Originally Posted By RoadTrip The only way to do it is to inflict damage so horrific that they are afraid to continue. Massive bombing of ISIS held areas would probably do it. Yes, it would undoubtedly kill innocent civilians. War always has and it always will. In the long run our half-hearted approach to conflict ends up indirectly responsible for the enslavement and killing of more civilians than if we had just gone in intent on TOTAL VICTORY... period.
Originally Posted By Kar2oonMan I'm not sure the shock and awe approach works all that well. More intelligence, more strategic targeting of key terrorists does. See: bin Laden. These clowns want attention and war and carnage. The news media gives them what they want by playing their videos again and again and again. I don't know if simply ignoring them to a great degree might not be worth a try. Instead, we help puff them up into unstoppable super villains, which feeds their warped egos and frightens people, which is what they're all about in the first place.
Originally Posted By RoadTrip In the final analysis, how much good did killing bin Laden do (other than the satisfaction of killing the s.o.b.)? Other people and groups outside of al Qaeda have become just as dangerous as they were. I mean way beyond shock and awe. Literally level the towns they hold. Make it clear that we are no longer going to conduct a "gentleman's war" against an enemy that resorts time after time to barbarian tactics. The are going to hate us just as much no matter what we do. We are "infidels" and need to be removed from the face of the earth in their eyes. It is up to us to remove them first.
Originally Posted By Tikiduck I'm with RT on this one. You can't wager a politically correct war. We need a D-Day mindset to eliminate this abomination, or it will continue to grow like an infected wound.
Originally Posted By SingleParkPassholder Back when I was in law school in the mid-90's, we could take an in-between semesters short course for an extra unit of credit in a subject not normally taught in law school. To put this in context, Clinton was President. A professor had just completed an exhaustive study on international security issues and how we could address them knowing we had a Constitution to deal with. This professor came to the conclusion that as long as we had to work within the Constitution, we were screwed. Back then, the professor identified Islamic terrorists are the next big, permanent threat. She had been a federal intelligence official along with other things. Back then, we had already been through the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Mogadishu. The USS Cole was yet to happen. She said that the sitting president had to be able to unilaterally act the moment intelligence crossed his desk, otherwise by the time we did something, debated it, got all the approvals, we'd be more than a day late and a dollar short, as she put it. She said right then, in the 90's, we had an opportunity to nip these things in the bud before they grew roots and spread. We had an opportunity to stop this before the children of these guys grew up, indoctrinated and unable to be reached to be convinced to be rational. She said we needed to set up moderate Imams, as many (dozens or hundreds or thousands) as it took, in the various Middle East regions to preach against killings based on the Koran. Plus, we needed to blow them away militarily THEN. If we failed to do these things, and by the time I took this class in 1996 she said we were already too far gone, then Islamic terrorists would be the biggest threat to our country for the next hundred years, at a minimum. However, our presidency is not an autocratic office and whoever was in the White House would never be able to do it without risk of impeachment or worse. Working within our framework and briefing Congress were the two things that would set back an effort to deal with it. Leaks would occur, time would be lost, we would always be playing catch up. So here we are some 18-20 years later, and though we finally got bin laden (something the professor advocated back in 1996), I would imagine my professor would say anything we're doing would be too little, too late. We're going to be reacting for the next long time. We can't not do it, but don't expect we're going to wipe them out. She didn't just intimate back then, she expressly said, if the country got the national security briefing the President did every day, no one would ever leave home. I can only imagine how Obama starts his day anymore.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 Yes, and it has nothing to do with "politically correct" war. That wasn't what we did when we went to Iraq. There was Abu Ghraib and people "disappearing" to other countries. There was shock and awe and overwhelming force. The military part was over relatively quickly. Trouble was, that was never going to be enough. The Bush folks didn't adequately ask "what then?" Our military is by far the strongest in the world. But asymmetrical warfare neutralizes that. And centuries of Sunni/Shia enmity is not going to simply disappear because that would be convenient for us. This is so much more complicated than just Isis. And even if we leveled every town they held, they or their successors would follow before too long. We can weaken them, and I think we should. We can manage the threat, but we can't get rid of it.
Originally Posted By Yookeroo "This is so much more complicated than just Isis. And even if we leveled every town they held, they or their successors would follow before too long." Right. Destroy ISIS and another group pops up. The only way out is to not be involved in that part of the world. And the only way to do that is to wean ourselves off of oil.
Originally Posted By Tikiduck So once again, the most powerful military in the world is crippled by a war of attrition, where it can only use a tiny fraction of it's strength. Thinking it is too late wont help. This is a threat that could easily parallel the Third Reich. I am no hawk, but I honestly think the solution is in an alliance of nations committed to all out success. If that means years of occupation, then so be it. It has to be better than the civilized world living under the constant threat of terrorism.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 I don't mean to be cynical, I really don't. But boy, talk about easier said than done. An nternational coalition dedicated to wiping out the threat? Yes, please. I mean, why didn't anyone think of that one before? I think Isis should be stopped, if only for humanitarian reasons. And I think the countries in the region should do a lot of the heavy lifting. In an ideal world. But even if that happens, we shouldn't be so naïve as to think that that will be the end of it.
Originally Posted By RoadTrip The need is to obliterate the threat so thoroughly that those who may remain "believers in the cause" are afraid to do anything about it, knowing they will face annihilation if they do so. We did that with Germany and Japan in WWII... the last war the U.S. was involved in that actually accomplished something. I think the memory of losing millions of civilians in WWII (even though their side ultimately prevailed) has even kept the USSR/Russia from being more aggressive than they could have been since then.
Originally Posted By Yookeroo "This is a threat that could easily parallel the Third Reich." Yeah, the Third Reich. No wonder it's impossible to have intelligent conversations about this. Conservatives scare so easily. "If that means years of occupation, then so be it." Yeah. Many years of occupation won't make things worse at all. Our presence there is what makes us a target in the first place. We need to get out of there, not increase our presence.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 "We did that with Germany and Japan in WWII" They were countries, not an ideology complicated by a 1000 year old religious fight.
Originally Posted By Tikiduck "We need to get out of there, not increase our presence." Yeah, great solution, lets just bury our heads in the sand and hope this will all go away. "Conservatives scare so easily." If you were referring to me, you don't know what you are talking about. "Yeah, the Third Reich." If left unchecked, easily. "They were countries, not an ideology." Fascism not an ideology?
Originally Posted By Yookeroo "Yeah, great solution, lets just bury our heads in the sand and hope this will all go away." If we have no interest in meddling over there, we stop being a target.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>Fascism not an ideology?<< We like to refer to historical examples that are tidy and clear-cut, and then behave as if they are the norm. They are not. Whether we bemoan the media today and pine for Walter Cronkite, or whether we talk about how great America is in WWII, those things are the exception, not the rule. But we want them to be the rule. Wars are more like Vietnam and what we face today. They are messy and complicated, with competing factions and overlapping goals. WWII was, comparatively, straightforward, between countries with very specific boundaries and very specific leaders. Creating a winnable goal was not difficult. But that's not normally the case. Since WWII, we've had Korea, Vietnam, and now conflicts within the Middle East. We keep talking about these wars as if they should go the way of WWII, but they don't, so we somehow think there's a shortcoming. But these things cannot, and will not, go like that. References to Fascism, the Third Reich, etc., inevitably miss the point. Look, I'm deeply conflicted over all of this. I like to pride myself on keeping up with the news, current events, and making informed decisions. But this one? Hell if I know what we should do. I reject Lindsay Graham's bizarre assertions that ISIL is practically knocking down my family's door, ready to behead everyone inside, including a Mickey Mouse statue. But I also reject oversimplified liberal claims that we always make everything worse and just need to sit this one out. I usually agree with Bill Maher, for example, but his arguments on his last show just sounded hollow. But what I do know: this isn't WWII. Whatever we do or could have chosen to do is likely a lesser evils choice, and will have unintended consequences that are impossible to predict with certainty, but you better believe when they happen, there'll be an awful lot of "see, we told you so!"
Originally Posted By Tikiduck All I am saying is if we are going to commit to a course of action against this ideology, we must see it through to the end. Otherwise it is like stopping antibiotics before the infection has been eliminated. We end up with a strain that is even stronger and more resistant to our efforts than before. Time and time since WW2 we have left conflicts early and unresolved. The whole Iraq debacle, which never should have been started in the first place, is a direct result of a mindless, half assed effort on our part. I think it is time for the United States and it's allies to put up or shut up.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>we must see it through to the end<< But that's just it. What does that look like? We do inevitably end up creating more terrorists just with our very presence and our bombing. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Look at the ideology in Vietnam. Today we have people say that if we'd only gone in to win, and tried harder, we could've defeated the North Vietnamese. But that's just not true. Our option to "win" was to quite literally exterminate the vast majority of North Vietnamese. That was it. Wasn't it General Giap who said that he will lose more soldiers than the Americans, but we would still lose, and he would win? We face a similar problem here. If we want to define "winning" as exterminating most Syrians and Iraqis, then I suppose we could win. But that's not our goal, and so yes, our presence will create more terrorists and more sympathy for ISIL. It is inevitable. Which isn't to say we shouldn't be there, but it is to say that it's pretty much the definition of an impossible situation filled with no good options.
Originally Posted By Yookeroo "we must see it through to the end." We can't. Not without killing millions and millions of innocent people. And even then, we may be worse off than before. We cannot win this battle. Maybe we can defeat ISIS, but then someone else will pop up to replace ISIS the way ISIS has replace al Qaeda.
Originally Posted By Tikiduck Sending our kids to fight and die into yet another no win situation seems incredibly callous to me. At the very least, our soldiers deserve a plan of attack with a clear victory objective to focus on. And where does it say we have to annihilate most of the population to achieve a clear victory?
