# ISIS captures Ramadi...now what? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 18, 2015, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328 "2015-05-18T21:30:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/101 "2015-05-21T15:58:50Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > Whether ISIS will turn out the same or better or worse remains to be seen. ISIS will not turn out. It has no staying power. All its neighbors hate it. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/102 "2015-05-21T16:10:45Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > ISIS will not turn out. It has no staying power. All its neighbors hate it. I don’t know. ISIS may evolve a bit into something more stable. It’s been around as a state for a year already. The Western Media clearly are pushing the narrative of a flash-in-the-pan organization doomed to fail, but I wonder how accurate that really is. ---
**Author:** ![CaptMurdock](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/captmurdock/32/11736_2.png) [@CaptMurdock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaptMurdock)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/103 "2015-05-21T17:45:32Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > US did a lot more than deliver bottled water in Libya. Turned out great, didn’t it. So what did we do wrong in that situation? :dubious: ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/104 "2015-05-21T17:46:54Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > ISIS will not turn out. It has no staying power. All its neighbors hate it. They seem to be popular in Syria on some level. And Saddam was not exactly Miss Congeniality in Iran and Israel and Kuwait and he lasted for a while. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![CaptMurdock](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/captmurdock/32/11736_2.png) [@CaptMurdock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaptMurdock)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/105 "2015-05-21T17:51:47Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > And Saddam was not exactly Miss Congeniality in Iran and Israel and Kuwait and he lasted for a while. > > Regards, > Shodan That’s because he _rocked_ the Swimsuit Competition. 😃 (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/106 "2015-05-21T17:55:32Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > Hopefully something reasonable. > > And it seems it is simply a choice of which despots. Some preferred Saddam, because he maintained a stable regime with only occasional outbursts of mass murder, and there wasn’t all that much sectarian violence, apart from the Kurds and Sunnis, and he didn’t threaten his neighbors, apart from invading Iran and Kuwait, and most of the women his sons didn’t kidnap and rape were better off and had jobs, and all the children who didn’t die because he was stealing from the oil-for-food program were relatively OK, except for the ones he tortured to punish their parents. > > Whether ISIS will turn out the same or better or worse remains to be seen. > > Regards, > Shodan Well, exactly, but who exactly is ISIS mostly fighting with? The Assad regime in Syria. Remember Syria? It looks to me like Assad isn’t quite as horrible as Saddam. But every ISIS dude we drop a bomb on gets us a high-five from both Assad and Supreme Leader Khamenei over in Iran. Just like every Nazi we killed in WWII got a thumbs up from Stalin. Was Stalin really really bad? Yeah, he was, he was really really bad. Really bad. Like, no-kidding, flat-out really bad. If you have a Hitler-off between Stalin and Hitler over who’s the most Hitler, it’s not ridiculous to imagine Stalin beating Hitler. So back to Syria-Iraq, since the war in Syria and the war in Iraq are really one war. If we really want to beat ISIS, we’d be supporting Assad. Sending him weapons, providing him air power, sharing intelligence, and so on. If we did that, it seems like the back-and-forth war between fairly evenly matched forces would tip decisively in favor of the Syrian government, and ISIS would be ground up. Which would tilt the balance for the Iraqi government. Except we don’t want to do that. We’ve been openly hoping for Assad to lose. Except Assad can’t lose without ISIS winning, and I hope no one is naive enough to talk about “moderate rebels”. So either Assad wins and ISIS loses, or ISIS wins and Assad loses, or the war continues to grind on. Since all three outcomes are bad, which option should we send American troops to fight to accomplish? Note that we’re already acting as a de facto ally of Assad, simply because we’re bombing ISIS and helping the Iraqi government against ISIS, but we’re not bombing Syrian government forces. ---
**Author:** ![Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/try2b_comprehensive/32/65_2.png) [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Try2B_Comprehensive)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/107 "2015-05-21T17:57:22Z")
I don’t think ISIL has staying power either. They and funded with plunder. Their territory is going to be a cholera zone. Time is not on their side, even given the fall of Ramadi. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/108 "2015-05-21T18:00:05Z")
> [@CaptMurdock](#): > > That’s because he _rocked_ the Swimsuit Competition. 😃 > > (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) I like Miss Syria’s baton twirling performance. She would have won if she hadn’t used a human femur. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![up\_the\_junction](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/f1d935/32.png) [@up\_the\_junction](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/up_the_junction)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/109 "2015-05-21T23:47:59Z")
You guys must know how much oil revenue ISIS generates - no news reports on this? > **[Inside Islamic State’s oil empire: how captured oilfields fuel Isis insurgency](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/19/-sp-islamic-state-oil-empire-iraq-isis)** > > Special report: coalition air strikes have not stopped Isis from earning millions of dollars a week from its Iraqi oil operations ---
**Author:** ![Donald\_Rump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9fc29f/32.png) [@Donald\_Rump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Donald_Rump)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/110 "2015-05-22T00:38:50Z")
> [@up\_the\_junction](#): > > You guys must know how much oil revenue ISIS generates - no news reports on this? > > [Inside Islamic State’s oil empire: how captured oilfields fuel Isis insurgency | Islamic State | The Guardian](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/19/-sp-islamic-state-oil-empire-iraq-isis) I’d infer from your linked news report that there are news reports on it.😛 Meh. They bring in say $1mm a day, which according to the article would be enough to pay around 56,000 foot soldiers–hardly an indomitable force. ---
**Author:** ![DinoR](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dinor/32/2821_2.png) [@DinoR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DinoR)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/111 "2015-05-22T01:12:32Z")
> [@up\_the\_junction](#): > > You guys must know how much oil revenue ISIS generates - no news reports on this? The 1 million a day figure was being tossed around last summer before oil prices tanked(and still in that story as of November but it’s unclear if that’s just an old assumptions). Since then there have been more strikes on facilities. A mid-level ISIS leader got hit in Syria in the last week. He’s the business guy behind the sales. They didn’t bomb him. They sent in US Special Operation, killed him, and captured his wife and female slave. I would assume part of the reason for sending troops in to Syria was so the could conduct site exploitation and gather intelligence. He’s probably replaceable after some mild to moderate hiccups but it’s hard to know what data got captured and how it can be used to cut in to sales or freeze accounts. The pay piece is a bit misleading because it assumes the only cost of operations is pay. Stuff they can’t capture in sufficient quantity gets bought on the black market at above normal prices. That could limit their operations tempo if the funds get cut enough. ---
**Author:** ![mascaroni](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/dc4da7/32.png) [@mascaroni](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mascaroni)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/112 "2015-05-22T01:23:24Z")
> [@up\_the\_junction](#): > > The USA doesn’t spend trillions on state of the art weaponry in order to use something so primitive as gas - the USA just supplies the cultures so client dictators can create the gas themselves. If you did a bit of homework you would realise that Germany and Russia are far more culpable. Although that wouldn’t really fit in to your one trick pony anti-American diatribe. ---
**Author:** ![mascaroni](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/dc4da7/32.png) [@mascaroni](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mascaroni)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/113 "2015-05-22T01:31:17Z")
> [@CaptMurdock](#): > > That’s because he _rocked_ the Swimsuit Competition. 😃 > > (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Well, if I can be serious for a moment, Saddam’s well trimmed, luxuriant moustache was, IMHO, far superior facial hair in comparison to the bearded ISIS hipsters. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/114 "2015-05-22T02:08:41Z")
> [@mascaroni](#): > > Well, if I can be serious for a moment, Saddam’s well trimmed, luxuriant moustache was, IMHO, far superior facial hair in comparison to the bearded ISIS hipsters. But not to [The Sacred Beard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator_(2012_film))! ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/115 "2015-05-22T04:17:22Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > One thing that’s bugging me about the whole ISIS thing is how no-one cares that the U.S. government spent ten years and billions of dollars to build an effective Iraqi military, and utterly failed at their task. I don’t want to assign blame here - it’s just that this is probably not the last time the U.S. will be involved in nation-building, and without investigating what went wrong, you’ll just make all of the same mistakes all over again. Well, ideally, we’d have stayed longer and rebuilt the whole country, not just a half-assed “military.” Schools, hospitals, infrastructure–maybe twenty-five years. But that would require an actual occupying force trained and committed to do so. And apparently that’s not really ever what we took in. ☹ ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/116 "2015-05-22T04:41:35Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > Well, apart from mass murder, invading Iraq and Kuwait, rape rooms, torture, massacres and wholesale slaughter, he did a hell of a job. > > Regards, > Shodan Our boys did most of that too, and unlike Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, we failed to protect religious minorities from persecution by foreign maniacs like al-Zarqawi. A grudge against al-Tikriti I can understand. But de-Ba’athification was the deadly mistake. It wiped out the competent and secular security forces and set a stage for sectarian war. If the USA wants to invade and reinstall the Ba’ath Party, by all means. Otherwise, we’re the pot-who-can’t-even-speak-Arabic calling their kettle black. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 10:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/117 "2015-05-22T10:31:48Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > Our boys did most of that too, and unlike Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, we failed to protect religious minorities from persecution by foreign maniacs like al-Zarqawi. > > A grudge against al-Tikriti I can understand. But de-Ba’athification was the deadly mistake. It wiped out the competent and secular security forces and set a stage for sectarian war. > > If the USA wants to invade and reinstall the Ba’ath Party, by all means. Otherwise, we’re the pot-who-can’t-even-speak-Arabic calling their kettle black. And now fools like McCain want to send troops into Syria. THis whole thing is a mess, that we largely made. ---
**Author:** ![up\_the\_junction](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/f1d935/32.png) [@up\_the\_junction](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/up_the_junction)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 11:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/118 "2015-05-22T11:54:48Z")
> [@mascaroni](#): > > If you did a bit of homework you would realise that Germany and Russia are far more culpable. > > Although that wouldn’t really fit in to your one trick pony anti-American diatribe. Please show me your homework #Eyore ---
**Author:** ![up\_the\_junction](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/f1d935/32.png) [@up\_the\_junction](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/up_the_junction)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/119 "2015-05-22T11:56:45Z")
> [@Donald\_Rump](#): > > I’d infer from your linked news report that there are news reports on it.😛 > > Meh. They bring in say $1mm a day, which according to the article would be enough to pay around 56,000 foot soldiers–hardly an indomitable force. I was only responding to the insightful folks who were saying ISIS had no “staying power” It struck me three oil fields wasn’t a bad start though I have no idea how that connects with “staying power”. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2015, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328/120 "2015-05-22T14:03:49Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > Our boys did most of that too… No, fortunately this is not true. > [@](#): > > …we failed to protect religious minorities from persecution by foreign maniacs like al-Zarqawi. And here all along I thought the US blew him to smithereens. [Whaddya know, I thought right](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi). Regards, Shodan [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/isis-captures-ramadi-now-what/720328.md?page=7)