Paris attacks

[overtone]

 

 

- - Don't tell me I have to be careful not to piss off a Muslim Fundementalist or I deserve the terror he inflicts. That is not reasonable or useful advice.

So the only reason you can think of for not invading other people's countries, not setting up systems of torture prisons, not drone striking civilians, not destroying whole civilizations and installing military and fundamentalist tyranny over their populations, and so forth,

 

is to avoid "pissing off a Muslim Fundamentalist"?

 

Actually, my observation was that the French do not deserve to bear the consequences of US behavior in the Middle East. And it was a response to your mockery of the French in their refusal to join the US in committing the horrible foolishness that is behind this latest crisis. The French were right, the US was wrong, and the French are paying for US folly.

[tar]

Everybody is paying for U.S. folly as far as you are concerned Overtone.

 

And not only that, but Republican folly. The real U.S. never made a mistake or backed a bad guy. Those of pure heart, who are not Republican, not bankers, not businessmen, not tied to oil or the military industrial complex, not CIA, not religious, not poor and stupid, not drug addicts, not gun owners, not policemen, not military, not reactionary, not bigoted, not foolish, not a child, not stupid enough to vote for Cheney, not afraid of refugees... which leaves about three Americans. You and two others.

 

Hope you three have a plan to stop ISIL.

'cause I don't want to answer to a caliph.

[overtone]

And not only that, but Republican folly. The real U.S. never made a mistake or backed a bad guy.

?

This business of who's a real American is your thing, not mine. I have always included the current electoral base of the Republican Party as part of the real US.

 

 

Those of pure heart, who are not Republican, not bankers, not businessmen, not tied to oil or the military industrial complex, not CIA, not religious, not poor and stupid, not drug addicts, not gun owners, not policemen, not military, not reactionary, not bigoted, not foolish, not a child, not stupid enough to vote for Cheney, not afraid of refugees... which leaves about three Americans.

Try as you might to corral the entire population of the US behind your gullibility and the warmongering of the W&Cheney administration in the Middle East, it remains the doings of particular people with the support of particular people. There are plenty of Americans who never fell for it, never supported it, never spent three minutes trying to excuse it,

 

and to this day do not live in denial, unable to admit the simplest of physical facts; and dissing the French, just to keep the fantasy walls in good repair.

 

The US would have been better off bringing violins to the Iraq War, than ignoring the French when they warned against that obvious disaster. And the fact that the French are now paying part of the price for the US failure to heed reason or behave decently, just makes dissing them that much more dishonorable.

Edited November 22, 2015 by overtone

[tar]

I refer to one joke, that was told during the Iraq war and you say I am dissing the French.

 

You diss the U.S. all the time. Why is my little diss dishonorable and your big neverending dis is honorable?

Edited November 22, 2015 by tar

[overtone]

You diss the U.S. all the time.

No, I don't. But it gives me hope to see that my recitations of historical fact and current circumstance are taken that way - despite the waterboarding bizarro spiel you haven't drowned in the koolaid, unable to tell right from wrong altogether. You recognize some things as bad, even if the US did them.

 

 

Why is my little diss dishonorable and your big dis is honorable?

Timing. The French are up to their asses in a US launched mess they warned about, and you mock them for not helping the US launch it?

 

The French would be within their rights to ship every Middle Eastern refugee they can round up directly to Texas, along with a bill for their trouble.

Edited November 22, 2015 by overtone

[tar]

OK, bad timing, But Overtone, you sound like the anti-Zionist propaganda machine that was dissing America during the Iraq war.

I was very distressed at the self hating Americans of that time, and felt we had a right, no an obligation, to remove Saddam. I was happy when we did and thought that Iraq would appreciate being able to live out from under his rule.

 

It did not work out that way and the divide between the Kurds and the Sunni and the Shiite was too wide to bridge. They needed to bridge it. And did not. It was not a lack of U.S. trying to give them an opportunity to bridge it. We broke the thing and didn't stick around long enough and strong enough to see it repaired. The fault was not in withdrawing our support from Saddam, once he invaded Kuwait, it was in withdrawing our troops and letting ISIS take the place back.

 

It is interesting to me that you base the U.S. failure on the fact that we had gone into Iraq to keep Saddam from using weapons of mass destruction, that we did not find. While at the same time relating the historical fact that we had provided Saddam with chemical and biological weapons.

 

It cannot be an historical fact that we had reason to believe Saddam had WMDs because we provided him with them, AND it be an historical fact that thinking Saddam had chemical weapons was an invalid excuse to invade a country.

 

Regard, TAR

perhaps if we had not backed Bin Laden in his fight against the Soviet Union he would not have been strong enough to hurt us later, but two things about that. One Afghanistan might have been conquered by the Soviets, if we had not supported Bin Laden and two, once Bin Laden brought down our towers he needed to die.

 

And so we backed Saddam against Iran. He looked like a secular leader we could deal with. Iran looked like a power that would align against us and threaten Israel. If we had not backed Saddam we may have lost influence in the area. Once he went rouge though, with the powerful army he had, he could have conquered the whole region. So we did our duty and built a coalition to defeat him. And did defeat him.

actually I don't think anyone in history has ever conquered Afghanistan and it will probably stay that way, so we probably did the Soviets a favor by helping to stop their war

Edited November 22, 2015 by tar

[CharonY]

 

 

And so we backed Saddam against Iran. He looked like a secular leader we could deal with. Iran looked like a power that would align against us and threaten Israel. If we had not backed Saddam we may have lost influence in the area. Once he went rouge though, with the powerful army he had, he could have conquered the whole region. So we did our duty and built a coalition to defeat him. And did defeat him.

 

Urks, geez, no. That is an odd, jumbled misrepresentation of what happened and the interaction between Iraq and the US. I am not even sure where to begin. Well, first the US was complicit in the rise of power of the Ba'ath party in 1963. That was well before the Iran-US conflict and one of the key points there was the increasing influence of the Iraqi Communist Party (there may be more, but the background here is the cold war, religion played virtually no role). This was followed shortly by an internal power struggle leading to another coup, ultimately ending in a pro-Nasserist government.

 

Saddam came to power in 1968 in yet another coup (technically as the second in command). In this context it is often said that he ruled with an iron fist to keep the various Iraqi factions under control. What is not so often said (at least after the Gulf wars) is that he did it in conjunction with massive welfare programs (not unlike Germany under Hitler) as well as modernization of the economy. This was realized using Iraq's oil reserves.

 

Now that the stage is set, let us talk about the Iran conflict. You make it sound like a defensive action against a religious conflict (secular Iraq vs religious Iran), but if you know your history book, you will realize that at that time the big ally of the US was: the then secular Iran under Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (you know, after UK/US deposed the elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh). So what actually happened is closer to the following:

 

Saddam started closer ties with the Soviet Union and following 1968 the relationship was rather bad with the US. Thus, in 1973-5 the CIA worked with the Shah (Iran) to finance Kurdish rebels resulting in the second Kurdish-Iraqi war. Also the thought that Iraq would be there to defend Israel from Iran is so mindblowingly wrong.. Just let me say that in 1977 the relationship between Iraq and Egypt went sour because Egypt started peace talks with Israel.

 

Now the Iran-Iraq conflict proper. As we all known 1979 marks the time when Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in the Islamic revolution. The resulting conflict had two elements. The first is indeed partially religious, but more specifically driven by revolutionary fears. The second is that the Arab states were wary of Iran, who, as we all know, are Persians. As the Western states now had lost their Iranian play-thing, they threw in their lot with Saddam in 1980. The funny bit is that the Soviet Union was pretty much the only one not chipping in, bringing him closer to the Western world. This is also the time when the US helped Saddam to use chemical weapons against the Iranians and then, also the Kurds. What I always found weird is that there was no regard for international law. This point is actually quite important.

What the war ultimately did, however, was to provide Khomeini with massive support from Iranians as he was seen as the successful defender of a massive Western-funded Arab invasion (note again that Iran was not the attacker and it also did not make a miraculous jump over Iraq in order to attack Israel).

 

Now let us talk the fall from grace: you said he was so powerful and because we did not want him to conquer the region we put him down. This ignores what I just mentioned, we gave him money to conquer a swath of the region first. And obviously, he largely failed. No the actual issues with Kuwait are different. In the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war Saddam wanted Kuwait to eliminate the debts Iraq made, which they refused. Saddam then tried to use oil to pay off his debts, and pushed for a raising oil prices, which was torpedoed.

Saddam then reached out to the US and, among other things, complained that the Kuwaitis were slant drilling into contested oil reserves. As tensions rose Saddam seemingly initially assumed that he could obtain support f(or at least non-involvement) from the US for a foray into Kuwait, similar to the support they received against Iran. After all, the US was providing heavy support to Iraq for a decade.and the tone was initially conciliatory.

 

However, it also became apparent that the US had no interest in rising oil prices and that the decision of OPEC not only not to curb oil production but instead increasing it, was supported by the US. Ironically, this situation resulted in an Iran-Iraq alliance to pressurize other Arab countries to limit oil production. Ultimately it resulted in the Iraq invasion of Kuwait (backed by the Soviets this time).

 

So instead of being all-powerful, Iraq was actually in a crisis and the move was a move to alleviate it. The attack by the US was unlikely to be exclusively due to the issues of international law, as they showed quite some disregard with respect to Iran. Moreover, Kuwait was a vocal enemy of Israel. What the ultimate reasons were can probably only be known once more information is declassified and analyzed by historians. But things that have been mentioned include stability of the region and especially the oil price (and thus, world economy) but potentially also due to heavy investments into Kuwait by a number of corporations (and again, it would not be the first time that large corporations were part of the decision making).

 

Finally, with regards to WMD, those that were delivered to him were found to be destroyed by UN inspectors. What the UK and US trumped up were false reports on new WMD programs that, as we know now for sure never existed. I should also add that I do profess to know the specific motivations of the parties involved, this is something for the historians to look at.

 

And since this is friggin long post for which I should not have invested any time I will let you keep all the grammar and spelling errors that you can find (heaps of them).

 

I would like to close again with an appeal not to give in to simple narratives to justify actions that can or have resulted in massive amounts of death and suffering. Every time such a decision has been taken it must be put under the highest level of scrutiny. We should not take the easy way out and pretend that our actions or the actions of our representatives were just using feel-good stories. The resulting issues are real and ISIS is just a manifestation of a quagmire where short-sighted foreign policy was used to systematically destabilize regions by pitting forces against each other. And now that the lid has been blown off it is just hypocritical to pretend that we had nothing to do with it. Or that we were just doing our duty (whatever that means).

Edited November 22, 2015 by CharonY

[Ophiolite]

I just want to report that I've broken my mouse key pressing the up arrow on CharonY's post and it still won't add more than a single +1 rep.

[swansont]

Do yiou guys really think this and other stupid beliefs don''t play a role in ISlamic terrorism?

 

That's the answer to a different question. It's not the answer to the question of whether Islam is a religion of peace. People seemingly have no trouble reconciling killing in the name of Christianity, and have killed in the name of Christianity, despite a big old "thou shalt not kill" banner in the ten commandments. So the question really is whether the beliefs and actions of one group defines the whole group. Because then you have to paint all religions this way, unless you embrace hypocrisy. If the terrorists show that Islam is a violent religion, then the KKK, the killing and bombing done in its name, etc. show that Christianity is.

[DimaMazin]

 

International human rights protects one's beliefs in their deity of choice.

 

Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

 

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

 

 

Islamic terrorists, and ISIS in particular, kill more Muslims than they do anyone else in the "secular world". Muslims are also targeted more by ISIS than anyone else in the "secular world". In around 8 months in 2014, they killed more than 9,000 Iraqi's, the majority of the victims were Muslims.

 

 

What a horrendously bigoted statement. In saying this, you ignore the context of how Islamic terrorism arose in the first place and the role of the West in the formation of such groups.

 

 

 

 

Have you considered the simple fact that banning religion or one's religious belief is just as bad as forcing people to be of a particular religion? That it is just as oppressive, not to mention a gross violation of their basic and fundamental human rights?

Really International human rights don't protect anyone from terrorists. Moslems have spoiled their countries, now they spoil Europe. Europe shouldn't make a help for moslems instead of science. If you want to make experiment with Islam in Euorope then you should build houses for European refugees in USA first.

[tar]

CharonY,

 

Very nice post, I had forgotten a great deal of the shifts of allegiances and government changes and the timing and who was a puppet of who throughout the whole thing. The Israeli wars we helped Israel fight and the cold war and our proxy battles with the Soviet Union certainly played a part in who we were backing or who we were hoping would serve our interests in the area. And the CIA certainly operated on our behalf in clandestine ways as was their charter. And the power that the military industrial complex has and did have in our country is not a point of contention. That is part of what we are about. Whether we flex our muscle in ways that help the world or hurt the world is important to consider, and whether our foreign actions tend to help our friends or hurt them, or help our enemies or degrade them, is important to consider.

 

And of course whether or not our actions allow us to put gas in our cars and drive to the mall to shop and go out to dinner and go to the movies, in peace and freedom, pursuing our way of life.

 

In Mali for instance, somehow special forces of the U.S. helped end the hotel siege. Somehow our interests and our role as defender of law and order, peace and freedom, put us there.

 

Surely there are reasons of trade and business and such attached, but that is who we are.

 

We help each other live a good life, and we help our friends around the world live a good life and we generally stand for human rights and freedom.

 

Seems the world keeps coming up with dictators that have some other idea.

 

Regards, TAR

and Russia and Iran and Saudi Arabia and Turkey have some power in the area as do others,

 

the Middle East is not a mess that we as the U.S. made alone

[overtone]

I was very distressed at the self hating Americans of that time, and felt we had a right, no an obligation, to remove Saddam.

Why an obligation? Had we done something wrong?

 

 

It did not work out that way and the divide between the Kurds and the Sunni and the Shiite was to wide to bridge. They needed to bridge it. And did not. It was not a lack of U.S. trying to give them an opportunity to bridge it.

Yes, it was.

 

 

We broke the thing and didn't stick around long enough and strong enough to see it repaired.

We broke it, prevented it from recovering, and stuck around for more than ten years trying (and failing) to make sure it did not repair itself in ways we did not want.

 

 

The fault was not in withdrawing our support from Saddam, once he invaded Kuwait, it was in withdrawing our troops and letting ISIS take the place back.

We encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait, and used that (and his overreach) as a pretext for destroying his military and imposing sanctions to prevent him rebuilding it. That was in 1990. We kept the sanctions in place for a dozen years, increasingly severe (the death toll among Iraqi children was variously estimated in the tens to hundreds of thousands), without creating the revolt and disintegration expected. It was fourteen years and full scale military invasion later - in 2004 - that the beginnings of Sunni ISIL began to emerge from the wreckage of the country, its ethnic cleansing, and its emerging Iranian backed Shia State. It was ten years of military occupation later that the US was forced to abandon its temporary bribery based lull in the Sunni revolt by the terms of W&Cheney's treaty with the Iranian backed Shia government, which promptly cut off the bribe money to the despised Sunni - and here we are.

 

 

It cannot be an historical fact that we had reason to believe Saddam had WMDs because we provided him with them, AND it be an historical fact that thinking Saddam had chemical weapons was an invalid excuse to invade a country.

It's a fact that years ago the US had provided Saddam with the makings and technology of chemical weapons, which he had produced and used in quantity; that he had acquired basic nuclear technology and a weapons program; and that he had the capability of producing biological weapons. It's also a fact that by the time of the US invasion the UN inspections and US sanctions enforcements had largely divested him of WMDs, there was very little chance of him possessing anything other than some old and nonfunctional gas shells hidden somewhere, and UN inspectors had been in Iraq with complete access right up until the preliminary bombing forced them out, easily capable of having any WMDs the US thought were present destroyed as they had all the others over the years. It's also a fact that Saddam had been fought to at best a negative draw by the Iranians, back when he had US support and all his nerve gas and the like and the Iranians were still in recovery from their revolution and under serious international strictures - not exactly a modern Wehrmacht, eh?

 

Chemical weapons in themselves were of course not a threat to the world in general, or the US in particular. The bogeyman used to further panic the US population in the wake of 9/11 was nuclear weapons supposedly about to be given to "terrorists" by Saddam, or perhaps manufactured in quantity and used in a massive suicide strike against Israel for some reason - the threats were short of specifics and long in rhetorical emphasis. But they sold the war.

 

And the Iraq War brought us to the modern circumstances - with our natural ally in the region (and the only regional army with any track record of fighting hard), Iran, difficult to coordinate with, and everybody else amoral scum trying to keep a lid on psychopathic thugs.

Edited November 22, 2015 by overtone

[tar]

Overtone,

 

OK, I see your point. We did not do it right. And yes I feel we did something wrong in initially backing Saddam and then finding any excuse to bring him down, once we saw his stripes clearly after Kuwait. I do not in my memory see the time period between Kuwait in 1990 and the coalition's invasion of Iraq in 2003 as as long as it was. I see it as one motion, as if we followed him to Bagdad after we slaughtered his guard on the road out of Kuwait, tried him for his crimes, hung him and tore down his statues in about a week and a half.

 

Sept.11th really changed my personal world. I fell easily and quickly into any thought that Saddam had ties with Bin Laden. I had read the Koran twice following Sept. 11th and debated much on websites, primarily Guardian Talk, against anti-Zionist propaganda. If children died because of the sanctions it was because Saddam would not send rations to areas in his own country that opposed him politically. The no fly zones protected his political enemies within his own country from air attack by his airforce. We did not kill those children. And we did not kill the civilians that died, except for the ones that were purposely put near targets to prevent us from hitting them. In most cases so we would look bad in the eyes of the world.

 

I know that Halliburton stood to gain in oil and security contracts, but the purposes of our activities in the area were to prop up governments that would be in our interests to prop up, and to fight against governments that would be in our interests to fight against.

 

It is generally understood that Britain and the U.S. were wrong to think that Saddam had designs to acquire nuclear weapons, and still had chemical weapons hidden from the inspectors. But at the time, considering his lies about everything else, such was certainly believable. But this far from makes him a good guy, and far from says that we should not have followed him right into Baghdad after Kuwait.

 

Perhaps history will show that we should help Iran help Hezbollah against Israel. Perhaps history will show that there are still WMD hidden in the sands of Syria. All we can do, is all we can ever do, and debate what our next move should be. Who we should help, who we should hurt and how much blood and money should be lost in the effort.

 

I have not, in any of our debates ever considered that you are wrong. Only that you throw out the baby with the bathwater, and forget that without the military industrial complex you would not have ANY say in how the world should behave. That is you could say what you wanted but would not have the power to actually accomplish anything.

 

Paris shows us that Islamic Extremists have the power to hit us at home. Only the strong anti-terrorism efforts that are undertaken by our FBI and CIA and police forces and armed forces and vigilant populace stop the cells from acting at a mall near you. We already have enemies. Some of them are France's enemies as well.

 

We should, and do, stand with them in any and all actions they need to take to put these enemies out of business.

 

Regards, TAR

[DimaMazin]

You're merely reinforcing, not rebutting what I previously said.

Indeed. I am bad guy for you, because I don't recognise policy of secular society without science development by useful.

[MigL]

Now you're stretching the historical truth Overtone.

The US did not encourage S. Hussein to invade Kuwait.

( no I will not write a post as excellent and leeeeengthy as CharonY )

 

And you contradict yourself...

You say the US gave S. Hussein Chemical weapons AND the technology to make them.

But since he destroyed all the ones we gave him he couldn't possibly have more.

( why not, he had the tech to make them himself )

 

But we're starting to go around in circles like the Israelis and Palestinians. We're looking to assign blame, and who did what first, instead of looking for a solution.

All parties involved have some guilt; what's the way forward ?

Edited November 22, 2015 by MigL

[swansont]

On the subject of "is X a religion of peace"

 

https://twitter.com/TheBaxterBean/status/668644088502165505

 

not all that different from CharonY's post

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/92159-paris-attacks/page-2#entry892336

[MigL]

In the interest of discussion, I'm going to play devil's advocate ( again ), SwansonT.

 

The argument being made is that Islam is just a religion, and isn't responsible for the evil perpetrated by people.

Just like evil is done by Catholics, Jews, Hindus, etc.

 

Now what if we were to replace Islam with the word 'gun' ?

Would you give us the old NRA rant " guns don't kill people, people kill people'.

 

Or, if you would say that guns facilitate the killing of people, so guns should be controlled; Would you then say that Islam facilitates evil, and should be controlled ?

Or could you say that, since Islam doesn't have a single leader ( as the Pope is to the Catholic church ), it is subject to many different interpretations, some good, some misguided and some even evil ?

 

In effect, since the Qur'an is interpreted at the local level by Imans ( often in very different ways than another Iman ), doesn't that make Islam, then, an extension of that particular Iman's ideology ?

And if this ideology is evil ?

 

I am no expert on Catholicism or Islam.

These are at best, shallow views, so, if someone knows differently, I'm open to being schooled.

[CharonY]

So tar, you are saying that you are in favor of a jingoist attitude reserving the right for a country to challenge the sovereignty over any other country in order to further its interest with no regard to long-term issues? Even when these actions demonstrably lead to issues we have today? Even if these actions limit the right of self-determination of whole populations? Even if these actions provides fuel to the extremists who can justify their actions as a defense against outside influence? Even if these actions put moderates into jeopardy as they can be easily accused to collude with outside governments against their own people? Even if these actions weaken any potential of the formation of stable governments that may have an interest in curbing terrorist actions?

 

I think these short-sighted strategies that seem to emphasize short-term goals (access to resources, controlling oil prices or other economic factors) are precisely why regions are embroiled in devastating power struggles.

 

MigL, I am not going to elaborate on all the issues, I would refer to UNSCOM reports for that matter. The question is a good one, however. I do think that the only viable long-term strategy has to be promoting stable governments and societies that will allow a peaceful transition to a more democratic society. This is only likely to happen if at the same time social tensions are reduced and prosperity will be accessible to the majority of the of the population. While it cannot prevent from radicals trying to seize power, typically it does reduce general support. How it can be realized is of course a different matter.

[tar]

CharonY,

 

I am saying that it is OK for the French, in this case to go against their constitution and normal important human rights of its citizens, in a state of emergency and close its borders contrary to EU principles, raid homes, question Syrian nationals, and bomb a sovereign country (Syria) to eliminate a threat. Reactionary and Jingoistic as it may be.

 

And I stand with her in her efforts and pledge my own blood and money to the removal of Da'esh from the planet.

 

Regards, TAR

 

We can get back to normal human dignity and respect once we no longer have to worry about getting blown up, stabbed, shot, cut-up, poisoned or otherwise "by whatever means" killed in the name of the prophet(pbuh).

 

You're blaming me for being Jingoistic, but I am thinking, since 9/11 that it is OK to protect your way of life if it is your way of life that is being threatened. Its OK to be Brussels and shut down business to protect yourself from being killed. You don't want to live that way, in fear. So you kill the bastards that are your sworn enemy, or throw them in prison . Then, once they are in prison or dead, you go back to being the peaceful folk you want to be.

 

Regards, TAR

France declared war on ISIS. Perhaps everybody should.

Including Muslims in those of us, who should declare war on ISIL. Sunni Muslims in particular. They should not join the "Association" to save their lives. They should reject Da'ish on the general principle of being civilized human beings. If there are teaching in the Koran that are barbaric, don't go by them. If there are no barbaric teachings in the Koran, don't do barbaric stuff in the name of the Prophet (pbuh). The koran specifically places mischief makers in the ranks of the mistaken. If you are a young person, looking for meaning and value in this life, do not pledge it to Da'esh. They have it absolutely wrong.

Edited November 23, 2015 by tar

[iNow]

^In which case, TAR, you're doing exactly what the terrorists want and you're really no better than they are.

[John Cuthber]

 

I am saying that it is OK for the French, in this case to go against their constitution and normal important human rights of its citizens, in a state of emergency and close its borders contrary to EU principles, raid homes, question Syrian nationals, and bomb a sovereign country (Syria) to eliminate a threat. Reactionary and Jingoistic as it may be.

 

And I stand with her in her efforts and pledge my own blood and money to the removal of Da'esh from the planet.

 

Do you realise that somewhere someone is writing (presumably in Arabic or something).

 

I am saying that it is OK for the French Our Brothers in the faith, in this case to go against their constitution and normal important human rights of its citizens, in a state of emergency and close its cross the borders contrary to EU principles, raid homes, question Syrian infidel nationals, and bomb a sovereign country (Syria insert name here) to eliminate a threat. Reactionary and Jingoistic as it may be.

 

And I stand with her them in her their efforts and pledge my own blood and money to the removal of Da'esh infidels from the planet.

 

Ok, now when do you both stop?

 

Don't get me wrong. If I thought your stance would help I'd be right up there with you; but not only will it not work, but it is obvious why it wont.

Every stray bullet (and most bullets go astray) risks killing or wounding some bystander. Every one of those bystander's family will then consider you as the enemy and will join up to get revenge.

If only Confucius had been right when he said " If you go on a journey seeking revenge, first dig two graves".

It's not two; it's dozens.

[tar]

Thread,

 

OK, I am being Jingoistic and reactionary. I get it. War is hell. Cycles of violence are stupid...etc.

 

But I am not Brussels. I do not house the center of NATO and the EU. The Belgians did not close their businesses to show terror and reaction and give the terrorists what they wanted. They closed their businesses because of a credible threat. They have a rabid dog in the neighborhood and they are taking their kids off the streets, and they have people with guns looking for the dog so they can kill it and let their kids back out to play.

 

When we were hit on Sept. 11th we didn't know who did it. We found out who did it and they did not have a state that they belonged to, that we could declare war on, so we declared war on the Taliban, who was protecting him. We did not kill him for many years, because we could not find him, and we were afraid that sleeper cells would activate, if we did kill him. Finally we thought we had the sleeper cell stuff under watch and felt confident enough that we had broken the thing up enough to where we would not be hurt back if we killed him.

 

Now, today, after Paris and the Russian Airliner and Lebanon and Bali, we don't have to wonder who has declared war on us. We know exactly the self declared state. We know exactly the town they call their capital, we know exactly the leader that calls himself Caliph, we know exactly where to find them, what their MO is and who they are trying to radicalize.

 

It was not possible to declare war on anybody after 9/11. It was after Kuwait, it was after Pearl Harbor, it was when the Nazis rose to power, and it is now. We know who to fight.

 

We do have to be very careful to not include civilians and Syrians and Moslems as our targets. And we should probably not try to punish Assad for his sins, or Putin for taking over Crimea from sovereign country, the Ukraine. All our other conflicts can go on hold, along with our normal peaceful lives, engaged in business and sport and politics and living. We have a common enemy. He is powerful and dangerous. We don't have to piss him off to bring down his wrath. We already have that. We have no reason to placate the dog. Petting will not work. We have to cut out the cancer, kill the rabid dog, cut off the leg to save the patient...whatever way you want to look at it.

 

But it is not like we have a peaceful alternative. If we don't want to live under a Caliphate. If we don't want others to live under a Caliphate against their will. We have only one course of action. Take out the leaders of Da'esh and put the escaped convicts back in jail where they obviously belong. And kill whoever tries to stop us from completing that task.

 

Hopefully by us I mean the whole world, except Da'esh .

 

We should let Syrians in to our countries. We are not afraid of Syrians. But we should declare war on our obvious mortal enemies.

 

Regards, TAR

Edited November 23, 2015 by tar

[waitforufo]

Simplier still perhaps we should remind ourselfs that violence begets violence.

Yes, violence does beget violence. ISIS needs to be taught that lesson. We should teach ISIS that lesson frequently and until they are no more.

[Ophiolite]

Yes, violence does beget violence. ISIS needs to be taught that lesson. We should teach ISIS that lesson frequently and until they are no more.

I ask out of curiosity. At school were you bullied, or were you the bully? In either case ...........

[tar]

Ophiolite,

 

Funny you should ask. I am actually very proud of the fact that in school I was the one who stood up for the outcasts against the bully.

 

I went to a private school where fighting would get you thrown out of school completely. A bully was picking on a friend of mine and even though he would have whipped my ass, and I would have been tossed out of school, I stood up to him. He backed down.

 

In public highschool I had long hair when not many did, and a greaser bully type confronted me in front of the school. I fought him, unconsciously opening my hand and slapping him, as you would in a play fight, while he was punching me in the head. When the PA system called us to the office, this in a time where the paddle was legal, I could have gotten this trouble maker into hot water, but I told the disciplinarian that it was a misunderstanding. After that we said hello in the halls, and the tension between the hippies and the greasers was much less.

 

I hope that answers your question.

 

Regards, TAR

oh sorry...just saw that question was not directed to me

Edited November 23, 2015 by tar