my father's generation would have taken to t he streets if after fighting a four year war in the early 1940's, our military brass left heavy duty equipment there for the taking for the people of Germany.

How is it we spent over ten years in Iraq, and yet we didn't have the resources available to bring back our complex military equipment including vehicles and weaponry.

I have posted here and some apologists or other for the military will come aboard and say, "Well, it would have been impossible to bring our equipment back." Really? If it was possible to bring the equipment to Iraq, how was it impossible to bring it back?

And why was the entire game plan of our war in Iraq simply to create division among the people there, and to further instability?

I am firmly convinced that the USA, Israel and also Saudi Arabia helped this organization develop.

..., our oil-driven policies in the last century did as well, and our (the West's) ME policies for the last millennium are partly to blame too. But the prophecies of Muhammad go back well before all that. To these extremists, this was all pre-ordained, and has to happen for their salvation. That's what is so depressing to me - this was in their book long before we really did anything to trigger it.

But, I don't think the West has conspired to create this organization. I think we have unwittingly - perhaps by willful ignorance - aided it. I do believe the Saudis - at high levels - are directly involved, motivated either by religious fervor or regional control/profits. The Saudis are NOT our ally.

in the last few years.

If the average blogger "living in his mom's basement" can notice that then the intelligence bigwigs can too.

This thing isn't going to stay regional either, it's going to spread further afield.

You have a view, you interpret objectively ambiguous new information as confirming this view, you are reinforced in this view.

utterly irresponsible. The entire invasion, war and exit were all irresponsible.

It is rumored that Halliburton is buying ISIL/IIS oil. So if that is the case, Dick Cheney is certainly not suffering for his irresponsibility and criminal behavior.

And the CIA's goal of having total instability in that region of the world is being totally met, as well.

I do think that militarily defeating Isis in Syria and Iraq will be a catastrophic blow to them. No more oil money, no more caliphate. Caliphates aren't defeated by infidel nations. So if we can do that, we will have disproven the prophecy and inflict a major blow to Islamic terror networks worldwide.

How do you defeat them militarily? We cannot insert ground forces, so how exactly do we do that?

close their accounts and money sources.

Back in the day, the British people got po'ed after the Mahdi killed Chinese Gordon. So they spun up the army to invade from Egypt, take Khartoum and kill the leaders (the Mahdi had already died at that point.)

Read The River War by Churchill (yes that one). It offers excellent insight into Islam and that part of the world and the peoples that live there.

We don't do punitive raids anymore.

If we decided to end it now, think Dresden but with B-52's leveling and killing everyone. If we want to drag it out and be cautious, well keep doing like we are doing and maybe we can make it last a couple hundred years, maybe longer. Think "hundred years war".

I keep forgetting

Why are we supporting jihadi rebels in Syria?

Why did we knock over Libya and leave it to fall apart?

We're not being told the full story and until we demand the truth we will just continue on this path.

It's amazing to listen to all the endless blather and BS and psychobabble...and then find such a concise article!

I liken trying to get people to look at the truth as like trying to rub a dog's nose in its own vomit...it just refuses to accept it and pushes back.

(Sorry for the crude analogy but that's what it feels like).

The problem is that the stakes are very high now and people need to stop sleepwalking and wake the heck up.

which would make Qatar, not Russia, the major source of natural gas for the EU:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/08/syria-ultimate-pipelineistan-war/

War is still a racket and religion is an excellent way to get people interested in fighting in one.

it is highly probable that its thorough nuclear obliteration - coordinated and consented to by all the major world powers - will be inevitable. It is one thing that could likely be agreed upon by the major players. No sane country or world can tolerate the existence of an ISIS state.

And yes, the problem is firmly rooted in religion.

Before someone like Trump gets power and does something regretful.

"the self proclaimed one true Islamic faith". The 'self proclaimed' qualifier is important. The rest of Islam doesn't accept that. And the Crusades weren't made by all of Christianity, for that matter - the Ethopian church had nothing to do with it, for instance, and the Orthodox church rapidly found itself a target rather than an ally. So it's not accurate to say Daesh "is an abomination of Islam's making", or that we are really "fighting a religious war against Islam".

The Koran, like many (probably all, but I don't know) scriptures, has contradictory messages. Daesh chooses to believe the apocalyptic bits. Others don't, but that doesn't mean Daesh has the 'right', or a better, interpretation, so it's not inevitable that they'll continue to get lots of recruits. While it may take decades for all the violent Islamists in the world to go away, that doesn't mean Daesh is bound to survive that long. It's a political entity, and can be broken up just as quickly as any other. And that means the mass executions might stop relatively quickly. The terrorism not so quickly, unfortunately.

... general perspective on it. But I do think we are being disingenuous when we try so hard to distance Daesche - or daesh... whatever it is - from Islam. It's no less a religious entity than the KKK or Westboro. It may still be relatively small percentage wise, but they occupy and are running a country sized region, and their army is perhaps equal or near equal to any other military in the immediate region (except Israel).

Perhaps what is most concerning is that, yes, it may be true that most of the Islamic faith is NOT "fundamental" like Daesche, but that fundamentalism - the simplicity of it - is apparently what is so attractive about it. Most ALL Muslims have been taught from childhood that "one day" there WILL be a Caliphate, and there WILL be a battle with the West, and that there WILL be Armageddon. Why are we so surprised that, given the political climate of the ME, more and more young Muslims are inclined to think this is it?

the KKK or Westboro can be shown to be disconnected from most of the New Testament.

Not so for Daesh: they are in line with many passages of the Quran and hadiths

(NB; not that I harbor any sympathy for Christianity, just being factual)

between groups who insist on literal interpretation of religious texts, or what they believe their interpretation is, and those who do not. It's not about distancing them, it's distinguishing them. They are different.

Lumping the fundies and radicals in with all religious people will not make anyone change their minds. This goes for Muslims and Christians, any religion. It only pisses everyone off and further entrenches the us against them mentality, which is definitely not something you want to do if discouraging fundamentalism is the goal.

I think the poverty and inequity has to be addressed before we can put a lid on such extremism. right now they feel great about stealing from others- taxing them and using the oil profits for violence. i think if people had a roof on their head and enough food, there would be little need for such nonsense. how to unentangle things so as to make that happen? no idea.

... to somehow disrupt their ability to attract disenfranchised young Muslim men who feel like they have little else to turn to. I read an article in Cracked.com a couple of weeks ago (linked from here) that explained how we created Daesche, and how many of its members joined up initially just for the paycheck.

But I don't know how we begin to address that issue either. We can't even get that right here at home!

reason they can hate on other muslims so deeply too. and yeah, worldwide, we have no cracked the code for any sort of system that is equitable. reducing abject poverty in they homeland needs to be a part of it.

Last edited Fri Dec 11, 2015, 03:27 AM - Edit history (1)

Just many Christians accept the Bible was written by imperfect humans.

The danger comes from the majority of US Christians who believe the Bible is the inerrant word of god, and from the quasi totality of Muslims who believe the Quran is the perfect, eternal word of god.

Their religious nature is largely just window dressing for PR and propaganda purposes...

... But I think these guys are true believers.

So whose views are closer to reality?

She's a vet so she has some extra insight

December 1 2015

It's a crime syndicate.

... about these guys at first. But after reading that Atlantic article and some others, I'm not buying that anymore. I'm sure some elements of it are just that, but most of the people they are attracting and most of their leaders clearly look to be fundamental end of timers.

Both will obviously result in catastrophe of different kinds.

ISIS are spectacularly evil and well entrenched; not stopping them will result in them causing immense suffering; a war sufficient to stop them doing so them will result in immense suffering.

Obama's current policy of "Kind-of-whelming military force" may well be the least evil - American bombs are killing some innocent civilians, but not as many as an all-out war would, and ISIS is still thriving, but not expanding the way it would if it weren't being bombed.

But there is no good option. I see lots of people on both sides getting immensely angry and self-righteous, and if you look at the likely consequences of what the other side are proposing, and ignore just how appalling the consequences of whichever it is you are yourself advocating is, it's easy to do so.

"We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohamed Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut."