Oh please. You know damn well that Obama’s response has been 100% political. He was trying to run out the clock and make it someone else’s problem, but he failed. Now he’s being churlish like GWB was, refusing to change strategies even though the one he has isn’t working.
France apparently knew exactly where to strike back because the US gave the targets.
The GOP wants to make pretty much the same exact mistake that we made after 911 but with added refugee crisis.
A coordinated military response is an element of an effective approach but knee jerk response to being baited is not. No you cannot go and kill all your enemies … not without creating many more to replace them in the process and killing a whole bunch of friends too along the way.
The West, and maybe even Russia, can put some limited intelligence on the ground to aid in target selection for maximal impact with minimal harm. The forces on the ground however have to be more native.
My fantasy … the enemy of my enemy is my friend. ISIS is the biggest baddest threat to both the non-ISIS rebel forces and to Assad, to to both US and to Russian interests. Maybe they are bad enough to motivate a US/Russia brokered deal between Assad and the rebels to power share in return for a united attack against ISIS?
I can see how well that’s working, since we knew they had a recruitment center and didn’t hit it.
You know what this war looks like? The war to prevent the Bolsheviks from conquering Russia. We could very likely have a huge problem on our hands in a few years.
What I know, is that there is nothing whatsoever that would satisfy you, or the RW media guys you let inform you.
Question: How many airstrikes have the coalition done?
You think there is a tenable strategy that would magically destroy ISIS. That’s nonsense.
How many innocent people are you willing to kill?
How many American lives are you willing to lose?
How many enemies are you willing to make?
These are things that have to be intelligently weighed when thinking through a response. Your position is little more than a shrill scream of, “HIT THEM HARDERRRRRR!”
As I say, a cartoonish view. You ignore complexity and demand that we just do it harder! It’s easy to be a screaming person on the sidelines ignoring the actual complexities. But actually running a war, with people’s lives on the line is hard.
You’re caricaturing my view. I do not think there is a magical way to destroy ISIS. But a terrorist state is an unacceptable security risk, and we can dismantle their state. We are very, very good at that. And as RTFirefly pointed out, we can’t exactly make things worse at this point. Just go in, break all their shit, kill as many of them as we can, get out and leave local forces there to handle the mopping up.
Does that get rid of ISIS? No. But at least they go back to being a post-9/11 Al Qaeda-style threat, hiding in caves. Rather than having recruitment centers which are as easy to find as a Starbucks.
The other problem which I’d be interested in hearing Clinton’s opinion on, but which she will never answer, is what happens by the time she’s President if she’s elected and the situation is a lot worse? What happens if there’s a general regional war involving multiple states and factions? Do we stay out of that, or just continue to selectively bomb people and invite retaliation without actually accomplishing anything?
Your strategy weakens America and makes more terrorists. Their “state” is already dismantled – and they dismantled it. There is no state to attack.
Seriously – what lessons did you learn from the war in Iraq?
It certainly lends itself to such.
How? At what cost? How many innocent people are you okay with killing? How many enemies will we make? How many American lives will we lose?
See above.
Thinking we can’t make things worse is magical thinking. Of course we can. We made Iraq worse. At least a hundred thousand innocent people are rotting in the ground now. And we created ISIS.
Aside from the fact, that we have, with the coalition, hit thousands of targets already. We are breaking their shit. But you think that there are a small number of targets. In reality, after thousands of attacks, we have run them to a standstill. It’s complex.
Utter drivel. There are a fixed number of jets and thousands of targets. You suggest that the administration was sitting on their hands and only the brilliant French could figure out to attack the recruitment station. Newsflash: Smarter people than you or I are looking at this, and choosing targets. That target would have been hit regardless of what happened in Paris.
You seem to think that they have one recruiting station. Like I say, cartoonish.
We’ve accomplished a lot. It seems like no level of involvement will satisfy you, because it can’t possibly reach the imaginary version of success you think is easily attainable.
Now you’re engaged in magical thinking. You don’t think we’re making a lot of enemies now? We are already at war. The only debate is over what tactics to use to win it. Democrats spend years criticizing Bush for waging “war without end”, yet Democrats are perfectly happy to support a strategy that is DESIGNED to keep things going the way they are now pretty much forever. That’s what war without end looks like. Admit it: the President has no strategy to win the war, his goal has always been merely “containment”.
The more involved we get, the more we lose the war. If we want to “win”, we need to stop creating more terrorists. Every bomb creates terrorists. Every time someone loses a family member to American weapons, we lose. The only way to win is to stop doing that.
I support targeted action that minimizes civilian casualties down to near zero, and logistical support for neighboring countries that might actually be able to engage on the ground without the blowback. Your strategy weakens America and makes more terrorists, and loses the war.
Yeah, and the increase in innocent deaths you’re calling for will only increase that.
You understand that sometimes things can be worse than other things right?
Not forever. It’s designed to be as precise as possible without soldiers on the ground.
Winning the war needs soldiers. Let me know when you get that army ready to fight.
Pure nonsense. These terrorists aren’t victims of American bombing, they are middle class, well educated people who get filled with nonsense because they want their empty lives to have meaning.
The contention that we create terrorists by bombing isn’t worthy of the Straight Dope. I doubt you could even find one terrorist who was radicalized by losing family members to US bombs. Certainly none of the 9/11 terrorists were radicalized in that way. Doubtful you’ll be able to show that any of the Paris bombers were radicalized that way.
In adaher’s defense, he’s right: the administration seems to have no strategy to destroy ISIS, which Obama for some reason chose to make our official objective. I mean, does anyone want to argue that the admin’s strategy has a hope of succeeding on its own terms?
Which is another way of saying we’re not even really trying to win. We’re just doing some stuff because politically we can’t be seen to be doing nothing. There is no strategy, there is no mission.
Cite that this describes more than a small portion of them? Further, our bombing creates enemies without a doubt, even if some oppose ISIS, they may hate us as much or more. As long as we kill and create rage, terrorism will prosper.
Whether true or not, this is far better than your strategy, which would greatly weaken us and strengthen our enemies.
I don’t dispute that we make enemies and create hate and rage, I just dispute that hate and rage are the root causes of terrorism. I maintain that it’s more brainwashing, the desire to join a movement, to change the world, to find meaning in life. If you look up the biographies of a few terrorists, you’ll find that almost none of them were victims.
Endless war and taking terrorist attacks doesn’t weaken us? Is France in good shape for participating in the war on our terms?
You’re talking about the leaders – most ISIS members aren’t leaders, and most aren’t wealthy. By and large, desperate people are much more likely to choose desperate action than comfortable people, especially when that rage is mixed in.
Making enemies and creating hate and rage weakens us. Bombing ISIS doesn’t strengthen us.
Again, what lessons have you learned from Iraq? What’s the worst that would happen if we just stayed out and focused on our own territory? Imagine if instead of spending 100 billion on a foreign war, we spent 100 billion on internal security, investigation, surveillance, and the like. Imagine if a generation went by in which no great numbers of Arabs and Muslims were killed by Americans.
It will end, eventually, as long as we don’t jump in. They can’t and won’t attack forever. And small scale terrorist attacks don’t weaken us – or if they do, not close to as much as the loss of life from a ground war.
Far more Americans died in the Iraq war than would have been killed by terrorists had we stayed out. That war weakened us hugely. Another one would weaken us again.