Andy, do your friends and neighbors who work for the Pentagon share your opinions?
Some of my fellow Navy civilian employees (many of whom are veterans like me) agree with me, some don’t. The active duty guys don’t typically talk politics.
In the long run their recruiting would skyrocket – what we need is a full generation to go by without hundreds of thousands (or more) of Arab and Muslim kids growing up with moms and dads who were killed by American or European bombs. As long as this is happening, we are weakened and these ideologies are strengthened.
With better surveillance and coordination, many of these can be prevented and lessened. But yes, in a free and open society it’s pretty easy to kill lots of people. This will probably always be true and there’s nothing we can do about it if we want to maintain a relatively free and open society.
Plenty of right-wingers who do talk politics out at Westfields…
ISIS has been losing territory (and in that sense it is actually correct that they have been “contained”). Lack of success on the battlefield in a conventional sense may even be why they are lashing out in acts of terrorism: how else can they keep recruits coming, absent battlefield success? Point being, ISIS didn’t show particular interest in striking the far enemy (aka us) until we started to threaten their territorial expansion. We ignore this at our own strategic peril, because doubling down militarily is guaranteed to increase, not reduce, the frequency of attacks, unless our military action involves thoroughgoing occupation and nation building.
On your second point: do you like it when liberals who advocate dramatic, legally questionable and counterproductive gun control measures after mass shootings say stuff like, “But okay, we’ll just take a bunch of mass shootings every year, no problem?” No one thinks we should just do nothing about terrorism. But the effort to implement some kind of military solution to the problem is a classic example of a dumb big government policy being proven not to work, with the conventional response being that we just need to do MORE of it and then the wisdom of the policy will be revealed.
So now the Hillary Election thread is almost all about fighting ISIS. 
What are the Carson/Cruz/Rubio threads about? Sinful anti-Christian Obamacare rules like forcing anti-contraceptive employers to check a box to get reduced premiums? :eek:
Ted Cruz, on sdaher’s team, tells us what he wants:
So, he proposes killing more innocents who happen to live in the wrong part of the world.
I’m really glad My Jr Senator has such a small chance of becoming President…
Typed “sdaher”–meant adaher, of course!
Back to Hillary’s campaign…
Found that list of senators backing Hillary to be kind of interesting; 38 out of 46. Only one senator is backing Sanders and that’s the man himself. The others are uncommitted. O’Malley appears to have no senator supporting him.
There are two sides to recruitment. Well, more than that, but for our purposes right now the two sides that matter are a) people who want to join, and b) ease of joining. Right now, you just travel to their “country” and you sign up. Normally terrorist recruitment involves knowing someone, getting vouched for, being able to dodge law enforcement, etc. Right now we’ve got tens of thousands of European Muslims who just got a plane ticket. It’s as easy as that right now and now they are starting to unleash that army.
Some problems are unsolvable. Enemy states mounting military attacks on us is not one of them.
But I’m looking forward to that debate this election season.
Not sure what your point is here. I’m all for disrupting their recruiting in ways that don’t make us weaker.
The attack on Paris was not a “military attack” – not even close. Neither was 9/11. These were terrorist attacks, which in my view are much closer to criminal mass murder than to military strikes. ISIS is not a state, as much as they want to be, and I see no reason to do them the huge, massive favor of considering them one.
Me too, though I’m quite concerned about the possibility of resurrecting the politics of endless war and endless fear. I still don’t get how anyone would look at the Iraq war and say, 12 years later, “we should do that again but this time we’ll get it right!”.
Well, this time at least, there’s less to fuck up. Even though Saddam was an evil bastard, most people could live normal lives, women could go to college and hold down professional jobs, stuff like that. Most of that’s already down the tubes.
And things have to be worse in the ISIS-controlled areas of Iraq/Syria than they are in Baghdad. So if we defeat ISIS, and all that’s left there is chaos, at least it’s not a huge drop in the quality of life for those who survive the war.
So there’s our slogan: “We might as well try again, because this time, there isn’t much left to fuck up!” 
When a state attacks you, whether with irregular forces or regular forces, it’s an attack either way and it has a return address. France knew exactly where to strike back. Bombs will disrupt them for a few days, but eventually we have to take away the territory they control.
I guess that’s what this election will be about: do we accept terrorism as a fact of life or do we kill our enemies? You know why the GOP will win that argument? Because the Democrats have already conceded it by doing “kill 'em” lite.
I would agree that the administration’s strategy seems to be the worst of both worlds: kill enough of them to invite blowback, but not enough to wipe them out completely.
However, in between “accept terrorism as a fact of life” and “kill our enemies” there is a rather wide excluded middle. And actually, you could just as easily argue that those who want to perpetuate an expensive whack-a-mole approach that fails to address root causes of terrorism are the ones who are accepting terrorism (and endless war) as a fact of life.
Exactly my point. If you’re going to hunt the bear, don’t wound the bear. You either kill it, or you don’t hunt it.
The root causes of terrorism are not something we can address, anymore than Muslims could have intervened in the Protestant-Catholic battles.
A state hasn’t attacked us. And killing them en masse just makes more terrorists. Your strategy weakens America and makes more terrorists. The only way to win in the long term is to have a generation go by without hundreds of thousands of children whose parents were killed by American weapons.
Your implication that Western policies have little or nothing to do with the genesis of Islamic terrorism clarifies, I think, the fundamental disagreement here.
Just nonsense. Your cartoonish view of the complexities of the situation are showing.
This isn’t a pile of rocks. “Obama is only moving one rock a week, wah!” This is a multifaceted problem, and intelligent people are working on it. You sound like Huckabee recently, “Why don’t we just cure cancer!” Well duh, that is a good idea. :rolleyes:
An officially recognized state has not attacked us, but ISIS is a state now. They control territory the size of Indiana, they have a capital which France knew to attack, and they have some infrastructure, such as recruitment centers.
Why the capital wasn’t hit before by our own airstrikes our President will have to explain.
Past policies did contribute, but we have no current ways of correcting that problem. It’s a bit like trying to fight Nazism by addressing the root causes of Nazism’s rise, which was the ill considered armistice terms, or addressing Communism by dealing with the world’s support of the czars. Once ideologies get established, that door is closed.