Well, the core of the ISIS fighters AFAIK are still from Chechnya

They say (and I don't think they have a reason to lie) that the "bosses" are mostly Syrians and the cannon fodder are mostly north Africans. The so-called "Europeans" are mostly returning, not going to the front.

I don't see any reason to doubt any of the other atrocities that they describe, which frankly makes the crimes of the Third Reich seem like almost no big deal. As in, the supervisor just cuts your throat if he feels like it. Or, you get wounded in the front line and they leave you to perish, dog will clean up the remains. For some of these, they even have footage, like where they throw people in that hole just as in the "300" movie.

If you listen to the interviews carefully (in particular the guy who runs his own little secret service), you will see that even assuming the armed conflict ends tomorrow, there will be no peace any time soon. What do you think they are hoarding this massive pile of video footage for? What do you think he talks about when he says "we can identify them"? They are already preparing for a massive vendetta after the war. As soon as it's over, they'll arrest anyone who is on any of those videos, and it will be a 3-minute trial with a death sentence.

Boots on the ground in Syria, and a quick ending to ISIS is what is needed now

Dropping two or three MOABs would be "quick ending", but for some obvious reasons this is not done. It's something that would definitively work, though (and no, I am not saying "just kill everybody in the country", it is a very different thing to "just kill everyone" and to demonstrate that you are serious about it and that civilians will not serve as shield).

Doing pest control in the banlieues would help. Having a working legal system that actually punishes serious criminals (rather than the average citizen) and a police that isn't a mere bad joke would help. Expelling, not talking about it, aliens who have a criminal record would help (Before someone will almost inevitably call me xenophobic for that statement, note that I am all for foreigners who follow the law and who aren't trying to kill me -- they are most welcome. It's the criminals I want out, nothing else).

In other places, if you attack people in public, police will yell "on your knees" and then they'll shoot to kill. Try and say "I have a bomb" at a station or airport in the USA, and see what happens. Try and say "Hahaha, you will crawl in the dirt, anyone who does not obey, we will kill" in a public interview in China. I'd be very interested about the outcome.

In Europe, they'll just say "Oh well, that is freedom of speech. Come on my friend, why don't you have some extra money". That doesn't work.

Arresting the salafist warmongers and hate preachers as well as the well-known violent radicals would help. We have somewhat over 400 people in Germany who are known to be ultra-radicals, trained in terror camps, and ready to kill people. That's not all, it's just the ones about whom the agencies are 100% certain. We're not talking about innocent people, or possibly innocent. Just the 400+ who are 100% certain to be vicious, dangerous aggressors. The Belgians have more like 5,000 of these (which obviously makes the problem a bit tougher), and nearly all live in one particular suburb (go figure why).

We have a dozen very well-known hate preachers (the guy who trains little girls to stab police with knives among them) who do what they do in open public without any fear of repercussions or consequences. They openly laugh at us and at our stupidity, knowing that nothing will happen. There's people in the middle of London who openly state in interviews that they aim to decapitate people, and they laugh.

What we are getting is really well-deserved. You have to realize that "religious freedom" cannot apply when someone says that he will decapitate people, nor "freedom of speech". You have to realize that "need proof before arrest" is the wrong approach when people are willing to kill hundreds with bombs without remorse. Those are all nice ideas, and they are the principles I would like to live by in my utopian world, but you cannot apply them to people who just give a fuck about your ideas or your values, and to whom your life is worth as much as the dirt under their shoes.

Oh, and when it comes to IS bombers, please try to abstain from saying "but they are Belgians", this is a perverse sophistry -- the fact that someone who was never willing to integrate and who by all means wants to destroy the state has acquired a nationality by some means is no justification to say "but they are Belgians". On paper, yes. But they never wanted to be (or should have been able to get that nationality).

Anyone who thinks dropping two or three MOABs would solve the problem needs to seriously reconsider their military tactics!

Actually, you could completely eliminate ISIS' infrastructure/support base/leadership with 4~ ... But I had to cheat and use a tsar-bomba sized bomb for Iraq.

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?t=6f6697d6b1d2d7eeaf1b429790dfa097

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27838034 (Map showing where ISIS is located currently)

This scenario leaves Raqqa (ISIS' capital) with no non-irradiated water sources, and irradiates most of ISIS' arable farmland as well virtually ensuring their organization collapses.

Not the preferred course of action though, by far.

Look. I typed all that up about history and the Middle East. Every single thought I expend on the Middle East is pure torture. I tortured myself for over an hour on that post.

Someone has to reply to it. Have mercy!!

L. Spiro

Look. I typed all that up about history and the Middle East. Every single thought I expend on the Middle East is pure torture. I tortured myself for over an hour on that post.

Someone has to reply to it. Have mercy!!

L. Spiro

Lol, here ya go!

Their reaction was to stomp down extremely hard on the groups responsible but also moving where those groups ultimately wanted towards where those groups wanted the society to move: towards an extremely conservative and narrow form of Islam which we now know to be the problem (we are worried about Salafism but the Saudi Wahhabism is an even stricter form of that).
And unfortunately they have tons of money to export that. Granted, most of that is our money we paid for oil so in a way, it's our fault as well but this is nonetheless one important piece of the puzzle. Unless the Saudi interpretational sovereignty on Islam can be broken I don't see much hope for things getting better down the road.

That is not an accurate history lesson.
The United States of America created fundamentalist propaganda inside Saudi Arabia in order to fight against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Because that makes sense, right?

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was trying to gain allies and increase the influence of communism. After nationalizing the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, Iran became much more hostile towards England, and Churchill convinced America that they were turning towards communism and aligning with the Soviet Union. England actively pressured America to use its new “CIA” thing to overthrow the Iranian government in 1953. The Soviet Union’s spread was crawling towards the Middle East and several other forced government overthrows (Guatemala, etc.) followed.

In 1952, a Saudi-American oil company had already begun printing religious propaganda in Riyadh, and in the same year America toppled Iran Eisenhower dined with Said Ramadan, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, tied to assassins, etc. The Muslim Brotherhood would in the next year fail to assassinate Nasser, who would become president of Egypt, which would be lost to the Soviet Union until his death in 1970, after which Anwar Sadat implemented sharia law and eventually broke ties with the USSR.

This was a further clue to America that enhanced radicalism could be used to fight communism. They kept using the Muslim Brotherhood for a while, kept pushing radicalism in Saudi Arabia, until finally it became public knowledge that America was funding terrorists.


This is getting too long and I am bored to death whenever the subject of the Middle East appears (yet I know too much about it?).
The Muslim Brotherhood was back-stabbed by America, America used Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Assam to recruit during the Afghan War. Hamas is founded from the more radical elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, and keeping this short, everyone turns on America.


So it’s not our fault “as well”, it is just our fault, “period”.
Except none of it would have had to have happened if not for the Soviet Union trying to spread communism. Every government overthrow was in direct response of that, and so was the push for radicalism in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East.
So it is entirely the fault of the Soviet Union.

And they all lived happily ever after. The End.


L. Spiro

Most of this pretty accurate as far as I know. A lot of the fundamentalist stuff started with Afghanistan in the 1980s, where most jihadist groups really began. Thing is that most of these guys basically went rogue afterwards, which is to be expected. It's really hard to fight an ideology, especially one that you created.

I recommend The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 if any of you wish to read about the origin of Al-Qaeda and other Al-* groups.

Many of them have roots in the Mujhaadeen in Afghanistan, which was organized, funded and trained by the CIA. The interesting thing is that the warning signs were there for a while, but most people didn't really see it until 9/11.

And these warning signs are still there, and continue to be there.

http://nypost.com/2015/09/18/team-obama-has-spent-500m-to-train-four-or-five-syrian-rebels/

The US government continues to pick and choose a group of 'moderates', 'rebels', or 'anti-whatever' to be their puppets in opposing local forces, and yet these same people would become the next terrorist group. Which one of these 4 trained Syrians will become the next terrorist?

It's like a lifecycle of terrorism. Western governments continue to inject money and weapons into 'troubling' countries, and these troubling countries produce more terrorists, which then encourages the government to put more money into it.

If you believe in the illuminati and all that crap, maybe it's all been planned out so we react in fear and submit to the New World Order :D.

If Marvel has taught me right, with $500 million, I am expecting these 4-5 people to be radioactively-infused mutants with super powers.

Yea it's true. The only issue is that there really is no perfect solution. I have yet to hear of something that convinces me it will certainly work.

Look. I typed all that up about history and the Middle East. Every single thought I expend on the Middle East is pure torture. I tortured myself for over an hour on that post.

Someone has to reply to it. Have mercy!!

L. Spiro

What you stated is a fact, most modern day dictatorships and virtually all major Islamic extremism can be traced back to the USA. The only exception I'm aware of are the Uyghurs, which are radicalized because of Chinese oppression.

Another aspect was all the attempted failed coups/assassinations in the region that all add to the instability/distrust. Even if you want to make ISIS out to be a state (Which they pretty much are at this point), the USA is actively and openly trying to assassinate their leadership, which is a narrative they love to use for recruiting. I mean, Iran's trying to help out against ISIS, and we STILL have people advocating for invading them ASAP... Despite them being one of the most stable countries in the entire damn region.

And then we support things like this http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/11/world/asia/iran-scientist-killed/

"Based on the existing evidence collected by the relevant Iranian security authorities, similar to previous incidents, perpetrators used the same terrorist method in assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, i.e., attaching a sticky magnetic bomb to the car carrying the scientists and detonating it,"

I guess from a historical perspective, the question would be which is worse, the extremism now, or the USSR having potentially conquered parts of the Middle East?

Having a working legal system that actually punishes serious criminals (rather than the average citizen) [...] would help.

Can we get one of those in the USA also?

I guess from a historical perspective, the question would be which is worse, the extremism now, or the USSR having potentially conquered parts of the Middle East?

You can't bomb an idea.
The so called ISIS attacks in places like the US, Europe and Australia can't be stopped by bombing Syria, and bombing them probably only makes these disconnected attacks of ideology more frequent.

I guess from a historical perspective, the question would be which is worse, the extremism now, or the USSR having potentially conquered parts of the Middle East?

Well one side is obviously unknown, especially as the USSR was doomed to fail and collapsed under it's own weight... Anything could've happened there.
...but conquered is a bit of leading phrasing -- were they actually looking to bring mid east and north Africa into the union, or just within their sphere of influence?

But, there's literally over a million dead on the other side. That's very hard to support.
Afghanistan was also actually well on the way to being a stable liberal democracy under the USSR, something that's still unimaginable there after 15 years of trying.
Lybia had gone from being on of the poorest to one of the richest countries in Africa, from majoriy illiterate to majority college educated, with water/food/housing considered a human right and direct democracy. Now they're worse off than Syria currently is. Looking at individual situations, and people, it's dead simple to choose the one where you had a house and a job and your family were safe within a society...

This ^^^. Although I didn't live through the Cold War, we don't really know what would've happened had the USSR not been "stopped". I will say that from what I've read in the history books, the Soviets couldn't 100% be trusted to not be aggressive/cause something that would really have harmed the US and allies. But it is well worth noting that a lot of the Middle East issues/failed states were at one point pretty close to becoming relatively stable states.

I would say that the problem with foreign policy then was more of a lack of foresight. People were so obsessed with the Soviets that they didn't think what would happen after the Soviets were gone/no longer an issue. No one thought about the fallout/effect of these policies 40-50 years down the road. So almost certainly the foreign policy went wrong there. I do think that it's pretty clear the Soviets would have collapsed at some point regardless of the foreign policy of the US.

I'll give the perspective of an (atheist, ex-Muslim) Arab on the topic. I didn't read everything you guys said because the posts are ridiculously long so this is just my opinion.

You can spend a lot of time arguing about what caused the mess that is the middle east. Oppression by the Turks for centuries which left Arabs uneducated and poor.

The oil boom in Saudi Arabia allowing it to export its extreme form of Islam to other Arab countries, mainly Egypt. A Tribal and collectivist culture thrown into chaos by randomly drawn borders by the British and French. Israel. The US's charming foreign policy.

I think it's more important to look at Islam, and why it is making the mess so much messier. To be clear I'm talking about Arab Muslims, since they are the ones I'm experienced with. And to please the PC police, I'm (obviously) not talking about all of them. The problem with Arab Muslims is that they don't really value life as much as the rest of us do. To many of them this is just a pesky test they have to get through to go to the next life. So what does this mean? They don't pursue happiness...

They follow rules. And Oh how many rules do they have. Not everyone follows the same rules and not as extensively, but they're there. They follow just the collection of rules/Sunnah that their parents are familiar with. It can be simple ones like no alcohol, to complex ones like the 9 Sunnats of drinking water which I've heard my aunt preach to her kids.

But it is sex that I'd like to talk about most. It is such a fundamental instinct that we desire, yet is actively repressed by hundreds of millions of people. And I'm not even talking about just premarital sex. The attitude towards sex is so bad, it's frightening (Tune in to any Muslim marriage counseling show on TV, and prepare to be horrified). I remember seeing protest signs in Egypt during the Mubarak ousting, saying "I want to get married". You see the economy in Egypt was so bad that young people were struggling to pay for weddings, furnished apartments which are a must if you want to get married, and Mahr (shudder).

So here you have an exploding population of young men desperate for sex, approval and self esteem. They end up marrying any woman they meet that their parents approve of, they end up with disappointing sex, a wife that lets herself go because she's miserable (I'm sure you've noticed how older Arab women look), no emotional support because of the loveless marriage, kids that they had too young (Arabs usually start trying to have kids immediately after the wedding), no time or money to do anything they really want, and the so many rules they have to follow to go to heaven.

And then who do they see? The west. The big bad west. With their sex, and openness, and women that treat their husbands with love and not just obedience, with young people doing what they want in life, not just get married young, raise kids and die. And so they call you immoral. And they try to shield their religion from your loose way of life as they interpret it as an attack on theirs. Why? Because if Islam wasn't there, if it wasn't the true religion, if it wasn't the answer, then they just wasted their entire life and spent it in misery, all for nothing.

But that's just my opinion.