Fvck ISIS

[code green]

Last Friday, ISIS targeted a Christian neighborhood in Aleppo after losing a lot of ground to the Syrian army earlier in the week. RPGs were fired at people's dwellings, taking down buildings with the habitants trapped inside Article describing attack. As I've said in a few of these threads, I've got family living in Syria, and unfortunately some in Aleppo. My aunt and 22 year old cousin were in an apartment complex that got decimated, and both died instantly. My aunt's mother asked the rescue workers how she looked when they found her, and said she looked like a sleeping angel. They didn't have the heart to tell her they found her daughter in 3 pieces, and my cousin was crushed by the rubble. Got to see some of the funeral over Skype, which was tough.

I remember talking to people here and IRL when the FSA was just starting to get attention saying if we didn't put a stop to the "moderates" then, it would escalate. Wrote letters to congressmen saying it would soon be open season on Christians, receiving nothing but condescending replies. Say what you want about Assad, but Christians had been living there in peace for decades without anything happening to them. Syria was the one country in the ME that managed to have people of different faiths co-inhabit without conflict. And now look at it....it's Beirut, Baghdad, and Cairo all glued together with the blood of innocent people that just wanted to live their lives. It's tough to really say anything else; I don't even have the heart to say "I told you so" anymore.

This shit's never going to end. I'm slowly resigning myself to the fact.

[BigNBAfan]

Problem is growth in the middle east is a ****ing pyramid. You kill one of those religious bastards and their 8 brothers turn to religion to cope and take on a mission of hate. This cycle just repeats itself... it's ****ed.

[Patrick Chewing]

This same kind of inaction from our government is what got Kennedy killed.


We can pound our fist in the pavement all we want, but until the United States decides to take decisive action and doesn't use words like "Degrade" instead of words like "Kill", ISIS will continue killing Christians, Jews, Muslims, you name it.


We elected this coward in chief, now we deal with it.

[Nick Young]

Can't believe that Obama and David Cameron were doing their best to drag us in to a war ON THE SAME SIDE AS ISIS only a year ago! Assad is no saint but he kept shit in check! He knew if he let up, people like these ISIS psychos would rise up and run wild and start doing shit like eating peoples hearts and filming it.

Syria was one of the most liberal countries in the middle east for awhile-when Assad still had power.

Assad was basically Batman-he's not the dictator that Syria wanted-he's the dictator Syria needed.

I hope Kurdistan becomes a reality soon.

Also, all these people in Syria have been getting shitted on FOR YEARS NOW in this shitty civil war and you never hear anyone talking about them. Other Arabs hardly talk about them, the media hardly focuses on them, it is shit! Someone needs to sort these people out and get them help! Why was the US so quick to stop genocide in the Balkans and isn't doing shit to protect Syrians!

[code green]

This same kind of inaction from our government is what got Kennedy killed.


We can pound our fist in the pavement all we want, but until the United States decides to take decisive action and doesn't use words like "Degrade" instead of words like "Kill", ISIS will continue killing Christians, Jews, Muslims, you name it.


We elected this coward in chief, now we deal with it.

I hear you. I'm just as frustrated with our lack of action. But this goes beyond bipartisanship. John friggen McCain (who got my vote in 2008) is literally taking pictures with a person that was involved in kidnapping Lebanese bishops while claiming "he knows who the good guys are."

Democrats and Republicans don't matter when neither side understands the landscape over there. I'm a product of it, and I can barely understand it.

[Dresta]

I hear you. I'm just as frustrated with our lack of action. But this goes beyond bipartisanship. John friggen McCain (who got my vote in 2008) is literally taking pictures with a person that was involved in kidnapping Lebanese bishops while claiming "he knows who the good guys are."

Democrats and Republicans don't matter when neither side understands the landscape over there. I'm a product of it, and I can barely understand it.

It does, in the UK too, where the two major parties both support these sorts of excursions. American and UK foreign policy is being directed by people who have next to no understanding of the regions they're dealing with. First in Iraq, then Libya, then Syria, then Ukraine - all of them now uninhabitable wastelands (perhaps Ukraine is not there yet, but it would be already if European countries weren't so much more reluctant to get involved in the latest crusade).

The rise of IS was documented and well known about, but no one in the right places considered them a serious threat, while our allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia were busy financing and supplying them. Putin = evil bastard, Erdogan = faithful ally



It's become beyond ridiculous. So pointlessly destructive that even someone like Henry Kissinger is urging caution. This article, written some time ago, shows how clueless US officials have been to the threat (and how arrogant), and how they ignored the warnings of people actually on the ground:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-10009778.html

I still find it astonishing that no foreign governments spotted the growing strength of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (formerly known as Isis) in the 18 months before it captured much of northern Iraq in June 2014.

There was plenty of evidence that Isis and al-Qa'ida-type organisations were getting stronger by the day in Iraq and Syria, but in January of that year President Obama flippantly compared Isis to a junior university basketball team which was never going to hit the big time and whose activities could be largely ignored.

He was speaking after Isis had captured the city of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, and the 350,000-strong Iraqi army was failing to win it back. The previous summer, Isis fighters had successfully attacked the infamous Abu Ghraib prison and freed hundreds of its most experienced fighters. In training camps in the deserts of Iraq and Syria, Isis fighters were preparing for spectacular advances in the summer of 2014 that would create a "caliphate" the size of Great Britain, defended by an army stronger than that of many members of the UN.

The outside world may have been astonished by the explosive rise of Isis, but Iraqi politicians had been warning me for several years that, if the war in Syria went on, it would destabilise Iraq and lead to the full-scale resumption of the Sunni-Shia civil war. They also predicted, with varying degrees of emphasis, that the Iraqi army was rotted with corruption and was not capable of fighting a battle.

I had been writing about the growing power of Isis and other jihadis in Iraq and Syria since the second half of 2013. In December 2013, I nominated the leader of Isis, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as The Independent's Middle East Man of the Year. The following March, I wrote a five-part series for the paper called "Al-Qa'ida's Second Act", the first sentence of which read: "Al-Qa'ida-type organisations, with beliefs and methods of operating similar to those who carried out the 9/11 attacks, have become a lethally powerful force from the Tigris to the Mediterranean in the past three years."

The five articles tried to show how strong Isis was on the ground in Iraq and that it was able to levy taxes in Sunni Arab cities such as Mosul and Tikrit that were nominally under the control of the Baghdad government. I wrote that the "War on Terror" had utterly failed, though the US and many of its allies had "adopted procedures formerly associated with police states, such as imprisonment without trial, rendition, torture and domestic espionage". The series attracted some interest among those who followed events in Iraq and Syria closely, but otherwise I was disappointed that there was so little appreciation of the danger.

Shortly afterwards I attended a conference of Middle East experts in Amman, Jordan, about the war in Syria, where I made the point that Isis was already powerful enough to carry out operations in a great swathe of territory. The only person who seemed to agree with me fully was Gareth Stansfield, Professor of Middle East Politics and Director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at Exeter University, who knew Iraq well. I got the sense that the others at the meeting considered our views exaggerated, even eccentric.

All ignored because it didn't fit with what people wanted to hear, like so many things in politics.

And this article looks into its rise and the role played by Saudi Arabia and Turkey: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n16/patrick...s-consolidates

**** IS, but seriously, **** Obama, too. Just woeful incompetence.

[Real Men Wear Green]

So people really want us to fully go to war in Iraq after we just spent over a decade over there achieving, apparently, nothing? I never want to hear about balanced budgets again and while we're at let's stop pretending to care about the lives of soldiers. Because neither talking point jibes with engaging in another war out in the Middle East.

I am also against ISIS. Everyone should be against ISIS. But we don't take out every organization we're against. We don't, for example, overthrow the Kims in North Korea. There are four (soon to be three) countries on the state sponsors of terrorism list and we aren't at war with any of them. If the entire world is ready to take on the burden of reforming Iraq then it may be tolerable for us to do our part but if we take on the burden of reconquering the same country we seem to be fighting every ten years expect thousands more dead troops, tens of thousands more dead Iraqis (to be fair, that is probably in the cards with ISIS but the difference is that now the blood will on our hands...again), and trillions more in deficit spending.

ISIS is absolutely horrible. But how many more times are we going to go into Iraq, shoot a lot of people, and then leave behind a government that we will have to either save or remove ten years later? We need to realize that we don't really now what to do about Iraq and the Middle East in general. We don't have to solve their problems and so far our track record has been awful. It'd be one thing if our interventions had been productive but what have we achieved?

[Nick Young]

F*CK TURKEY! They are not our "allies" in any sense of the word.

[Dresta]

So people really want us to fully go to war in Iraq after we just spent over a decade over there achieving, apparently, nothing? I never want to hear about balanced budgets again and while we're at let's stop pretending to care about the lives of soldiers. Because neither talking point jibes with engaging in another war out in the Middle East.

I am also against ISIS. Everyone should be against ISIS. But we don't take out every organization we're against. We don't, for example, overthrow the Kims in North Korea. There are four (soon to be three) countries on the state sponsors of terrorism list and we aren't at war with any of them. If the entire world is ready to take on the burden of reforming Iraq then it may be tolerable for us to do our part but if we take on the burden of reconquering the same country we seem to be fighting every ten years expect thousands more dead troops, tens of thousands more dead Iraqis (to be fair, that is probably in the cards with ISIS but the difference is that now the blood will on our hands...again), and trillions more in deficit spending.

ISIS is absolutely horrible. But how many more times are we going to go into Iraq, shoot a lot of people, and then leave behind a government that we will have to either save or remove ten years later? We need to realize that we don't really now what to do about Iraq and the Middle East in general. We don't have to solve their problems and so far our track record has been awful. It'd be one thing if our interventions had been productive but what have we achieved?

What are you talking about? No one really seems to be saying that, most seem to be saying that it was a mistake to marginalise Assad and to supply the so-called 'moderate' rebels (when the fighting was, from the start, driven by extremist groups). It's too late now, sure, but IS could not have grown into what it is without ignoring it, without allying ourselves with Turkey and Saudi Arabia against Assad, and providing Islamists with training and weapons. Those in the Iraqi government knew what was happening in Syria would destabilise Iraq (only just after the US had left), relayed this information to US officials, who ignored it, and kept charging onwards in their anti-Assad crusade.

Where were the condemnations of Saudi Arabia and Turkey? Where was the awareness to a threat that utterly annulled all the money spent in the region over the past decade? Why wasn't the US putting the same pressure it now puts on Russia on these countries, who were acting far more outrageously?

You would have thought they'd have learned their lesson after Bin-Laden and Afghanistan the first time, but apparently not.

[Real Men Wear Green]

What are you talking about?

This:

This same kind of inaction from our government is what got Kennedy killed.


We can pound our fist in the pavement all we want, but until the United States decides to take decisive action and doesn't use words like "Degrade" instead of words like "Kill", ISIS will continue killing Christians, Jews, Muslims, you name it.


We elected this coward in chief, now we deal with it.

[StephHamann]

Assad was basically Batman-he's not the dictator that Syria wanted-he's the dictator Syria needed.

[code green]

You would have thought they'd have learned their lesson after Bin-Laden and Afghanistan the first time, but apparently not.

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." -Winston Churchill

[Dresta]

This:

Still not 'people' - and most in this thread (including OP) are complaining about the unnecessary foreign subversion of Assad and its disastrous consequences (the general unthinkingness of American foreign policy), not calling for an invasion.

I certainly don't think the US has any money to be giving to charitable causes abroad right now, including the $5+ billion spent on democracy promotion in Ukraine, the purpose of which seems only to marginalise and antagonise Russia.

[Nick Young]

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." -Winston Churchill

You think he'd be more grateful for us winning the war that he couldn't.

[Patrick Chewing]

It shouldn't matter how many times we go over there. Evil must not be allowed to thrive on any corner of this Earth.


Blame the U.S. for being a product of its own exceptionalism. If no one else will take the fight to the enemy, then we will.