A good start would be a defensive measure - don’t allow masses of unvetted people from that region into your country.
I am curious how this is defensive, given that the majority of the the perpetrators of European terrorism, to this point, have been home grown, not immigrants.
Were you under the impression that it’s an either-or situation? Perhaps the fact that most of the terrorists have been home-grown is precisely because in the past it has been hard for terrorists to get into various countries, and so groups like Al-Qaida and ISIS were forced to shift strategies and recruit locals.
As a reminder, the 9-11 attackers were not home-grown. Clearly terrorist groups are going to try to send terrorists into the west from the middle east. It may just be that it’s been really hard to do so since 9-11.
It should be obvious to anyone that a group like ISIS, seeing borders open wide and millions of people streaming through them, would try to embed as many terrorists into that population as possible. To simply deny such an obvious strategy is crazy. And in fact reports are that at least one and perhaps two of the attackers in Paris were Syrian ‘refugees’ who came through ports in Greece. So this isn’t hypothetical - very early in the immigration process, we’ve already seen terrorism committed by supposed ‘refugees’. To deny that this is still a risk is to ignore the reality in front of you.
It’s also important to remember that some of the refugees are extremists who are simply on the losing side of a war and getting out of Dodge. That doesn’t mean they are going to become happy, productive citizens in their new countries.
I totally understand the humanitarian problem, but it works both ways. It’s not very humanitarian to let terrorists or other extremists into peaceful countries en-masse. It’s also counter-productive to your own goal - all it will take is one more terrorist attack with a known refugee involved and you’re going to see a massive backlash against immigration from that region. Better to control and limit it now, and to vet people properly, than to simply open the floodgates and hope that everything turns out well.
A good start would be to simply turn away single men without families. Let in the women and children, the old and infirm, and send the healthy young males back.
Also the small detail that the refugees are fleeing from islamic nutjobs in the first bloody place.
Then what?
We beat them, we have a parade, then we leave.
And they, or another radical group, takes over again.
Going in and invading creates power vacuums, and opportunities for radicals to exploit. That’s why they are in Iraq and Syria. That’s why winning the war against Saddam Hussein was easy, but the mess afterward was so hard. Unless we are willing to occupy a country for a long long time, with the loss of life and money that entails, just going in and kicking ass may do more damage than it prevents.
Then we repeat Step One.
If a radical group takes power, we bomb and create a power vacuum; if someone we can do business with takes power, we’re good; if not, we shrug and repeat.
So we do the easy thing, and don’t bother with the long long occupation – and if that suffices, great; and if not, we do the easy thing again.
Until we go bankrupt and the American people revolt.
We simply do not have the capacity, either monetary or political, to respond to every situation with total war and long-time occupation. It simply can’t be done.
There is no easy thing.
[snip]
Of course if we had look at where they came from we should had invaded Saudi Arabia.
I think a lot of what took place had to be put on not being more proactive with the humanitarian disaster, and one should not forget that leaving Greece with a lot of austerity measures was not going to make them be very effective at controlling the refugees; in any case AFAIK there are reports that the majority of the terrorists in France lived already for a long time there if they were not born there, as **El Kabong **noted -and I think he is right- an attack like this one is not likely to had been trusted to a guy coming just out of the boat.
I was replying to your use of the word “easy”; it’s right there in the copy-and-paste.
Good thing I didn’t advocate for long-term occupation.
Or even short-time occupation!
I also think that too, I pointed before that in the dark days of WWII by happenstance we decided to become allies of Stalin, regardless of how much hate we had we knew that there was a bigger threat to take care of.
I think I proposed years ago that we will have to find our Stalin and join forces, it may be that this is already happening.
You’re begging the question. You are simply assuming that ALL the refugees are people ‘fleeing from Islamic nutjobs’. I’m sure the vast majority of them are. But how many terrorists in that group are acceptable? 1%? .1%? .01%?
.01% of 5 million people is 500 terrorists. Is it acceptable to allow 500 terrorists into your country? If it’s .1%, that’s 5,000 terrorists. I don’t think anyone knows what a reasonable number is here, other than it’s almost certainly greater than 0%. We already have evidence of that. So what’s a reasonable number, and how many innocent lives are you willing to bet on your estimate?
And how many of them are ‘Islamic nutjobs’ who are simply on the losing side of that war and are now fleeing because they don’t think they can win? Do you think they are going to give up their radical views just because they made it out of the region? And even if many do, how big a number is acceptable for those who do not?
Also, if you’re going to let in all these refugees with no plan to assimilate them into the culture and economy, aren’t you just setting up a problem for maybe 10 or 20 years from now similar to what France already faces? Many of these ‘home-grown’ terrorists are young men radicalized by unemployment and poverty due to the fact that they live in un-assimilated communities with few job prospects and little hope.
There is also the problem of police resources. Having millions of undocumented people from Syria and Libya and elsewhere thrown into the population adds an awful lot of noise to the process of trying to establish connections and relationships between people and terror groups.
Home grown but almost uniformly trained in the ME and sometimes equipped.
There is certainly no easy, short-term solution to this problem. If we choose to take more draconian measures via invasion/occupation of ISIS’ territory and any other haven of terrorist activity, IMHO it will take decades of involvement to keep these places sufficiently pacified. In the meantime, we risk severe blowback, unintended consequences, and the adverse consequences for our own civil society from the resulting fiscal strain and political division. But as a long-term strategy, it will certainly be messy but it could work.
I have argued elsewhere that a focus on policing/intelligence as defensive measures, combined with a much-reduced US/Western footprint in the Middle East and Europe doing a better job integrating its disaffected Muslim populations, could also constitute a successful long-term strategy. These measures would presumably remove what seems to be the motivation for these attacks. But the cat is already out of the bag. It would presumably take a generation or more for a new set of policies in the ME to have any beneficial effect.
In short, I think either way we’ll be living with these kinds of attacks for a long time, no matter what we do.
Where to start: it’s just all hopelessly naive and uninformed :smack:
Hands up for everyone here who think Iraq would have turned out great if only we had sent more troops!
Most times, a shitty idea doesn’t yield better results by doing it harder.
Let’s say you successfully kill every Da-esh member, and subdue the country per the OP. What happens when we leave? Or do we stay there forever, ruling with an iron fist? In that case, why not just let Assad stay in power? He was doing a pretty good job of doing that before the civli war.
No. I am noting that closing borders does little to nothing to prevent the spread of terrorism or terrorist acts.
All the related issues to the mess in Syria, the rise of Daesh, the enormous refugee problem, and so on do not suddenly become more manageable with a simplistic “close the borders” solution.
I have no perfect solution. I simply note that sound bites do not provide any sort of solution. Preventing desperate people from escaping tragic situations is liable to promote recruitment by terrorist groups–from both within Europe, (as has been occurring already), and within the MENA. Once recruited, (wherever they are), Europe has no more ability to keep out individuals from the MENA region than the U.S. does from Central America.
I think ISIS would appreciate that very much. I can’t think of a better recruit than a healthy young man being thrown into a hopeless and broken environment away from women and families, who has just been literally rejected by the West and told “You are not welcome here, you belong with the Islamicists.”
Well, if there’s going to be any kind of lasting change in the region, it’ll take young men taking up arms against oppressors. So what’s the extent of the current bounty program? I see al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri is worth $25 million, maybe throw a few thousand at anyone who can deliver the head of an ISIS member on a stake.
Hey, you forgot
“And behold, I shall cover the earth with a fresh tomato sauce to destroy all untastyiness. And I shall simmer this sauce on low for forty days and forty nights then another day allowing it to cool and thicken.”