The whole Middle East is like a sick game of whack a mole. Every time you whack one - two more pop up who are nastier than the previous one.
I detest the Saudi regime but I don't even dare contemplate who is in line to replace them.
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The question is, can we actually do that? Usually when we try to disengage, the snakes come out of the swamp and we have to deal with them in places we don't want to deal with them. Then when we go back and attack the snakes on their home turf, we find that we are in the swamp again. In addition, are we really going to let them wipe out the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians or the Yazidis, while selling their women in the bazaar as sex slaves?
I don't have any solutions. I've come to the conclusion that there are no good solutions and in fact no good choices. We just have to try to pick the least bad choice--and we can't be sure which that is.
However, while it might not be the least bad choice--indeed it might turn out to be the worst choice--I have to say that knowing that we are killing jihadis makes me feel good. (By contrast I never understood why we were messing around with Libya in the first place and was dead set at allying with al-Qaeda in order to go to war against Assad in Syria. As bad as he is I never saw him as the worst of the Syrian combatants).
Well once upon a time when maybe steamships were the fast travel across an ocean, a problem area could just be ignored. But this is not just local tribalism and it is not contained within the Middle East. The ideology has been growing esp since Sayyid Qutb's day sand it's spread quite widely with a dogma that requires it's relentless expansion.
I predict any attempts to "fight" the Islamic State will be just as fruitful as our past efforts.
The biggest problem we face with regard to ISIS is ourselves.
Most of American society from what I've seen finds the idea of war and violence too distasteful to consider except in extreme circumstances. A firearm is worthless without willingness to use it by the holder, and that's the problem we face as a nation. Our military is more then capable of deleting ISIS from the map, but the same people who say police officers are wrong for killing armed felons would protest and raise domestic ruckus at that solution.
Or worse, they'd even identify with ISIS. A repugnant thought, to be sure, but I can see many liberals at this university siding against our own troops as CNN beats the populist drum of "imperialist America".
This is just my stance, but ISIS isn't the problem. As many have observed, there will always be despots and thugs running amok in the world, espexially in the Middle East. The problem is that our government is selected by our neighbors, and they consider the idea of armed conflict unfathomable short of nuclear war.
Oh, good. Finally someone is going to explain it.
It seems to me that IS represents a massive threat to the stability (such as it is) of the region, a significant threat to Europe, and a let's-keep-an-eye-on-this risk to the U.S. I have yet to see anyone lay out a convincing argument that IS is a clear and present danger to Americans, such that invasion (or whatever "destroy ISIS militarily" means) is the best use of our limited resources.
America!! Kitten, YEAH!! Comin' to save the mother-kitten day, YEAH!!
OTOH, while they hate Americans and the West, it appears that their primary goal is to unite Arab-Muslim region into some pan-Arab state. How much of their hatred for the west is because we stand in the way of that goal? Is a pan-Arab state really such a bad idea?*
*I think Dan Carlin put forth a pretty decent compelling argument for this.
Oil - they decide they don't want to sell oil and the oil price goes nuts. All the pick-ups at the range now cost $5000 to fill up. Economy crashes. Interests in the USA who make money off oil go nuts.
We only care about cheap oil. Would they give up income - yep, if they are religious nuts and some of the ilk have suggested such.
Of course, we cannot be energy independent as it would damage the environment.