I was drinking a beer when someone saw the news on their phone. We asked the bartender to switch TVs to a news channel. It got quiet for a bit as the situation unfolded.
It wasn’t much more than ten minutes before somebody asked if the TVs could be switched back to the replay of a Penguins game that had been on earlier.:smack::smack::smack::smack:
What makes you think “engaging” ISIS less is going to help?
What has ISIS done to cities that surrendered to them? Don’t they move immediately to mass executions and further expansions?
I don’t think ISIS wants to be left alone, I think they want to expand the battle unilaterally even if we don’t.
I doubt that the majority of people were aware of Charlie Hebdo, in the Middle East; that anyone in Europe or the Middle East cared too much what a small gaggle of cartoonists thought; nor in general was there any particular aim on the part of the Hebdo artists to point out that Islamic terrorists are idiots. While I haven’t read the Hebdo articles, my understanding is that they were mocking Islam in general, not the people who fall prey to cultist leaders.
Both smokers and Scientologists have become distinctly more rare the more prevalent the cultural recognition that these activities are simply moronic. People innately fear seeming “uncool” or “laughable”, and will go to great lengths to avoid it.
Charlie Hebdo did nothing to promote this sort of attitude among its readers, let alone the wider world. And even if they had, they didn’t have the readership to change opinions at the scale which would be necessary.
Comparing this to Munich is inaccurate. That operation was based on a very specific set of circumstances. THe terrorists were known and had already been in German prisons but were released. So Israel went and killed them. They also went after others associated with the attack. Israel had great intelligence on the Palestinian leadership, so that helped.
All of the actual attackers are dead and the ISIS leadership is not as well known and harder to locate since unlike the Palestinians, they have territory of their own, whereas Israel was able to do their assassinations by taking advantage of the freedoms of Western countries the same way the terrorists did. It is unlikely that ISIS has leadership in Europe. No option but to go after them in Syria and Iraq.
I wouldn’t entirely disagree with your above options, but I do have reservations.
Firstly, It could be viewed as a victory of sorts for ISIS. This in itself may be a recruiting tool for the organization. Secondly, accepting these attacks cannot be entirely prevented; sure, but just how frequently they occur is the all important question. Once a decade may be acceptable, once every year or two is probably not.
There’s also the question of what happens if we stop fighting ISIS. Do they carve out a nice big caliphate? What do they do then?
Many of these attacks are said by their perpetrators to be in response to Western military activities in the Middle East. To the extent those statements are true, a reduced Western military footprint in the Middle East would diminish the casus belli driving terrorist attacks on the West. That’s how doing less would, in the long run, help. Of course, this approach would have to be coupled with vigilant police and intelligence work, of the sort that has foiled so many would-be attackers in the US since 9/11.
Now, maybe the terrorists are lying about why they’re attacking us. Or maybe the occasional terrorist attack is a necessary trade-off for us pursuing our interests in the Middle East. Or maybe a better solution altogether is indeed more military engagement with the source of the threat and the real policy failure has been to do too little against ISIS, which seems to be the establishment consensus on the issue.
Are you Hitlers grandson or something?
Crashed on a friend’s couch for the night, went home around noon. We never heard or saw anything out of the ordinary besides the occasional EMT truck sirening by. #victimsofterrorism :o.
The city was eerily quiet on my way back though, no joke. Hardly anybody in the streets or the subway. Which is par for the course I suppose, but still weirded me out some.
So, if we respond by sending tens of thousands of troops to Syria, it’s a victory for ISIS. If we respond by doing nothing, it’s a victory for ISIS. This would suggest that whatever we do, a given attack will be, in an immediate sense, a victory for ISIS.
In terms of frequency… I would agree that society cannot be expected to just get used to attacks of this magnitude on an annual or biannual basis. But the US seems to grimly accept that mass shootings will occur on a basically regular basis. No one likes that we live with mass shootings, and it’s certainly a divisive political issue, but mass shootings have not really threatened our Way of Life and I don’t see why occasional small-scale terrorist attacks should, either.
Obviously what happened in Paris is on a much larger scale and could never be permitted to become quotidien.
So it isn’t the fault of the hateful radicals that kill people, but it’s the fault of the people they kill.
That’s true, but their hatred for the West, and basically anything that doesn’t agree with their version of Islam, is the enemy. Military action against them just means we are a top priority rather than something to be dealt with later, when they are more powerful.
Less bombing is still war. There are only two options, just as there have been only two options from the beginning: fight or don’t fight. Since we chose to fight, that exposed us to greater short term risk of terror attacks. But fighting a little, or even a lot less changes nothing. We will still be killing their people so they will want to kill our people. So the options remain: go all in, or pull out. Cutting our sorties in half changes nothing other than to continue to piss them off while doing less damage.
I don’t think Western civilians have really internalized that bombing ISIS meant we were at war with ISIS. Our leaders preferred to use words like “confront” rather than “war”, but bombing people and using allies on the ground to try to take territory away from them is war.
In war, that comes with having the initiative. You get to set up situations where your enemy has no good options. It’s time for us to take the initiative and hurt them and force them to respond to us, preferably in ways that offer them no good options. But for the short term, we dance to their tune.
Mass shootings actually are a crime problem, because it is lone wolves or at most two people with no material support or training from anyone. The problem with ISIS is that they control a terror state, which is an order of magnitude more dangerous than a simple terrorist organization. Anyone can just go to Syria and train in their camps. We need to force them back underground where they have to hide like al Qaeda does. And denying the enemy territory is a military problem.
Well, if this was an act of war by another nation (ISIS) againt the capital city of a NATO member, it’s kind of a big deal. All of NATO may go to war. Like, not just some miliatary actions here and there, but actual war.
And if it’s not blindingly obvious, that would be a big deal.
Yes, of course this is major news.
It’s not an act of war by a recognized nation, but ISIS is a nation in fact. And we have already been at war. What’s changing is that now we are about to prosecute that war fully, rather than with half measures.
France has the 5th or 6th largest military spending in the world. It’s only a small military if you compare it to the USA, that dwarf everybody else. But compared to anybody else,it’s in fact one of the most powerfulmilitary in the world.
The problem is that in a modern military, the actual fighting force requires a huge support and backing, and operating it is absurdly costly given the price of modern military hardware. Being able to keep 10 000 soldiers abroad in fact puts it in the top of the world armies. But it’s in no way sufficient to launch a large scale operation, like, say,invading Irak or whatever. In fact, the USA is the only country with the ability to do such things.
France’s job recently was to prevent the spread of Islamism in the Sahel (Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Centrafrican Republic) while keeping an eye on the more or less unstable or Islamist infiltrated neighbouring countries (Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Nigeria) since it has close ties and a lot of involvment in this area by virtue of being a former colonial power.
A token force had been sent to Irak too, but IIRC it was until recently only a handful of planes plus some special forces, intelligence, etc… As I said, this has been ramped up during the last months (which might be the cause of the attacks in Paris, I guess), but I remember reading recently that the army big wigs were complaining that they were spreaded too thin, couldn’t rotate troops properly, didn’t have the budget to cover the cost, etc… Hence my assumption that it’s unlikely that France will increase significantly her military presence there.
Especially since they can’t leave the Sahel to its own devices given how explosive the situation is there : Mali lost half its territory to the Islamists in a couple weeks before the French intervention (basically the same scenario we saw in Irak with ISIS : the army trained and equipped at great cost by western countries just evaporated when faced with the prospect of actually having to fight) , they act unchecked in large part of Libya and launch from there operations in neighbouring countries, Chad is a mess surrounded by totally unstable neighbours, Centrafrican Republic has been kept out of a full scale civil war between Muslims and non-Muslims only because of the presence of international forces, Boko Haram is extending its tentacles outside of Nigeria, etc…
ETA :I somehow fell asleep before clicking “submit”, so, I’m posting this hours after writing it makingit maybe irrelevant as the discussion progressed.
No. I never even had heard of the concept.
I made no comment on the benefits of attacking ISIS, and I certainly said nothing about sending tens of thousands of troops. I simply statyed that ISIS will have obtained one of it’s major objectives* if* the West stops attacking it. So yes, that **could **be interpreted as a victory for the organisation. Just as Muslims being attacked/persecuted is a recruiting tool for ISIS so is an ISIS victory in the ME a potential recruiting tool. It all rather depends upon the nature of the ISIS threat. If ISIS is a reaction to outside forces attacking the ME then pulling out from the region is good policy. On the other hand if ISIS is a symptom of the degeneration of a faction within Islam then pulling out of the ME will do us little good.
However the new anti-corruption government of the Nigeria under Mohamadu Buhari has made very good progress against the Boko Haram, which was succeeding very much because of the extreme corruption and incompetence of the Johnson presidency.
the north of the Mali is fragile of course but the beating heart of the radical groups in the sahel is the Libyan collapse.