They were mentally ill single individuals not killing to advance the agenda of an organization which they were a member.
I’m curious what ISIS thinks it will accomplish in its most exaggerated goal plans; does it seriously think the entire West will adopt sharia law, pay tribute and let ISIS have diplomatic recognition or something?
Let us keep this in mind: A terrorist organization that can mount an attack that kills hundreds – or even, in the case of 9/11, thousands – is still only a terrorist organization, and is not an existential threat or serious military threat to any country. It has no Wehrmacht, nor the industrial and organizational basis for such. The Israelis deal with this sort of thing routinely; they mourn their dead when it happens, but Israel keeps ticking along, and the Palestinians do not represent and never have represented the kind of threat Israel’s nation-state neighbors have in the past. Terrorism is a resort of factions who are too weak to win on the battlefield.
I too have wondered why this was staged in France and not the USA.
I am glad that I did not ask the question and receive ridicule and sarcasm.
What you’re referring to is symmetrical warfare where the parties are evenly matched and use similar strategies. What the terrorists are engaging in is asymmetric warfare where unconventional strategies are used.
I see no benefit in discussing such strategies but I’ll just review 9/11. 19 terrorists used credit cards to gain access to 4 very large, very expensive fuel air bombs that killed thousands and brought down 2 very large buildings. They garnered cooperation through the use of box knives. at $1 a knife that’s a total investment of $19. The entire operation took less than 2 hrs.
What weapon(s) in conventional warfare could the military use to accomplish the same task and how much would it cost? After you answer that how would you apply it to a ghost army that could be living next door to you without your knowledge?
ISIS knows we live in an open society where political correctness demands we ignore any demographic link to these threats. They will infiltrate using the refugee crisis and we will use taxpayer money to pay for that process.
All I ridiculed were his examples of America’s thwarting of terrorist plans. Both were actually examples of dud bombs with the perpetrators being caught after triggering the device.
Eta: I guess I also ridiculed the “if we don’t include Boston” bit. But I answered his questionearnestly.
They would like the West to declare Islam the enemy, batten down the hatches so that Muslim people are no longer welcome, and start sending troops over, ideally in as heavy handed a way possible.
They want to drive a wedge between Islam and everything else, so that moderate, globalized, modern Islam becomes impossible. They want Muslim people to see the West as the enemy, and to that they want the West to see Islam as the enemy. They want there to be no common ground between the two. They want Muslim people to suffer, so that they can become resentful and angry. And they want that suffering to happen in isolation.
This accomplished the twin goals of giving their ideology a population to grow in, and to continue to drain the West of money, international credibility, internal political will, and ultimately our values. They want to piss us off into an extreme reaction, so that we waste resources and ultimately look horrible to everyone.
Dude…they werent designed to be duds…we caught a break.
WTF? Of course I know that. Donald Rump said “the US has been pretty successful foiling terrorist attacks” and gave those as example. Those aren’t examples of the US foiling attacks - unless you think the CIA snuck silly putty in to their plastique.
You have to figure in the cost of the plane tickets and the cost of learning how to fly the planes.
The fact is, European nations are much more likely to be the target of such attacks. France, in particular has a large, disaffected Muslim population and they (France) are a major player in the battle against Da-esh. The US, while clearly the leader in the are against Islamists in the M.E still has a relatively assaulted Muslim population compared to European countries. We got mostly the educated classes, and Europe has been getting a large portion of the less educated. The 1st generation is simply glad to be in a liberal democracy, but the 2nd generation often feels disaffected and alienated.
Money is just a number in a database. What matters is wealth and the West has tremendous wealth and capabilities. The only thing being drained is patience.
Visa paid for the plane tickets. You could include the cost of learning to fly if you like. It doesn’t change the asymmetric argument by 10,000 percent. The planes cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
In reality they never learned to fly an airplane. They didn’t take off or land which is the only real skill involved in general aviation. What they were flying was far more complex. They never learned power management or the concept of safe operating speeds. Essentially they were the equivalent of 5 year old children steering their parent’s car without using the gas or brake peddles. They had exceeded Vne speed and were lucky the planes held together long enough to smash into a building.
Why do people insist the two parts of a comparison must be identical for the comparison to be valid?
The point is, appeasing the Nazis in 1938 did not stop them from invading more countries and killing more people.
Attempting to appease ISIS in 2015 is not going to stop them from invading more countries and killing more people.
People arguing for pulling back are operating under the assumption that everyone wants peace. They don’t. Some people actually want war. ISIS is one of those groups of people. They are going to fight and kill whether or not their victims resist. The less opposition they encounter the stronger they will grow because they are no longer just a bunch of terror cells, they actually hold territory and resources now. They are expansionst. If you fail to push back they’ll just expand that much faster.
And then there’s the obvious: We are already at war with ISIS, the President declared his intention to fight ISIS at the UN a long time ago. The debate isn’t whether or not we should go to war, but what tactics we should use to win it.
The idea isn’t that drones are deciding by themselves whom to kill. But that people deciding whom to target would do so on the basis of computer analysis of patterns suggesting that a particular individual might be tied to terrorist activities, and not necessarily on positive evidences that he is. To the point that they might not even know the identity of this person.
Is something nobody is suggesting? :dubious:
You don’t think the effects of 9/11 had an economic impact?
Cutting back on our war effort in the hopes they won’t be mad enough to attack us is appeasement.
And who is suggesting that?