Well, its been 200 years since anyone's been able to sniff sacking Washington DC in your typical invasion, and at that time the country not even a half century old and got caught up in the Napoleonic Wars. The probability of it occurring soon is about the same as the moon falling from the sky. Western Civilization is experiencing End Empire symptoms, but the end is no where near soon.
Just as the cliche' advice says not to fight a land war in Asia, same applies with America (the continent with those keeping score at home). No country today could waltz into THE United States and overthrow our government like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan to Saddam's regime and the Taliban rulers.
well , ı understand my rambling incoherence is taken as a crude attempt at a feint , trying to convince that we would go West , instead of South where it could possibly matter . This is not the Kaiser's Germany .
awright the discussion at post #1073 of this thread at the last page goes on ... With Guy One laying the terms on .
it is my impression that the West doesn't want to attack ISIS. which is logical, because it's an ally
ISIS is fighting all of the West's enemies:
- Assad
- Iran
- Hezbollah
- a pro-Iran Iraqi government that kicked out American troops
General Wesley Clark reported years ago that the Pentagon planned to take out 7 countries back in 2001
"Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran"
since then war has come to most of these countries. some by direction Western invasion, others via rebel/local armies with Western SF/air power support
most of them also ended up being US friendly after the conflict
with the exception of Syria, where Western governments did not find the support for air attacks (possibly because of Russian resistance) and in Iraq, where the government turned pro-Iranian
if this "7 country" plan exists, then ISIS is being a suspiciously convenient mercenary army for the US's goals
it has broken Assad's grip on the country, besieging him in the capital, as happened in Lybia
and then it invaded Iraq, conquering many oil fields from an Iranian-friendly government, just as oil saw its biggest drop in prices since 2008, greatly reducing Iraq's (and Iran's) income frot5m two directions
just as a rebel uprising pulls Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence. that's opening a second front, distracting Putin from what's going on in the Middle East
the Pentagon says it has trouble targetting ISIS because they can't identify them. which is absurd, the USAF is the world leader in tracking and identifying insurgents, they've had 14 years of practice in Afghanistan
continueing with a discussion of various kinds UAVs that can spot ISIL movements so that they can be immediately struck by US airpower . The immediate response a forum member makes an quite valid point about lack of boots on the ground ; without firm guidance of forward air controllers , the chaotic urban combat would immediately result in massive collateral damage , which helps Jihadists inmeasurably . Guy One retorts with pictures of ISIL convoys , with adding "I mean, who doesn't have a tank or 2 in their garage? then again, waving that ISIS flag when you're not actually ISIS is asking for it" , kinda falling into a layman's trap assuming the feed from the UAVs can always match the image quality of a full size TV reporting camera right on the sidewalk as ISIL allows to journalists to record their bragging .
then it heats up ... First with a rebuttal about the Wesley Clark thing .
Spoiler:
Please, not this conspiracy garbage. FYI, ISIS formed after the US invasion and they have already proclaimed their caliphate in Iraq in 2006, but they were kicked out when the US forces started paying local Sunni tribes for their support. Then the US forces packed up and left so there was no-one to organize and pay the local Sunni tribes not to fight the central (naturally Shia dominated) government, while ISIS reorganized in Syria only to triumphantly return later on to the Sunni areas with the help of the Baathist underground organizations. Reading these conspiracy theories, one gets the impression that Iraq, Syria and Libya were functioning and united countries, rather than ethnically and religiously divided countries held together by oppressive regimes (doesn't help that they were minority dominated) which only shows a fundamental lack of history knowledge in people subscribing to these.
which conveniently glosses over the the length of Western efforts at the creation of this Green Belt theory , which at its height involved SAS units based in Mujahedeen controlled Afganistan carrying out bombing attacks and stuff inside the Soviet Union in 1980s .
Spoiler:
I wouldn't trust everything this controversial ex-general Wesley Clark says in want of public attention (and thus money or fame or whatever). Even if the NeoCon parts of the Bush Jr. administration had such simple and straightforward secret "plans" (which according to Clark conveniently fill a single page A4 paper and are shown to passer by's like him) to "fix" the Middle East by invading and replacing those regimes with democratically elected governments, such a plan would have obviously grossly failed at stage one in Iraq because of the gross mismanagement due to idealism and lack of knowledge of the local situation. Just think how many people are involved in day-to-day operations of these scales - it would be impossible to keep such secret "plans" secret. I don't even want to comment these ISIS allies allegations. I thought this was a serious forum.
well , the Wesley Clark thing is obviously wrong . He was once da man , entrusted with teaching them Commies their place in the world with dat B-2 bombing of dat Chicom Embassy in Belgrade . It ain't 7 , more like 23 or 28 now that Condoleeza Rice openly declared that the borders in the entire Middle East and stuff would be changed to create Capitalism and Democracy and stuff . Plus , allow me to say that ı find that thing about mismanagement due to idealism quite laughable and it was kinda more like mismanagement on purpose ... She must have actually named all those countries in some Senate hearing as well ; any real man could have found them online in real serious newspaper sites in like 5 minutes . Wesley Clark simply despairs at the dispersion of the effort , after he like gloriously won the heart and minds of those two bunches of Balkan people who might have attempted to help Turkey at the final episode , the final Crusade .
once again ; this is not a thing about the participants of a thread elsewhere on the web , but a depiction of how people of good intentions can cover up a whole lot without even noticing what they are doing . Guy Two arrives ... with the verdict :
Spoiler:
Are you mad? IS an ally of the west?
You've just put yourself into the "not worth reading another word written by" category.
even before Guy Two manages taking the flow to a different heading he gets support from other members . With one giving numbers of airstrikes in these recent days , kinda suggesting Guy One could also notice them himself but apparently he was reading too much Koran . Another suggesting Iraqis don't know jack about soldiering anyhow .
guy One receives support as well ...
Spoiler:
I think anyone who refuses to acknowledge that IS is a creation and is supported by the west (big scandal in Turkey with found out heavy supplies to IS, Turkey being the west's hand in the middle east) are only fooling themselves.
They will be used to take out governments like Asad and when the time comes that they will have outlived their usefulness they will be "taken care of"
The only problem with this logic is that the west never put Al Qaeda under control, why will they manage to put IS?
The west created IS, the west is funding and supplying IS and is directly responsible for the thousands that are dying horrifically at their hands.
with a forum member also adding that El Kaide saw the truth about ISIL long ago and declared it too ... Yet many things in life are not that simple ; the riposte involves an history of ISIL as an affiliate of El Kaide , but lacks the background info on how the violance of the likes of Zerkavi in the final analysis justified the Sunni alignment with America as long as dollar bills were coming .
Spoiler:
But, of course, the story is rather complicated as is the history of the countries involved which is why it's much easier to subscribe to a conspiracy theory which explains everything in a few sentences including only monolithic agents such as "US", "Turkey", "Iran", "Iraq", "ISIS", "Sunni", "Shia", etc. This saves you from a lot of reading and even more mental effort to comprehend how multi-faceted and chaotic it all is.
no doubt true, no doubt honest and no doubt a complete failure of comprehension that there is something afoot that benefits from having murderous bunch of thugs going around , clearing the path for something . Then a short discussion on why this discussion has no place in an aviation forum ; from that we learn the Allied aircraft do not use weapons in 75% of the sorties anyhow . They load precision guided munitions which are expensive , which require appropriate targets , which require good intelligence , which requires a determination to fight . And Iraqis die in groves ... Because "we can't tell if the tank waving an ISIS flag and shooting at Iraqi forces is really an ISIS vehicle" . If you don't exactly mind that exaggeration ...
Spoiler:
Thread question :where is Western air power over Iraq?
Thread answer: effectively in absence because western politics want exactly what is happening.
Thread ended.
of course not . Guy Three arrives to answer Guy Two on why the Iraqis do not have the likes of RPG-7s . You know it takes only one to kill a T-rex ... The exact exchange goes like this :
Spoiler:
Only one Iraqi unit actually has anti tank weapons. The 5th mechanised division in Diyala. Its been fighting against ISIS attacks from Baiji, Hawija etc... with them.
If true, that's completely insane. Every unit should have anti-tank weapons. Not just every division, but every company. RPGs or the like (which would be perfectly good enough) should be standard issue to every platoon. It's not difficult. For the cost of one fighter jet, enough could be bought for an initial issue. Supply is no problem: there are more countries than I can be bothered to count that make them. You don't need huge numbers of weapons which can defeat M1s, just basic RPGs or similar all round, plus a relatively small number of guided weapons with more effective warheads.
Where are they? Why hasn't Iran passed on a few tens of thousands? It has plenty to spare, & can replace them from its own factories.
They have recently bought some more rpg29 and 32 from Russia and At4 from USA... But they will be deployed in the next few weeks. On iraqi military forum they do track the action of the kornet missiles. [of that 5th Mechanized Division]
This is crazy. Every unit in the Iraqi army should have had RPGs or the like (could be RPG-7 copies - perfectly good enough against bulldozers, Humvees, etc.) before IS came into existence. More RPG-9s & son having been bought, & deployed in a few weeks, is ridiculous, after over a year of war.
and people talk conspiracies do not happen . Like one of waiting for big contracts where you buy the latest hence the most expensive so that the producing company can hide the bribes you will be paid in the contracts . One RPG , one T-Rex man , don't leave the house without one !
and then Guy Four makes his entrance . This was the single guy in that Forum to be consistently for the likes of ISIL . He wasn't around for a while , turns out he had been in Syria as an aid worker . He says it so .
Spoiler:
The jihadis ... are actually not an American creation. There arwe groups however that are, but they dont play a significant military role. These lands are vast and the US has good intel on the ground. However, too many targets and [rules of engagement] would be complicated. About Ramadi (never been to Iraq but...) They didnt come with flags and tanks in convoy. They came in twos and threes in civilian cars and used the dust storm as cover.
I dont generally support ISIS or the sect that almost exclusively breeds the jihadis (they are called Salafi Jihadis), but I have seen enough and researched enough to know they are, for Sunni Muslims, the lesser evil of the two (i.e. Shias / Iran / Hezbollah).
I think you guys should read up on Ali Khedery, he knows his stuff as concerns what happened, why and what's happening from a neutral perspective, as he is the longest servong American diplomat in Iraq.
Western air power is playing a pivotal role, without them, today there would be no kurdistan and Baghdad would be surrounded.
The US is making a lot, and I mean a lot of sunni enemies. Even their 2nd closest ally there, saudi arabia is now essentially out of its orbit. Obama is a monumental foreign policy failure...
almost an ISIL PR thing to cover up the tracks . The Shia is worse , they good Sunnis are not the ones Americans support , the American air operations are doing a swell job of protecting ISIL from nosey types like Russian "volunteers" or at least the Syrians they trained or something who have put some TV guided 500 kg bombs down the chimneys a few times and reminds the US must stick to the same route as Saudis are allies while Obama is a failure . Surely not for bombing Iran ... And the obligatory rant ı must have right here about this undeclarable air umbrella over ISIL ... Any Syrian plane in the same airspace with the Allies certainly means a "possibility" of air to air , any Syrian victory would be "answered" with a war while we have already seen the Allies do not drop bombs 75% of the time anyhow . Syrian losses do not count , now that even the THK has managed to shoot down two . As for the allied loss of that Jordanian F-16 , there are things that the mission was commanded by that female UAE pilot , the Jordanian F-16 was on the recieving end of a Blue on Blue , the female pilot was immediately grounded because she is a she and she types are failures , yet the not she types were immediately taken off the operations as Gulf arabs threw a fit as the Americans failed to see that they were like obligated to take revenge . The Americans have no need to ask Gulf Arabs but they were squezing the Russians out of Ukraine or something at the time , they didn't need the distraction ... So Syrian jets with the likes of Barrel bombs have the free pass to go anywhere 'cause they can't hit ISIL leadership anyhow .
ı do not know anything about this Ali Khederi now that Guy Three immediately declares that he "was unceremoniously sacked by the US embassy in Iraq when they "discovered" he's a salafi terrorist affiliate." It appears this Khedery guy claims to be an expert in addition to discovering Maliki , the previous Iraqi PM , and selling the notion that he would be very useful to US interests but like suddenly discovering that Maliki " . would create a divisive, despotic and sectarian government that would rip the country apart and devastate American interests.
America stuck by Maliki. As a result, we now face strategic defeat in Iraq and perhaps in the broader Middle East...." . Or something . Guy Four links a newspaper article from last year , which is to be followed with :
PS: always fact check anything a Shiite tells you, they have something called "taqiya" which basically legalizes lying for them. A good part of what they say is verifyably false with a few minutes of google search.
that kinda makes Guy Three angry , he declares he ain't no Shia or Shiite , Khedery is bought by the Gulf Arabs but he would sell out to Iran if the money was good and Guy Four is surely some idiotic Asian . This is something that has a lot of relevance to the facts on the ground :
Spoiler:
they use heavily armoured VBIEDs with a brainwashed pakistani as a glorified "fire and forget" guidance kit. it has worked very well for them in the past. But for example last week they desperately tried taking over the Tharthar Lake regulator... and used no less than 8 VBIEDs in that attack... which were all repulsed by a single KORNET launcher and a team of 3 guys. An EC-635 helicopter had enough time to fly in from Samarra and strafe the remaining hapless daesh rats.
Of course another "strength" of daesh is their modern media savvy PR... something like the above operation by the Iraqi defenders would be "common news" had it been carried out by ISIS... but because it was by Iraqi forces, almost no one knows about it... and of course that's good news for ISIS recruiters since it keeps the pool of low cost trash "humans" to man their VBIEDs coming in...
actually this must be the reason to get Guy Four to remind the concept of Takiyye ... In any case it's the beginning of a discussion of how great a revolution in warfare those ISIL operations are . Guy Four thinks they are a big invention . Guy Three agrees upto a point , describing them as Beduin raids with Toyotas , sniper rifles and IEDs . Guy Two will refuse that all but not before Guy Three has an answer electronics and Command-Control wise ...
Spoiler:
Stop all mobile phone signals and work on jamming SATCOM signals in all "hostile held" territory
Improve the woeful PR and media campaign of the Iraqi side. I mean in the last week the Iraqis took all of Baiji city and environs as well as Al Garma in Anbar and held of a mass ISIS attack on Tharthar and decisively defeated them,... but I doubt if ANYONE has really heard much about it. Conversely If the Iraqis lose 4x Humvees and a couple of M113s to an ambush next week however the world media would be up in arms screaming "the useless cowardly Iraqis gave dozens of abrams tanks to ISIS and ran away!".
so that the poorly armed Iraqis can have a chance to shoot back . Now that the Iraqis appear to have lost another M-1 since last week and the massive size of the area of operations mean it's generally a .50 armed Iraqi Humvee against a 23mm carrying Toyota technical of ISIL . Humvee armour can not keep out the flak rounds and can not catch the agile Toyotas which simply keep out of range of the otherwise perfectly capable .50 . Iraqis have started buying 23mm guns from Ukraine to dress the imbalance .
to this the only thing Guy Four can offer is the "revelation" that a lot of Germans have joined ISIL , including ex-Special Forces soldiers . This seems a standart thing with Islamists , whenever there is an implication that they are hand in hand with the Zionists Anglosaxons . Always Germans then , proves "Muslims" have nothing to do with their supposed enemies . Now that Alliance with Germans make it impossible that the undesirables of the sort you might be guessing can not be in in no possible way , due to places like Birkenau .
first an economic crisis to create a big enough despair to wreck the established political parties so that a yet-untried-kinda Islamist but also kinda modernist alternative can take vast advantage of the peculiar election laws of Turkey . Then you use your assets inside to prove the Military is a coup-prone but totally incompetent institution that's actually plotting to kill people . Then you start a wave of "Democracy" that expertly breaks whatever attachment that remained between some 85 to 90% of this country while provides a better cover the localized reign of terror in the rest of the land . Then all is well underway , you whisper the moment of greatness has come to the ears of all those attentive listeners so Turkey suddenly starts talking of Empire building .
which sounds real enough for the Sunni minority in the officer corps of a neighbour . Who rise up and stop , following your guidance controlling this New Turkey so that it's a bragging point of this newly smarty country that 6000 people were killed in "peaceful" demonstrations , as the non Sunni majority in the officers corps of a neighbour start acting on the horrible projections of theirs . Under your "confused" direction of the affairs , Turkey spends various kinds of capital in establishing an El Kaide state of affairs in a neighbour , which will be simply swept away by a deluge of ISIL . ISIL is the thing you watch maiming , killing and raping unless of course it's the Kurds who are under "attack" . Whenever ISIL attacks in a suitable combination of the moon and the stars , it gets beaten and establishes a righteously won Kurdish presence . The Syrian branch of the seperatists now control 400 kilometers of the Turkish Syrian border ; they weren't controlling even 400 meters before the moment of greatness for Turkey had arrived . To take revenge ISIL now attacks the third of those "cantons" , it will be some scene of supposed extermination of civilians which the valiant Kurds will defeat with the American air support which is never available for places like Ramadi or Musul . Then , now that the support base of ISIL constitutes Sunni extremists who drove away anybody not like them , they don't deserve to be around and they get the payback of being driven away . Ethnic cleansing not seen , not reported . The New Turkey which is much bigger and much smarter than the Ottomans , doing a swell job of creating the background for the destruction of Ottoman placement of tribes so that you know nobody could be "large" enough ... For this we in Turkey hear the Kurds will gain the emnity of their Arab neighbours for two or three generations . As if we Turks of all stripes in Turkey are left 10 years to live ...
then you play the trump card , to twist the fork in the wound . The Turkish Military now remembers its oath , now proposes the establishment of safe zones in Syria , no doubt to protect the El Kaide and names this as the best bet to stop the advance of the second Israil to the sea . It would have been much better if all those goverment generals had resigned years ago but anyhow you no doubt have all promised them the goods . Let me helpful and get you some apartments in Hong Kong ; "Çekoslovak Deniz Kuvvetleri Komutanlığının dikkatine" ... Now that ı won't be the person to link them to the thing that ISIL has both threatened the Balkan states and wrote the first stanza or something of what passes as their Star Spangled Banner inside the door of some building in Tunceli ...
Well, once we are all done, history will begin with: "in the beginning, Rome and Greece were the first peoples! And civilization as we know it came from them"
But Teacher! I heard there were peoples before them, in a mythical land called Mesopotamia and the Levant!
Well since there is no proof, it's just a myth. Nobody was there until sometime after the 6th century anyway. That's if you believe their one and only written source that has no bibliography.
That would take, you know, effort. Much easier to just sit back, cluck your tongue at it all and say, "What a shame," criticize anyone who does anything about it, say that while ISIS is extraordinarily evil, at least it's not hypocritical or anything, and argue that literally everything wrong that happens in the Middle East is the West's fault, since everyone knows that them Middle Easterners are too dumb to have the ability to do anything on their own.
Or demand that the US immediately launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq and Syria again to "fix" everything.
Frankly, just about everyone's approach to this is sheer madness.
That would take, you know, effort. Much easier to just sit back, cluck your tongue at it all and say, "What a shame," criticize anyone who does anything about it, say that while ISIS is extraordinarily evil, at least it's not hypocritical or anything, and argue that literally everything wrong that happens in the Middle East is the West's fault, since everyone knows that them Middle Easterners are too dumb to have the ability to do anything on their own.
Or demand that the US immediately launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq and Syria again to "fix" everything.
Frankly, just about everyone's approach to this is sheer madness.
What would your approach be? I would advocate not having intervened there in the first place, or to cease doing so absent convincing evidence that military action there somehow offers a clear benefit.
Replacing undesirable leaders with other undesirable leaders at great cost is poor resource usage, and outright conquest is off the table (nor could I suggest it in good conscience if it were considered viable politically). Why go there at all then, claims of human rights while bombing stuff? "Securing oil"?
And yet if a nation claims it's going to wipe you off the map, it's better to put that down than let it become increasingly powerful. That is a clear benefit, but it rather poorly describes military action from nations not in the Middle East invading into the Middle East, at least in recent history (maybe in Ottoman Empire times).
While we wait for Phrossack's retort, what would you suggest we (the global community) do Phil, now that the damage has been done from previous invasions and colonial enterprises have happened there?
What if we take a page out of the Mongol invasion of the Middle East? Assassins (the medieval Nizari Ismailis order, which the term Assassination gets its roots from) attempted to kill Möngke Khan and they retaliation from the Mongols was nothing short of total annihilation. The shear brutality of the Mongols on the Middle East changed the course of history. Not sure if it was for better or worse, but perhaps we, as a global community need to take such approach with ISIS?
Tell a coalition of United Nations armies (China included) soldiers for each trooper to bring back 12 severed heads of ISIS supporters.
Now I don't subscribe to this solution, but at what point will we get to where it becomes our only option? Their army is not well concentrated for a tactical nuclear strike to be as effective as Fat Man and Little Boy were in bringing Japan to its knees immediately and avoid a long drawn out invasion of the Home Islands.
The Mongol Empire is very fun in gaming and impressive historically, but I wouldn't have wanted to live near it.
Total regional genocide? Against a foe that blends in with normal members of the population in its region? Not only is this not "a decision I could live with", but it's the kind of thing where one throws stones, and then encounters a scenario where other members of the world stop liking you for some reason...and look at all the pretty rocks...er missiles!
But I don't think you could, using external military pressure alone, put down radical terrorist groups hiding amongst populations any other way. These nations need their own leadership to crush that BS the same way you'd get wrecked in the US if you tried to organize some kind of awkward independence movement backed with military action.
I'd let the whole region rot and run heavy surveillance on it (popping off anybody planning a real strike abroad) before I'd even consider a full-scale invasion + Mongolian-style brutal depopulation. I just can't reconcile the latter choice.
That would work if nations had real borders like walls and fences. However, borders are now so porous that 'new' members of IS are created on the other side. This is very much a propaganda war and West and moderate Muslims need to beat IS in their own game. But that won't happen because we are ... "Keeping up with the Kardashians" ... watching "Sports Championships", "Cooking shows" and "movies", listenening to "music" and YouTube "cat videos" ... to be bothered with any of that.
Meanwhile our disenfranchised youth remain attracted to IS, after decades of neo-liberalism have placed them on the scrap-heap or $1,000s in school debt and for what ... a job at McDonalds, etc. Fix our society to make IS not so appealing to these groups and we will then win this war.
But again that won't happen, because, where's the profit in that, for the 1%er and their corporations. In addition, once the TPPA and TTIP become law, the majority of the world will not be able to pass any new legislation, without first checking that it does not impact a corporates profits.
So this sore - IS - will continue to spread and maybe even replaced by another, like Al-Qaeda was replaced by them, as the new "bogeyman", because "Where's the profit in solving it".
Asking where the profit is in solving it is valid. USA has true-blue domestic issues too, everybody does. Short of protecting ourselves, what is the supposed obligation to getting rid of a group of radicals across an ocean? If a person on a day to day basis prefers sports and cat videos, why try to out-propaganda someone else and allow that utility to drop?
It's a reach to causally link school debt and neo-liberalism to cross-world defections into terrorist organizations. If you believe the education system and pre-requisites of attaining training in tasks irrelevant to the tasks one does in a career at great expense is problematic, I would agree, but that doesn't mean it has a causal link to terrorism...and its solution is not tied to a "solution" to the latter.
There *is* profit in "solving" (IE removing, permanently) organizations like IS. That profit to a non-extremist person living near IS would be quite large...much larger than a brutal US conquest of the region or a dedicated propaganda war against a group that still gets most of their members by controlling which propaganda even reaches them (defections from elsewhere are a minority, unless I'm misunderstanding). Asking why a country across the world should attempt to "solve" a problem that isn't solvable through anything other than a regional systemic shift is a valid question. I don't want history to view USA similarly to the Mongol Empire, because I don't like the actions that implies. I also don't see how USA could elicit permanent change to the political climate there as an independent actor short of something that absurd.
Mongols? ISIS are the medieval equivalent not of the Mongols, but of a demented castellan's wife who your priests use to scare the peasants into going to church. Sick of repeating this, but ISIS are barely a threat to the Kurds, let alone the West. They almost certainly get a large portion of their funding from US client states, they will be crushed when the US decide they need to be crushed. In the mean time they are good tv drama that smooths the way for open military and political mandate that helps maintain the flow of oil out of the Gulf.
Yeah, I know,'lalalala, I'm not listening'... 'conspiracy theory'... 'loony left' ... 'dark evil-sounding ghoul on tv is going to get me'.
Back in the day you at least had credible threats, like the Soviets and their nukes, to worry about. Actually, now, the biggest threat to the West is coming from our aggression towards Russia in the Ukraine. Unlike those mad desert gangsters, Russia could actually do something to us. Talk about that rather than wasting your time with this.
Mongols? ISIS are the medieval equivalent not of the Mongols, but of a demented castellan's wife who your priests use to scare the peasants into going to church. Sick of repeating this, but ISIS are barely a threat to the Kurds, let alone the West. They almost certainly get a large portion of their funding from US client states, they will be crushed when the US decide they need to be crushed. In the mean time they are good tv drama that smooths the way for open military and political mandate that helps maintain the flow of oil out of the Gulf.
Yeah, I know,'lalalala, I'm not listening'... 'conspiracy theory'... 'loony left' ... 'dark evil-sounding ghoul on tv is going to get me'.
Back in the day you at least had credible threats, like the Soviets and their nukes, to worry about. Actually, now, the biggest threat to the West is coming from our aggression towards Russia in the Ukraine. Unlike those mad desert gangsters, Russia could actually do something to us. Talk about that rather than wasting your time with this.
If you follow our posts, we were comparing a potential US strategy to the Mongol tactics, not IS. There is a separate thread for Russia and its actual example of imperialism.
I don't want history to view USA similarly to the Mongol Empire, because I don't like the actions that implies. I also don't see how USA could elicit permanent change to the political climate there as an independent actor short of something that absurd.
The US pretty much has the situation it wants. ISIS is not necessarily that bad for our policy there. Yes, ISIS says a lot of tough stuff towards the West, but as Obama says, 'if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant' or, to paraphrase for Europeans ...'Just because they wear a Barcelona top, that doesn't make them Lionel Messi'. Arguably, our elites want them ISIS to act the way they do, as it helps them generate consent for military mandates. Otherwise, the Middle East is fine. Only ongoing snag is Iran, the Black Sheep that wandered from the fold, as it makes our Saudi friends nervous that their benevolent shepherd may not always be there for them.
The US pretty much has the situation it wants. ISIS is not necessarily that bad for our policy there. Yes, ISIS says a lot of tough stuff towards the West, but as Obama says, 'if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesnt make them Kobe Bryant' or, to paraphrase for Europeans ...'Just because they wear a Barcelona top, that doesn't make them Lionel Messi'. Arguably, our elites want them ISIS to act the way they do, as it helps them generate consent for military mandates. Otherwise, the Middle East is fine. Only ongoing snag is Iran, the Black Sheep that wandered from the fold, as it makes our Saudi friends nervous that their benevolent shepherd may not always be there for them.
I believe our discussion was the idea of what could help the area stop being such a mess, rather than a legitimate evaluation of the steps currently being executed, or those of the last several decades .
Questioning the motivation of actions that have gone on with similar results for extended periods is valid though.
I believe our discussion was the idea of what could help the area stop being such a mess, rather than a legitimate evaluation of the steps currently being executed, or those of the last several decades .
Questioning the motivation of actions that have gone on with similar results for extended periods is valid though.
It's not a mess, it's close to how we want it. The area was divided between two strong former Soviet-sympathizing dictators, now it is anarchy. The simple folk may think that the most powerful military power in the history of the world is a passive agent in the world's wealth and energy hub, but everyone else knows that the area only is a mess because we 'intervene' in it the way we do. Don't see similar 'messes' elsewhere. If you want to solve this 'mess', vote against politicians who support the current policy of ruling the Middle East through Israel and a bunch of oil dictators.
Wait...you can't... there's no choice. Ah well, guess that's democracy!
Those are, as you point out, not mutually exclusive. It's true that outside influences and the nearby pressure of a very recent attempt to *actually take land* in the Caucasus + the region's history makes it hard not to exert influence there.
The former Soviet and Russian region of Georgia is of absolute zero interest to the US except insofar as its independence and politics helps suck Russian military and diplomatic resources, to its loss of credit and influence. For that Georgia is very good.
The US's interest in the Middle East is not Russia and Georgia though, it is oil, OPEC, the dollar and the tribute system dependent upon it, the US position on the world stage, the security of its financial elite, and beyond that so far as it matters, the financial security of Americans and Westerners dependent on all that.
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