Is there any point to defeating ISIS?

Impossible to defeat a idea.

And you know how some people think of the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression” 150 years later? Imagine if the aggressor was 10K miles away. Every bomb we drop makes it so much worse.

Would you feel the same way if ISIS was on your street and the pistols were aimed at the back of your head?
In WWII, some wanted to remain neutral and leave the Europeans to their own fate, if it was to be so. But Hitler had different ideas about world domination that wasn’t limited to just Europe and points North, East and South.. Just like a cancer, no matter how you ignore it, sooner or later it comes after you!
After the slaughter of the Jews and other not-so-pure-or-perfects, the world said “Never again!” But the world will have that again if humanity turns it’s back and walks away from ISIS.

ISIS is sufficiently evil that the world must stand together to oppose them. That said, the methodology for how that happens is critical. If we invade and then withdraw, creating a huge power vacuum, then I do think we’re doomed to continue repeating the cycle. If instead we support locals, and allow them to win the fight for themselves, then no power vacuum is created. In theory, defeating ISIS by having the locals take control, should provide a much more long-term stable situation.

ISIS would not exist if Russia and the US never thought that their need for oil was sufficient cause to occupy, murder innocents and ravage an otherwise peaceful existence in the Middle East. Can you really blame them??

You can also bet your last bottom dollar had any other country raped and pillaged our resources here, there would be all kinds of masked militias terrorizing the occupiers who dared fuck with us. Can you say Idaho?

We can’t. We can only contain and barricade against it. Something like it will always be there until we can dismantle religion and political and socio-economic interventions in the region.

I don’t think the US disagrees with Putin that we need a repugnant strongman or two in the region, the sticking point is that the US believes we need a new repugnant strongman in the area. Assad has too much documented human rights baggage for the US to support him and retain any “face”.

As near as I can tell, the current strategy is retake the land now controlled by DAESH (necessary to remove their economic base) and turn the reigns over to new strongmen in the region. Probably one acceptable to the West, and one acceptable to Putin.

Remember back in 2012 and 2013 when Syrians were asking/begging for American help? Interesting Link .
Note the comments. Some of them were spot on.

Isis does terrible things to the people in areas that they control.

Isis does terrible things to the people in areas they don’t control, as well. If they were barbaric only in their own areas, we may be able to tolerate it. It’s the world domination part that makes them a threat every where.

Even if ISIL disbanded by themselves, there would still be a violent movement there, and another organization with a different name (thankfully, as I’m tired of people writing “ISIS”) would emerge.

The “War On Terror” concept needs to be replaced by other types of thinking that have some prospect of positive resolution.

As citizens, I think it’s also a mistake to identify with our own governments’ policies as being simply something “we” are coming up with based on “our” best interest, since it seems to me this is at best a nice story the corporate-bought government and corporate media use to have us not notice that they drive what our military, government and diplomats do in the world, and why world events and situations have been as they have. It has little to do with what would really be good for people. Many people hate the Western nations, and we invade them, based mainly on multi-national huge corporations who operate the modern version of colonialism, dominating foreign governments to extract as many resources as they can at low and predictable prices, without benefiting people at large except inadvertently or for show and to gain more political influence, for the purpose of getting the highest scores in the meaningless human-invented games of accumulating more and more wealth and power, mostly to the detriment of everyone and everything else.

@kritiper

Hitler and Nazi Germany weren’t a faceless, amorphous enemy that could just neatly vanish into society at large then reappear when convenient. A decade and a half into the “war on terror” and it seems many Americans still fail to recognize that we are not fighting a conventional war against state actors. We’re fighting an idea, and you’re never going to defeat an idea with force no matter how many bullets you fire or bombs you drop.

I’m in two minds about it, ISIS is a horrible organisation but on the other hand dropping thousands of bombs on the land they control just to make us feel safer seems very wrong. The military don’t even think it will work without boots on the ground but whose boots?

@Darth_Algar Kill them all. That’ll fix it.

~ It can be combat practice for the real thing. Also missiles need to be used before the best before date.~ Without a war it is hard to justify the huge military budget.

@kritiper

You really do fail to understand the problem.

Isn’t Putin correct in backing the repugnant strong man of his choice?
Putin is perfectly in his right, Uncle Sam has backed at least a dozen douchebags when it served his purpose, to criticize someone backing a douche bag that is not your douchebag of choice is just plain folly and hypocrisy.

@Darth_Algar You have to start somewhere. Doing nothing does nothing. Some people only understand extreme force. After all, it’s what they practice.

@kritiper

Apparently some people don’t understand that tripping over the same rock over and over again yields no progress.

@kritiper Do you really think threatening death is an effective deterrent against a group of guys who regularly use suicide bombing tactics?

“Oh shit Ahmed, America has elected a Republican to office who says he’s tough on terrorism and will carpet bomb the shit out of us. We don’t want to get bombed, better take off that suicide vest and surrender…”

Is that really how it’s supposed to work?

@Darth_Algar Ditto! That logic is a two-way street.
@gorillapaws Read my previous post.

@kritiper

So if bombing the shit out of brown people for the last decade and a half hasn’t worked yet what makes you think it will now?

@kritiper I was responding to your previous post. These shitheads don’t fear extreme force. They regularly blow themselves up for their cause. The only thing they fear is not living up to their “religious duty” that has been brainwashed into them by radicals.

I’d say the bulk of them aren’t even that religiously motivated. They’re people who have nothing and no prospects to look forward to. They also see that their homelands have been invaded, bombed, occupied and bullied by western forces for a century. And they know that history has taught that people must often fight to secure prosperity for themselves. What else are they going to do?