Good morning the US State Department.
Can I encourage you to not get your meds mixed up.
You remember Iraq 2003?
The idea was to age war, introduce consumerism, capitalism, maybe a little voting, and the dumbass population would do a happy dance forever.
As a general proposition, people around the world do not want or aspire to the ‘American way of life’. Not ever.
Unless the regime has been in place for a long time, or has been installed without US interference, the US is unable to do that successfully, this isn’t the Cold war anymore.
Given that all this research would take a couple years and almost all cars are currently gas powered this would take a while. Hopefully it would take 2-5 years for electrical cars to become practical for everyone and then fifteen years or so for the current gas cars to be replaced. ISIS would probably start to feel it in ten years and after fifteen to twenty have to find a new source of revenue.
On the other hand sending the army in to the oil fields would probably take about six weeks.
Well, if that’s all we want, surely we could nuke all the towelheads and then have the oil to ourselves, wouldn’t that be grand‽ [/sarcasm] :rolleyes:
I don’t know what response you expected, but no, that’s a terrible premise. What you care about is not the only thing everyone else cares about.
This has no consideration for history, just the present. There was a time (in living memory) when terrorists were mostly the atheist-socialist kind. Countries were only too willing to embrace western values as an alternative. And lookie-lookie: communism is practically stamped out in Europe. There a just a few holdouts in some third world countries.
What makes ISIS distinctive from the Taliban or any other totalitarian movement in this respect? Sure, people get sick of them pretty quickly, but the ruthless use of force can keep a movement in power for years or even decades after they lose popular support, assuming they ever even really had it.
Secondly, building a successful, prosperous nation is a long slog, no question. Building a nation that can be a cancer in the region and cause problems doesn’t take long at all. ISIS has between 31,000 and 200,000 men under arms:
Historically, totalitarian movements have never collapsed solely from their own weaknesses. In fact, without serious opposition, a totalitarian nation can limp along pretty much forever(see: North Korea). So relying on time to get rid of ISIS is wishful thinking.
Exactly. They hold pieces of desert nobody gives a shit about, don’t have an economy, or an industry, or a medical infrastructure, or an education system, or a taxation network or anything of the sort. Their entire business model used to be propped up by looting Iraqi banks and businesses, but they’ve run out of those. Now they’ve moved on to smuggling oil but we’re started targeting their convoys so that ain’t gonna work either.
They also have a real problem keeping their eager volunteers from leaving - there’s a reason Dabiq routinely runs articles on the various ills that befall refugees fleeing the region. They desperately need to scare their own guys into staying put.
In 5-10 years top someone’ll pen a follow-up to Ozymandias.
What did the Taliban control that was better than what ISIS has? And what’s stopping ISIS from controlling something that actually is valuable, like northern Iraq’s oil fields, or all of Syria? What happens if they take control of a country;s government, like Libya or Saudi Arabia?
^
Agree. I don’t believe in letting a criminal regime all by itself and expect it to die out.
Arable land.
These lands, people actually care about. There’s a reason those are the areas ISIS does not, in fact, control.
But what if they summon an avatar of Yog-Sothoth ?!
I’m not sure how effective our air campaign is; maybe it’s working, maybe it’s not. They’ve apparently lost some territory.
But I worry that the focus on “defeating ISIS” distracts from the real problem: why are so many Muslims in the West (especially in Western Europe) so easily radicalized? To paraphrase the right on mass shootings: “Jihadi propaganda doesn’t kill people; people kill people.” The problem is people, and not even people from “over there” but people from over here. If France had the gun laws of the US, you’d probably see many more events like the Paris attacks. AFAICT events in the Middle East may be a contributing factor, but it seems to me we could turn the entire area occupied by ISIS into Gorilla Glass and still be faced with essentially the same terror threat as before.
In fact, to the extent that we allow such attacks to increase ostracization of Muslims in the West, we make the problem worse.
With concerted global effort, they could largely be deprived oil revenues via sanctions. If we can do it to Iran, we can do it to ISIS.
If they control a government like Syria or Libya, it would suck for the resident population. Could we use their airspace for commercial travel? Maybe not. If they launched terror attacks, we would have to hit them hard, but more along the lines of Reagan bombing Gaddafi: punitive stuff. Nonproliferation may be a cause for ground invasion, if necessary. My guess however is that such a regime would be focused on self-preservation and might favor skirmishes with neighbors vs eliciting the wrath of the US. It’s not surprising that ISIS is launching terror attacks while under bombardment by the US, France, and Russia; my read is that the attacks are meant to deter us, not to provoke further bombardment. If we left them to their little hellhole in the sun, they might largely leave us alone. I think they would send plenty of propaganda our way, but would effectively be the Khmer Rouge of the Middle East.
If they controlled Saudi Arabia, I guess that country would devolve into regular beheadings, flogging of bloggers unto flesh falling off, and women couldn’t drive. 
Would they sell us oil? Like hell they would. Either that, or their tenure would prove rather short-lived. Even the Saudis are hanging on for dear life. Would they jack oil prices way up? Probably not. Oil producers are as dependent on low oil prices as we the consumers are. If oil prices rise, it makes our domestic oil sources and alternative sources more economical, which ultimately puts the mono-dimensional economies of the oil producers out of business.
It’s just not the same kind of threat. Qaddafi could be deterred by threatening his own life. These are religious fanatics. Traditional deterrence doesn’t work. The Taliban were facing invasion and they still wouldn’t give up bin Laden.
My point is that the ISIS problem is relatively small compared to where it could be in five years. And then our choices will be much more stark. Today, we want to avoid another Iraq. In five years, we might be trying to figure out how to stay out of a conventional regional war.
The canon fodder are fanatics who don’t fear death. But al-Baghdadi and the leadership I think very much enjoy their money, power, wives, Internet porn, and other worldly pleasures. They don’t want to die or lose the aforementioned.
Saddam Hussein was under imminent threat of invasion, and yet he didn’t come clean about his WMD program. Was he an irrational fanatic with a death wish too? Either the Taliban didn’t actually have the power to turn over bin Laden, or they didn’t believe we would attempt to depose them, or that we would succeed if we tried.
If ISIS were today an easy problem to solve, I would agree with this argument. However, I’m convinced that destroying them requires a substantial ground invasion and lengthy occupation. These strike me as incommensurate with the current problem. Indeed, I have trouble coming up with scenarios where such costs would ever be warranted by the Islamic State, except for possibly if they started to pursue a nuclear weapon. But that’s a remote scenario, and I would rather deal with it if and when it occurs. As Busmarck said, preventive war is like committing suicide for fear of death.
Your reasoning could have been used for rolling back the Soviets from East Germany in 1945, because might as well stop them now before they try to invade Western Europe. Which threat, of course, never materialized.
Containment makes sense with a nuclear superpower threat. It does not make sense for a weak third world nation. Small problems like that can turn into big problems down the road. In the absence of significant opposition, a caliphate is a very real possibility. Think occupying a desert the size of Indiana is hard? Wait till you have to clear the enemy out of all of North African and Messopotamia.
This is basically a version of the old domino theory. What you ignore is that Daesh has no capacity, or any realistic path to such capacity, to take over the world or take over the Middle East. The Kurds, the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Iranians, the Turks, and the Israelis will not allow them to take their land. These actors are and will always be much more powerful than Daesh and will resoundingly repel any attempt at territorial expansion into their borders, on their own, without assistance from the US. Sunnis in Syria and northern Iraq acquiesce in them taking over, but these are barely states.
Unlike (say) Germany which had a large industrial base and a capable workforce–not to mention strong allies–Daesh has no industrial base; no allies to give or sell them shit or come to their aid; no sustainable source of revenue (plunder only goes so far, and oil revenues can be reduced to a minimum), no regular access to weaponry, ammunition, and spare parts. In short, they pose no threat of regional hegemony. None. Let them have their Indiana-sized hellhole in the sun as long as it lasts, which my guess is < 5 years if left alone. They’ll be an internally unstable regional nuisance that will eventually invite a stronger neighbor to come in and deliver the death blow, as Vietnam did to the Khmer Rouge.
I would urge reading this in-depth examination of Daesh’s economy. Conclusion excerpted below:
http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/450/html
Well, we’re getting to a time when actually people won’t remember. An 18 year old voter will have been 3 years old at the time. I knew shit all when I was 18. You could tell most of them Saddam invited us over as friends and many would believe it.