Gathering Storm in the Mideast

[jordan179]

As many may now be aware, a radical Islamofascist organization, ISIS, which had been fighting in the Syrian Civil War, has now invaded Iraq.  With amazing speed, they have vanquished one Iraqi military formation after another, and are wreaking dreadful atrocities on the helpless civilian population.  Mosul and Tikrit have fallen.  Advancing ISIS

Comments

[skarman]

Personally, the US and the rest of the world needs to stay out of it

[jordan179]

Personally, the US and the rest of the world needs to stay out of it.

It's certainly most short-term convenient for us to stay out of it. I'm not sure exactly how we get to decide for "the rest of the world."

The US should now, step back and let the rest of the world deal with this.

We are, in point of fact doing this. And "the rest of the world" is also stepping back, save for the parts of it which are fishing in troubled waters. And that is precisely why a major war is becoming inevitable.

It is time for the US to actually work on cleaning up the mess in their own yard.

Oh, I'm sure a lot of that will take care of itself when the war starts and we can make money hand-over-first as we did from 1939-41, and perhaps keep the fighting at arm's length as we did from 1941-45 (if we're lucky again). Of course, we live now in a world with nuclear weapons, so the equivalent of the U-Boat raids off our coast may be a bit more bloody for us, but we're a big country. Most of us will survive. The heavy dying will be done by Little

[skarman]

In case you've missed it, in that part of the world, heavy dying as you call it, has been going on for centuries. If it isn't clan against clan, it's tribe against tribe, Sunni against Shiite against Coptic, Arab against everybody else ad infinitum. Like I wrote earlier, the only time in recent memory that things were rather calm, was under the rule of guys like Saddam, Muammar, Hosni and the Assads

[skarman]

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

We've become complacent because we've not been under the threat of the gun. We have zealots, religious and political trying to enforce their will on us. The latter is the bigger threat for they are the ones willing to bend our necks towards the former. I say we deal with the latter ones first. Hopefully, before the former manage to perpetrate more 9/11 style attacks, though maybe those need to happen to open people's eyes.

Personally, I'd have turned the whole area into glass already, notwithstanding that not everybody there is part of the evil permeating that region of the world. I'm that fed up with these people. THAT is my idea of "flattening them".

[ford_prefect42]

Disclaimer: The following is a nit. I am compelled, by mental forces beyond my control, to pick those.

"glassing" significant portions of the world is not feasible, nor was it ever. When we invaded Afghanistan, I ran some math, using the nuclear arsenal at the time, and this
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/gmap/hydesim.html

I determined that the entire US arsenal would be capable of putting 1/3 of the land mass of Afghanistan within the 2PSI ring (severe damage to residential structures).

Nit ends.