If you don’t know what core Al Qaeda refers to, either learn it or don’t pretend to know what you are talking about.
Raverman - tell us what you think happens to the hierarchical position of, say, a general in the US Army if he were to get killed in an attack. The army is smaller right, less substantial, less able to function?
Same with bombing people you don’t like - someone younger, hungrier, more ambitious takes their place.
It’s not like a finite group, every day young people grow a day older, reach a tipping point, tomorrow will be the same. For sure, you can suppress an area of land for a period. But have you noticed how half the ME and Gulf is now embroiled from what was within Iraqi borders. Where are you going to stop trying to bombing the rage they feel?
For the sixth time, explain to me why core Al Qaeda is not the most powerful terrorist organization on earth, since they have been bombed for nearly a decade and a half. They should be just as powerful as in 2001, if not more so if “bombing only makes angry people join their group.”
It’s basic stuff, you shouldn’t have to ask.
You remember the concept of a vacuum from school|?
For the seventh time, why hasn’t core Al Qaeda grown stronger as the result of it being under constant bombardment since 9/11? You keep saying that bombing terrorists make them stronger. So Zawahiri should be the head of the deadliest, most powerful terrorist group ever.
You’re kind of like the Donald Trump of this message board - playing to the gallery and not interested in thinking.
Al Qaeda is not welcome where the action is. Like with all military structures young guys are attracted to the action. Ba’thists have always distrusted even hated the Al Qaeda posse. Now they are effectively at war.
Join up some dots already.
I am, and there are still some around ;).
Baathists? Who said anything about Baathists?
Al Qaeda has been hiding in Afghanistan and Pakistan while being slowly decimated. UBL was in hiding and unable to direct anything. Zawahiri is even more isolated. Their lieutenants have a very short life span. With all those bombs, I’ve been told many times in this thread that innocent Afghan and Pakistani families will be angered so much that they will take up arms to defend Al Qaeda and fight the United States. Yet year after year, Al Qaeda in Af/Pak grows weaker and more isolated.
Where are all these terrorists that we’re creating? They aren’t joining up with Zawahiri’s crew. You said we’re creating a new generation of terrorists by bombing anyone, so where are the tens or hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Pakistanis who ought to be joining Zawahiri’s struggling organization?
Just answer the question clearly. Don’t change the subject to what’s happening in some other part of the world. Tell me why the printer terrorist organization from 2001 is a shell of itself, when your theory dictates that it should be stronger.
Can you understand what’s wrong with the above?
You not being able to answer a simple question. You’re a coward because you can’t say why you think you’re right, and can’t admit that you’re wrong.
Did the Anglo-American alliance seek permission from a French government for the 1944 invasion of Normandy?
Catolics and Anglicans now coexist peacefully in England. Sunnis and Shi’ites were coexisting peacefully in Arab countries for many centuries before the English Civil Wars.
The tragedy of Daesh can be blamed in large part on incompetent decisions by the Cheney-Rove Administration, especially the disbandment of Sunni institutions, and the hilarious imposition of a one-size-fits-all purple-finger “democracy.” After such collosal blunders, it will be hard to find a good way forward, but degrading Daesh is a necessary step.
Why do I hate the truth.
I think it’s more likely. I don’t firmly know enough about the group that captured the Russian pilot, but my understanding is it wasn’t ISIS, but was instead anti-Assad rebels non-aligned with ISIS. That is a broad group. In other instances where such groups have captured Americans, some of them have sold those Americans to ISIS, others have instead ended up getting home again after being captured by those groups.
The Russians are employing indiscriminate bombing tactics against these anti-Assad rebels. There was one interviewed awhile back when Putin first started suggesting “peace talks” that would include coordination between them and the anti-Assad rebels and they were like “you mean the people murdering us? We will never talk to the Russians.” The Russians are vastly more unpopular with the non-aligned anti-Assad rebels than the United States is, in general. But I don’t know enough about which specific rebel group it was that captured and killed the Russian pilot to speak definitively as to whether an American pilot would’ve been spared or not. If it was one of the rebel groups we’ve worked with somewhat, then I think maybe so. If it was one of the remnants of al-Nusra, probably not.
Sure, we still have collateral damage with a drone strike, but when a drone drops a 14 lb bomb on a building being used by ISIS there’s a good chance most of the “civilians” inside are family members of the ISIS fighters in the building, these are not civilians that Syrians or Iraqis that dislike being ruled by ISIS are going to shed many tears over.
I’ll be disregarding anything else you have to say on the topic since you have chosen the tactic of representing what I said in a completely false manner.
“Whatever that even is” is a euphemism for “I’m not buying Obama’s bullshit marketing strategy” to convince us that al Qaeda has been defeated. I’m very surprised you are.
I don’t believe this is true, we need to limit ISIS ability to grow, limit their ability to stabilize their territory, limit their ability to make money, or it will continue to get much worse. That’s independent of the need to see Assad gone.
The last report I saw on ISIS’s territory is that it is down roughly 10%. But much more important than acreage is the “quality of control” ISIS has over territory and the “type of control” it has. In a few of its strongholds like Raqqa and Mosul they’re now entrenched very well, but most of their “transit routes” are under great difficulty now. Even in their strongholds, while the quality of their military control of the area is high, the quality of life in those strongholds is at an all time low, which in the long run will make things much more difficult for ISIS vis-a-vis recruiting, maintaining recruits, and maintaining a civilian population–without a civilian population ISIS isn’t a state, and it knows that.
I’ve never viewed airstrikes as anything but part of the answer, and alone they can only serve to partially degrade ISIS, but we can’t just do nothing about ISIS until Assad is dealt with. Assad is a far more complex geopolitical problem and we cannot directly move against him now that Russia has deployed its military in support of Assad. Obama had many years to do something definitive about Assad, that option is off the table now.
You think Zawahiri today is as dangerous as Bin Laden in 2001?
I think you’re being glib here, but what you’re saying is in fact a good point. Anyone that thinks we can simply kill our way to solving terrorism is incorrect. There’s a new documentary out you can view on Showtime On Demand called “Spymasters” that features interviews from several of the recent CIA Directors. One issue on which they all agree is that there is “no killing our way” out of the problem.
But there’s sort of a point that misses, too. While I hate the concept of using the word “War” too loosely (i.e. the War on Drugs), I begrudgingly accept it’s the best word for our struggle against terrorism. The subset of people who think we need to view it as a global “police problem” I think are off the mark. But unlike the war against Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, the broader war against terrorism isn’t so tangible. That’s why it cannot be beaten by killing people (whereas in fact, once you killed enough of the German and Japanese military it did essentially allow us to defeat them in outright war.)
However, this broader war against terrorism can spawn more tangible opponents, ISIS is one such opponent, al-Qaeda as an operational group was one such opponent, the Taliban is one such opponent. All three of those forces have in fact been degraded through killings, to differing degrees of success.
One of the interesting points made in Spymasters is that there have been two great victories in the war on terror. One victory is the largely successful operational destruction of al-Qaeda. This was the result of a decade of killing terrorists, thousands of drone strikes killing hundreds of commanders, and conventional ground force encounters in Iraq and Afghanistan and sometimes other places using covert special forces actions. The other great victory is the ideological victory of al-Qaeda’s brand of jihad–while al-Qaeda operationally was destroyed, its war caused its ideas to spread like wildfire around the world. Not just in ISIS, but groups like Boko Haram, groups in Yemen, groups throughout Africa, Southeast Asia etc have adopted much or at least part of the al-Qaeda ideology in terms of how to fight the war against the West.
It hasn’t universally spread–the Taliban for example still kind of stubbornly remains a “traditional” insurgency movement focused narrowly on control of regions of Afghanistan and really not being too functionally different than it has been since the mid-90s. But honestly Afghanistan and the Taliban in fact have always been somewhat divorced from the broader war on terror, the only real link is the Taliban made a very poor strategic decision to use its control of Afghanistan to provide a strategic haven for “fellow traveler” groups like al-Qaeda, probably inspired at least partly by the fact that some of the high ranking Taliban leaders of the time had fought alongside OBL in the insurgency against the Soviet Union in the 80s. If this relationship based largely on personal allegiance had never happened with the Taliban and AQ we likely never would’ve gone to war in Afghanistan and it’d probably be an afterthought and a country rarely even mentioned in the news.
My position is that there’s no such thing as the West “winning” a war on an ideology that is so disparate and diffuse as “Islamic jihadism.” I view it as a symptom of dysfunctional and/or failed societies. Those societies have to fix themselves, and it will take generations. Where the West does have a role is preventing the forces of this ideology from coalescing into “hard power” entities like states. Think of it like fascism, we couldn’t “kill the idea of fascism”, but we could certainly kill fascist states, and the death of those states undermined the ideals of fascism. Since fascism was a pretty upstart ideology, and was in a situation where it could be so spectacularly shown to be a bad idea, it was defeated a lot faster than the ideologies we’re dealing with here–because Islamic jihadism is something that is based on a 1400 year old religion with something like two billion adherents. The overwhelming majority don’t believe in the al-Qaeda ideology, but said ideology is crafted to “speak to them in the language of their faith” so it’s not easy to just make it go away like we did the the fascists in WWII (i.e. by proving their fundamental argument that fascism was the way to create strong and powerful states to be false, since it anti-fascist countries unequivocally defeated them in war.)
When Islamic jihadism manifests itself in more obvious targets like ISIS, we have an obligation to react, as the West.
Did the UN Security Council exist in 1944? But even if we ignore that, I just don’t get this idea that we’re in some situation analogous to WWII. We’re not. This is Civl War within sovereign countries. However… if you really think the analogy is useful, let me know, and I’ll be happy to open a GD thread to hash that out.
Well, I’m not really seeing anything I disagree with there. The only question is who and how. Da-esh is primarily a regional problem, and when the regional powers show little or no interest in degrading them, I’m not seeing why it’s our responsibility to do so-- especially when our track record in the region is what it is.
I’m with Bernie Sanders on this issue. It’s one thing for the US to play a supporting role to help the regional powers deal with this issue, but we shouldn’t be the ones leading the effort. It’s a regional problem and we shouldn’t be trying to impose a solution from the outside.
What “civil war” country was the Russian airliner within? The Paris massacre? What about their recent threat to attack the UK? What about their promise to bring it to the US? If you think ISIS is fighting a “civil” war, please take a seat in the back of the classroom and sleep it off.