do."
No, I wouldn't say that. Basically, I would say that I'm not really sure what the right policy is, but I'm pretty sure (a) it's not what we're doing now and (b) I have a hard time believing that people who don't even know the basic facts about the region can articulate the right policy in one sentence (especially when they say they know more than do the generals). (a) is partially derived from the fact that I'm acquainted with many of the US officials developing and implementing policy and I believe they are, to use the technical term, dipshits.
Syria in many ways is one of the great case studies to add to recent war history studies in what can happen with/without external intervention.
In Iraq the U.S. overthrew a government, spent 5+ years putting in place another government, and then another 5+ years supporting that fledgling government's stability - all in the face of enormous internal and external opposition forces. Kind of impressive, really, what we accomplished there in the face of the level of determined foes.
In Libya, we overthrew a leader without a clear plan and let the country dissolve into anarchy.
In Syria, we specifically did not overthrow the leader or government and our support to the resistance was meaningless. We left a power vacuum when we stated a red line was crossed but showed a lack of will or strategy, which has been filled by a concerning Iran/Russian alliance.
This is just very recent middle east history to add to all of the other times we supported an existing dictator or worked to overthrow them.
The irony, the true irony, is that the greatest stability and nation-level prosperity I'm aware of in "recent" history when a strong nation intervenes in a weak nation is the colonialism model.
Based off history alone, it looks like a colonialism + strong protection of rights package would offer the best bet for turning a desperate, dictator run country into a prospering global entity.
But my guess is I'd be called neoconservative for thinking that.
Bobby said;
"On the other hand, I suppose it's possible that some underling, not connected with the more recent repression, could knock off Assad and glue the egg back together- I don't know."
David Goldman, who uses the pen name Spengler, has suggested that in a state like Syria, cobbled together from several minority ethnic groups and one majority, stability is only possible if one of the minorities, e.g. the Alawites, is in control. His reasoning seems to be, that the other minorities will trust the Alawites precisely because the Alawites need the other minorities to counterbalance the majority Arab Sunnis. In his view, the alternative to Alawite rule is Arab Sunni rule, which is anathema to the Kurds, Alawites and Shias.
I don't know, Goldman is clever. Sometimes too clever. Interesting to think about what this analysis portends for the increasingly fragmented American polity.
James Pawlak said...
"1. Be legally armed and shoot down terrorists.
2. Declare Islam a criminal-terrorist ideology (As based on its unchangeable teachings and 1400-year history of violence) and list all Mosques and Muslim associations/groups (eg CAIR) in the same class/category as the KKK and various NAZI groups."
Yeah, I agree. The difficulty is that American political thought places a very high value on separation of Church and State, which makes most thoughtful Americans, conservative or otherwise, extremely reluctant even to consider suppressing something that calls itself a religion. That's why I think we will need to get a lot madder before we do anything effective about the problem. It sickens me to consider what is going to have to happen before we get that mad. After won't be pretty, either. Hard cases make bad law, and this a very hard case.
garage mahal: "More bombs and baby parts"
Hmmm. That's five words too many.
Too properly mask your ignorance, I would strongly recommend you keep your word-count-per-blog-post within this range: -1 > n > 1, where "n"=garagie-word-count.
I can do no more for you.
You're welcome.
Drago?
You think your statement includes any valid values?
Bobby,
The CentCOM commander denies he was altering intelligence. Do you believe him ?
I don't.
I don't want to go through your list but the AfriCOM commander Carter Ham was retired pretty quickly.
Obama's Sec Def and CIA Director don;t have anything good to say about his efforts with the Middle East.
I don't want to get into a debate with someone who seems to have an agenda.
"A Paris type attack in the US and ..."
And a great cry will arise from the MSM, Oh, but just think of the the poor Muslims!
"Could somebody, anybody, explain to me why Hillary, Kerry, and Obama all think we should be trying to overthrow Assad?"
Could somebody, anybody, explain why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice all thought we should have overthrown Hussein? Tipping that first domino led to the subsequent ongoing catastrophe in the region.
Bobby said...
Michael K,
"Boy, you sure sound like a leftie. I tried but the bullshit seems to be impermeable."
Hahaha... Okay, so the only name you could throw out was McChrystal and yet you "know" Obama has "purged all the generals that want to fight and all that is left are political generals who tell him what he wants to hear"?
So let's try the second part of that -- who are these political generals who only tell the President what he wants to hear?
JCS Chair Gen. Joe Dunford, USMC?
CENTCOM Commander, Gen. Lloyd Austin, USA?
ISAF Commander, Gen. John Campbell, USA?
SOCOM Commander, Gen. Joe Votel, USA?
AFRICOM Commander, Gen. David Rodriguez, USA?
PACOM Commander, Adm. Harry Harris, USN?
None of those four-stars are warfighters and all of them only tell the President what he wants to hear -- that's your thesis?
Except he doesn't talk to those guys every day. He talks to the Diretor of National Intelligence who talks to those guys every day. He directed the appropriate intelligence agencies involved with the middle east to play down the increase of ISIL activity in the daily presidential breifings,
That doesn't really matter though because Obama has missed more thn half of his daily presidential briefings.
Golf or something.
Jupiter,
"David Goldman, who uses the pen name Spengler, has suggested that in a state like Syria, cobbled together from several minority ethnic groups and one majority, stability is only possible if one of the minorities, e.g. the Alawites, is in control. His reasoning seems to be, that the other minorities will trust the Alawites precisely because the Alawites need the other minorities to counterbalance the majority Arab Sunnis."
Could be, yeah. I just don't think Assad is going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle. But like I said, I think it is plausible that some other member of what was once the ruling Ba'ath Party- an Alawite, a secular Arab, perhaps even a Druze or Kurd- could somehow reassemble the Coalition. the problem, of course, is that Assad is going to fight like his life depends on it because- honestly- it probably does, right?
TheDrillSgt: "You think your statement includes any valid values?"
If Ive constructed the statement "properly", then the answer is "no" to your question, whether I "think" it true or not.
In short, what we'd do then is what we should do now.
If that's the case, there's no deterrence.
Michael K said...
There is no sign at present that Obama is doing anything serious about ISIS.
Obama's plan:
Step 1: Make peace in Syria between all the factions except ISIS.
Obama realizes this will necessitate Assad having to go.
He's working on the proposition that it will not take longer than 4 or 5 months for Putin to realize he has to tell Assad to go.
Drago,
Just checking. I would have thought you would have written an internally logical expression like -1 < n < 1 which would still have returned a null value :)
Obama isn't even trying to get a ceasefire between Assad/Russia/Iran/Hezbollah and the better rebels - he wants a full fledged peace agreement!!
He's told Kerry to try to speed things up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/world/middleeast/john-kerry-adds-voice-to-those-urging-bigger-push-against-islamic-state-in-syria.html
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — With the Obama administration under mounting pressure from some of its own top former officials to take a more aggressive approach to combating the Islamic State, Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that he would like to see the American-led military and diplomatic effort in Syria “go faster.”
He added that President Obama had charged his aides with “coming up with any concepts that will, in fact, work, and which could help change the situation on the ground.”
Michael K,
"The CentCOM commander denies he was altering intelligence. Do you believe him ?"
Honestly, I don't know. If you look at the false Afghanistan intelligence reports (Dan De Luce has got a good synopsis up about it on Foreign Policy and Yahoo), that was happening while Petraeus was the at the helm in Afghanistan and Mattis was at CENTCOM. Without getting into classified stuff, I experienced first-hand that reporting from the field was being dismissed and dressed up by HQ, so I know it was happening. I don't believe that either Petraeus or Mattis directed or otherwise would have wanted their staff to do that. It's just that the whole culture has become so sycophantic that collection management officers are stepping on their case officers' reporting not because their bosses are telling them to do it, but because they know what will please their superiors. So I don't really know if GEN Lloyd was aware of it. (That said, with all three of them, West Point taught us that a "commander is responsible for everything their subordinates do or fail to do," so they're at fault for allowing that culture to take hold, but just saying there's a difference between ordering a cover-up of the Watergate break-in and not knowing that some of your subordinates had implemented Iran-contra).
"I don't want to go through your list but the AfriCOM commander Carter Ham was retired pretty quickly."
Carter Ham is the closest thing to being a legitimate purge victim, yes. That said, he did do his full two year tour command at AFRICOM, so he wasn't 'relieved of command.' Partly, he was a casualty of SECDEF Panetta needing to find a COCOM for David Rodriguez, after the SECDEF decided to install Joe Dunford as ISAF Commander (which GEN Rodriguez allegedly really wanted), but I think GEN Ham thought he had another four-star assignment coming to him. (Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times has a good article about this here. But like I said, I think this one is the closest to being legit, it's just not as simplistic as when the liberals said Rumsfeld "fired" GEN Shinseki (the Bush Administration did no such thing, and Shinseki finished his full four-year tour as CSA).
On that, I heard liberals tell me all the time that Rumsfeld had "purged" the military of its generals, and the only ones left were his sycophants. They were as wrong then as conservatives are now when they say it about Obama and the current cohort of generals. The uniformed military leadership is not at an all-time high, granted, but it's not in bad shape, either.
"Obama's Sec Def and CIA Director don;t have anything good to say about his efforts with the Middle East."
Can you blame them? Our Middle East foreign policy is a disaster, dude.
"I don't want to get into a debate with someone who seems to have an agenda."
Okay, you have no problems getting into a "debate" with Cooke, ARM or garage mahal when they spout off their asinine ideological or philosophical views, and all you have to do is just yell "Leftist!" or some ideological counter. But I'm asking you to discuss facts and details, and you come back with this? Maybe Ann's right that the level of discourse here had gotten lazy and no one was really discussing or debating the issues, so perhaps her moderation really is a good thing. I don't have an agenda- I just don't merely recite right-wing talking points (or left-wing talking points, for that matter). Sorry if that's a problem for you.
Robert Cook said...
"Could somebody, anybody, explain why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice all thought we should have overthrown Hussein?"
Yep. The US, you may recall, was maintaining a no-fly zone over northern Iraq. This was extremely expensive, and also required playing nice with the Turks, who then as now, were major assholes. Saddam Hussein was in the habit, for reasons that probably seemed good to him, of staging various provocations, such as massing a bunch of tanks on the Kuwait border. Every time he did this, a whole bunch of guys in Georgia had to drop what they were doing, load all their tanks onto ships and haul their unhappy asses over to the Persian Gulf to call his bluff. Meanwhile, our European "allies" were making fortunes circumventing the "sanctions" that were supposed to bring Saddam down, but really only starved the population under his thumb. Furthermore, Saddam took pains to make his neighbors believe he had active nuclear and WMD programs, whether he did or not, and no one, including us, could really be sure. So, that was the situation. I suspect that the aformentioned officials felt that an indefinite continuation of that situation was not feasible, let alone desirable, and the alternatives were to back off and let Saddam do whatever he liked, including reoccupy Kuwait and even invade Saudi, or else wax his evil god-damned ass. And while I am as dissatisfied with the outcome as everyone else, I still can't say they made the wrong decision.
Rusty,
"Except he doesn't talk to those guys every day. He talks to the Diretor of National Intelligence who talks to those guys every day. He directed the appropriate intelligence agencies involved with the middle east to play down the increase of ISIL activity in the daily presidential breifings,
That doesn't really matter though because Obama has missed more thn half of his daily presidential briefings.
Golf or something."
You beat me to it-- the President doesn't even bother to take his intelligence briefings. DNI doesn't actually run interference between the COCOMs (that's the Joint Staff and OSD, and I don't think either of them are doing it either because the reports are getting cooked before it even gets to the COCOM commanders). I think we're going to find that the intelligence reporting failures are not the result of a top-down directive, but something much more insidious in the form of the intelligence and security bureaucracies taking it upon themselves to dress these things because they know it's what the decision-makers want to hear. And if you know how the Iraq WMD intelligence failures occurred- and the steps the intelligence community took to mitigate against that happening again in the future- and that's a massive tragedy.
Bobby,
The Downing Plan? No way. I respectfully suggest, as others have before me, that it would turn into a "Bay of Goats." It is too complicated with too many moving parts that would have to fit together perfectly and run smoothly and in sync for the operation to succeed. Sure, a variant of it it worked in Afghanistan (albeit on a smaller scale), but Afghanistan and Iraq are two very different animals. Most damning, to my way of thinking at any rate, is its reliance on the changes of attitude/morale in Iraqi leaders and troops to the operation's success. Strategies whose success is contingent on the enemy acting in way that will fit with your plans are not strategies you want to bet the farm on, and with good reason.
Some problems don't have solutions. The Middle East is one of them. At least for the time being.
Bobby said ...
"Basically, I would say that I'm not really sure what the right policy is, but I'm pretty sure (a) it's not what we're doing now and (b) I have a hard time believing that people who don't even know the basic facts about the region can articulate the right policy in one sentence (especially when they say they know more than do the generals). (a) is partially derived from the fact that I'm acquainted with many of the US officials developing and implementing policy and I believe they are, to use the technical term, dipshits."
Hmmm... If what we really ought to do is get the Hell out and let them all kill each other, it's not hard to see how that might be more apparent to someone who is not a general and hasn't spent years trying to find a way to prevent them all from killing each other. Plus, your final observation seems to undermine your point. If the people making US policy are dipshits, why shouldn't their policies be worse than what Joe Schmoe would come up with after reading a couple articles in Time?
I don't know, Bob. You sound sincere, intelligent and concerned. But you know what they say about, when you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the first thing is to stop digging? Is that a ladder in your hands? Or a shovel?
Roughcoat,
"The Downing Plan? No way. I respectfully suggest, as others have before me, that it would turn into a "Bay of Goats." It is too complicated with too many moving parts that would have to fit together perfectly and run smoothly and in sync for the operation to succeed."
Well, the "Bay of Goats" reference was applied to the Downing Plan as it was submitted (and rejected) in 2002 for an invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq (and what would have substituted for Operation Iraqi Freedom 1). I'm talking about using it as a framework for combating IS and Assad regime elements in Syria. I don't pretend to know that it would work- I merely think it might be at least as good an alternative to putting 10,000+ US troops on the ground there, especially given the greatly reduced costs involved. I have, however, in the past been accused of being too optimistic about SOF capabilities, and I don't deny that.
"Some problems don't have solutions. The Middle East is one of them. At least for the time being.
To quote John Abizaid, "we're about this far apart" (my fingertips are practically touching). I probably would have phrased it as: "The Middle East might be one of them." That would be the only edit I would make to that paragraph.
As for me, I don't have a plan for peace in the Middle East. I'm working with Christian Assyrians to ensure that they can develop and obtain the wherewithal to survive for at least another generation in their ancestral homeland in the Nineveh Plain. Our plan is to arm them, train them, give them the means to defend themselves and when needed to take offensive action against their enemies. How long can they do this? As long as it takes or until they're all dead. For years and years and years, maybe. That's the Middle East for you.
Jupiter,
"If what we really ought to do is get the Hell out and let them all kill each other, it's not hard to see how that might be more apparent to someone who is not a general and hasn't spent years trying to find a way to prevent them all from killing each other.
That I'm not actually talking about - I should have been more clear about that. I'm talking about Donald Trump and some of the commenters on this blog who seem to think it would just be as simple as throwing in a brigade or two of US combat forces and we'll destroy Daesh in just two months and have control of their oil fields and finance the entire operation and everything will be just swell! I actually have a greater degree of respect for the "we probably can't win this hand with the cards we have so let's not play until the next round" crowd than I do for those who don't realize the sacrifices that would be required to "win" over there.
"Plus, your final observation seems to undermine your point. If the people making US policy are dipshits, why shouldn't their policies be worse than what Joe Schmoe would come up with after reading a couple articles in Time?"
I should have been clearer about this, too -- the leadership of the diplomatic/political mission is separate from the leadership of the precision targeting mission, which in turn is separate from the security force assistance mission. I'm speaking of the former, which is civilian-led, and not the latter two, which are military- and intelligence-led. And that's all you're going to get me to say about that.
James Pawlak said...
" 2. Declare Islam a criminal-terrorist ideology (As based on its unchangeable teachings "
If Islam was a criminal-terrorist ideology, why are we having these problems only now, in the last 30, maybe 50 years, and not before?
The fact is what we are seeing is a form of Islamic revivalism. The people doing this are converts, or people who didn't know much about their religion, but knew they were Moslems, and when they seek to do the right thing they find these people.
and 1400-year history of violence)
Off and on, and never like this. This ideology of killing rdinary people at random originated in Germany at the start of World War I (lthouh Kaiser Wilhelm was trying to make something useful to germany out of Muslims going back to the 1890s.)
Max von Oppenheim, in Berlin, wrote fatwas and had them translated into four or five languages from the original German.
There's a book which might have something about this:
The Passion of Max von Oppenheim: Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler by Lionel Gossman
It did not have much success during that generation.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/museums/11022199/Germanys-Grand-WW1-Jihad-Experiment.html
This later led to the Muslim Brotherhood. Already in the 1920s there was a counter organization in Indonesia.
and list all Mosques and Muslim associations/groups (eg CAIR) in the same class/category as the KKK and various NAZI groups."
Now CAIR is bad.
Now there's an interesting thing. I read today three letters (two by eyewitnesses) of Moslems celebrating on Sept 11th (cab drivers at the Journal Square PATH train stattion in Jersey Cityl people entering a mosque at the corner of Atlantic andFourth Avenue in Brooklyn - witnessed by a New York City detective assigned to guard that misque; and by another mosque in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn.)
But all such stories are confined to the date of September 11, 2011 itself!
George w. Bush did something that perhaps was good. I don't know who contacted who and where pr wether Bush himself knew or whether it was people working for him, and things were maybe told to people in Saudi Arabia as well, but he took the position that they all were loyal. And the people running these mosques wanted to appear or were afraid not to appear loyal and against terrorism, and it all stopped. And I think they pretended it had never happened. George W. Bush clasped them to his bosom, and the imams or whoever decided they had better live up to the picture.
There were one or two outliers, but even Anwar al Awlaki joined with al Qaeda only because the FBI had caught him seeing prostitutes.
http://nypost.com/2015/09/13/al-qaeda-terrorist-feared-his-love-of-sex-and-hookers-would-end-him
The FBI would never have exposed him, certainly not wantonly. But he had a problem. He was maybe already guilty of helping the Sept 11 plot - although afterwards he had denounced the attacks. That was why he was under such surveillance.
Anyway, the end result was he went completely over to the dark side.
A book by Scott Shane "OBjective Troy" is all about him.
Jupiter said...
The difficulty is that American political thought places a very high value on separation of Church and State, which makes most thoughtful Americans, conservative or otherwise, extremely reluctant even to consider suppressing something that calls itself a religion. It is important to go after the teachers, not the students. You can have evil religious teaching.
Sammy Finkelman said...
"If Islam was a criminal-terrorist ideology, why are we having these problems only now, in the last 30, maybe 50 years, and not before?"
Jesus. You ever hear of a place called Istanbul? It used to be called Constantinople. The change took place in 1453, which is not in the last 50 years.
By the way, if you are wondering, I'm talking about planet Earth. Not whichever planet you inhabit.
Finkelman: "If Islam was a criminal-terrorist ideology, why are we having these problems only now, in the last 30, maybe 50 years, and not before?"
Just wow.
Where does one even begin to address this degree of purposeful ignorance?
Jupiter and Drago,
I think it depends on how you're defining "criminal-terrorist" ideology. Not everyone sets that from its origin, or even the fall of Constantinople. For example, Ayaan Hirsi Ali-- whom I think we'll all agree knows a thing or two about radical Islam-- told Megan Kelly just last week that: "Islamic extremism is older than this election cycle and the last election cycle . . . Sunni Islamic extremism is at least 95 to 98 years old." (Fast forward to 2:45 for the quote)
I wouldn't automatically assume Sammy is talking about Islam on a different planet or that he's being "purposeful(ly) ignorant" -- maybe he's just defined it differently than you have, and somewhat closer to how Ayaan Hirsi Ali defines "Islamic extremism." Best way to find that out is probably by, you know, asking him to define it instead of reflexively posturing about how outrageous his reply is. Put another way, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali were blogging here and she made her "95 to 98 years old" statement and you reacted that way out of hand, I'm guessing the only people that would take you seriously would be those who don't know who she is, because- sorry fellas- you don't know half as much about radical Islam as she does, and you know it.
Roughcoat,
And honestly, that's about the most common denominator approach that anyone can take there right now-- organize, equip and train the indigenous local defense forces of the various anti-Daesh communities (Assyrians, Chaldeans, Armenians, Kurds, Druze, etc.), and strengthen and empower them to resist Daesh aggression. Keep Daesh off-balance and reduce their combat power with low-cost, high-reward drone strikes, air strikes and unconventional force raids. Disrupt their financial support system (particularly the black market oil). After that, the costs start going up for incrementally smaller- and more transitory- gains. Not reflexively opposed to anything from a Downing Plan style offensive to a conventional force ground campaign, but the American people and their decision-makers should be damn sure they understood precisely what it is we'd be committing to doing, and right now I don't get a sense of that at all.
Finkelman: "If Islam was a criminal-terrorist ideology, why are we having these problems only now, in the last 30, maybe 50 years, and not before?"
Just in case anyone else is this ignorant:
Western civilization has been "having these problems" with Islam for well over a thousand years.
Look up El Cid, Charles Martel, Vlad Dracul, the Reconquista to begin with. The Crusades were in response to the Muslim conquest of the Holy Lands.
The first foreign war this country ever fought was to suppress Muslim pirates. (The shores of Tripoli from the Marine Corps hymn.)
Bobby said...
Roughcoat,
And honestly, that's about the most common denominator approach that anyone can take there right now-- organize, equip and train the indigenous local defense forces of the various anti-Daesh communities (Assyrians, Chaldeans, Armenians, Kurds, Druze, etc.), and strengthen and empower them to resist Daesh aggression. Keep Daesh off-balance and reduce their combat power with low-cost, high-reward drone strikes, air strikes and unconventional force raids. Disrupt their financial support system (particularly the black market oil). After that, the costs start going up for incrementally smaller- and more transitory- gains. Not reflexively opposed to anything from a Downing Plan style offensive to a conventional force ground campaign, but the American people and their decision-makers should be damn sure they understood precisely what it is we'd be committing to doing, and right now I don't get a sense of that at all.
IOW Fight them there not here. Hmm. Where have I seen the strategy before? Alas. For your last part. Liberals have no stomach for the long haul even after they were warned that fighting muslim extremists could take decades. Well. They are different. They've proven they can't handle democracy. Oh. Wait. Nevermind. They're brown and don't deserve our help. Just bask any of the usual suspects.
@Jupiter at 5:20 pm:
Sorry, that doesn't cut it. Not even close.
Bobby: "Best way to find that out is probably by, you know, asking him to define it instead of reflexively posturing about how outrageous his reply is."
An easier way to find out might be to inquire what are the actions being taken by the "radicals" today that haven't been taken throughout Islamist history?
If the answer is "not much", then all Sammy (and most on the left) are attempting is to lay all of islamist radicalism on the backs of the west, colonialism, Bush et al in support of whatever fashionable Marxist idea holds sway today.
Robert Cook: "@Jupiter at 5:20 pm:
Sorry, that doesn't cut it. Not even close."
Actually comrade, it does cut it. By quite a bit.
Jupiter, next time, if you want cookie to "buy" something you are selling, just tell him that your assertion involves having a prospective Republican VP hop into a commandeered SR-71 and hop over to Paris for secret talks with a Khomeini-type group resulting in American hostages being held longer in order to secure a domestic political victory over democrat party opponents.
That one comes pre-approved from our resident conspiracy theorist cookie.
Drago,
"If the answer is "not much", then all Sammy (and most on the left) are attempting is to lay all of islamist radicalism on the backs of the west, colonialism, Bush et al in support of whatever fashionable Marxist idea holds sway today."
But I didn't link to anyone on the Left. I linked to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And I don't think it's accurate to say she's attempting to "lay all of Islamist radicalism on the backs of the west, colonialism, Bush et al." If you regularly or occasionally listen to what she says or read what she writes, I think you'll find it's quite the contrary.
Bobby: "But I didn't link to anyone on the Left. I linked to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And I don't think it's accurate to say she's attempting to "lay all of Islamist radicalism on the backs of the west, colonialism, Bush et al." If you regularly or occasionally listen to what she says or read what she writes, I think you'll find it's quite the contrary."
No argument on that point.
I believe my question (and the answer to that question) is still the most relevant whether or not Hirsi Ali, whom I greatly respect, arrives at the same historical conclusion.
ask
Bobby said,
"Put another way, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali were blogging here and she made her "95 to 98 years old" statement and you reacted that way out of hand, I'm guessing the only people that would take you seriously would be those who don't know who she is, because- sorry fellas- you don't know half as much about radical Islam as she does, and you know it."
I have great respect for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for her courage, and for her honesty, both of which are immensely greater than my own. But as to "Sunni Islamic extremism is at least 95 years old...", well OK. Fine. But Constantinople still got renamed in the 15th century, and not as a result of a successful ballot measure. If you are trying to argue that Islam has only been a threat to Christian civilization for a century or so -- Well, on what planet?
The deeper issue here, is that some people seem to think that Islam is just Buddhism with the names changed, and lately it happens to have hit a bad patch. Not so. Islam, Sunni or Shia, has from its inception been a uniquely virulent totalitarian ideology. I see no reason to suppose that will change any time soon. Its evident inferiority as an organizing principle for a peaceful society seems only to make its adherents more determined to forcibly subject the entire world to shariah. And the success they are having in Europe is hardly cause for optimism.
Robert Cook said...
"@Jupiter at 5:20 pm:
Sorry, that doesn't cut it. Not even close."
Help me out here, Cookie. Give me a hint.
Do you mean, you don't believe a word I say, or you agree with my sitrep, but don't think it explains "why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice all thought we should have overthrown Hussein?"
Jupiter,
"If you are trying to argue that Islam has only been a threat to Christian civilization for a century or so -- Well, on what planet?"
Except that's not what Sammy said. Go back and read what he said and you will see that he specifically noted that the problem set has always existed, that it has waxed and waned over the years, and that (by his assessment) only in the last 50 years has it approached the intensity that we currently are seeing. It's not nearly as unreasonable a statement as you're trying to make it out to be if you bother to actually listen to it.
"The deeper issue here, is that some people seem to think that Islam is just Buddhism with the names changed, and lately it happens to have hit a bad patch."
Again, that's not what Sammy said and- if you read his comments on this thread and others on this blog- it's quite clear that he's not someone who believes that Islam = Pacifism. to be honest, I don't even know who on this blog has ever advanced that position. But for many commenters on this blog, there's no room for nuance. For many of you, it's either the commenter espouses some very absolutist right-wing rhetoric (which, I will add and frequently point out, is often factually incorrect or absurdly simplistic) or that person MUST be a "Leftist." For many of you, there's no room for dissent from what is not a very well-informed position. In this instance, Sammy's position is closer to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's than is your own opinion, but you're convinced that you alone are correct-- even though you have to concede that she knows far more about radical Islam that do you. FAR more. So, why not ask him how he was defining the term "criminal-terrorist ideology"? (FTR, Ayaan Hirsi Ali probably picked "95 to 98 years" to correspond with the intense subjugation campaign of the Ikhwan under Wahhabi doctrine and Saud leadership -- long story short, the Ikhwan were newly-converted to Islam and used to conquer the other nomadic tribes, which is relevant to Sammy's point- that he has made several times on this blog- that "born again Muslims" are frequently the executors of contemporary violence).
Oh, and, one last thing, I would just say that- from my own experience- in practice (not doctrine) Buddhists are not as pacifistic as Americans seem to believe.
Bobby,
Here is Sammy;
"The people doing this are converts, or people who didn't know much about their religion, but knew they were Moslems, and when they seek to do the right thing they find these people." I suppose that is not exactly Islam = Pacifism. Close enough for government work.
" long story short, the Ikhwan were newly-converted to Islam and used to conquer the other nomadic tribes, which is relevant to Sammy's point- that he has made several times on this blog- that "born again Muslims" are frequently the executors of contemporary violence)."
No kidding. Which is why talk of a "Muslim Reformation" is fantasy. There have been multiple "Muslim Reformations". The people who carried them out are known, in the Muslim world, as "Apostates", and are subject to the death penalty. Islam is an ideology of violent conquest. Anyone who wants to can pick up the fallen flag and carry on. The one Islamic doctrine that does not go away is "Death to the Infidels!" Be they Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sunni or Shia.
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