Gathering Storm in the Mideast
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
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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 Brown People (or honorary Little Brown People, as is the case for the Caucasian Arabs and freakin' Aryan Persians) far from us. So I guess that's all right, eh?
Let the fight play out. Let the US have its second revolution. Let Europe either repeat the same path as it did during the rise of the Fourth Reich or finally get its act together as it did AFTER much of Europe fell, hopefully sooner.
Well, yeah. If we don't do that, the wargames won't be interesting at all. Can't get much fun out of battles we're sure to win, now can we? We need to cherry-tap this run. And if we lose, we can just re-start the game, right? It's not as if it's real ...
And once they're living the way that they say they want, we can forget about them. Build a wall around it for all I care, to keep them inside their territory. If, however, they venture out and attack us then, we will be in a better, much healthier position to flatten them. Maybe even find we have popular support from the locals.
Oh, wait ... you're responding from the timeline in which Bush's major foreign policy concern from 2001-2009 was China, aren't you? Ok. Let me explain.
In my timeline, "they" did "venture out and attack us." 9/11/2001. And ISIS was spawned by the very same organization which attacked us. So by your logic, we should "go out and flatten them" because "we might even have popular support from the locals," correct?
And if attacking two of our most important cities doesn't count as "venturing out and attacking us," then what exactly does?
How do we hermetically seal off the whole Mideast given that the rest of the Western world isn't willing to co-operate with us on this? Or that the laws of physics don't seem to be co-operating with us either, given that modern weapons can range across the entire globe?
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Another thing you seem to conveniently forget, is that most of these people? They don't like the West. Sure, some of them will work with us, but only because, at the time, it's the only game in town. The Iraqis have been the ones on the other end of the US and Coalition forces' guns twice in a row. The Iranians held US embassy personnel hostage for months. Palestinian terrorists LOVED shooting, throwing overboard and generally being not very nice towards US citizens, especially if they were service members or were Jewish. The Saudis love our money, toys and females but gladly finance numerous terrorist groups and hold their oil supply over our heads. The Pakistanis? They love our money, our aid, both financial, military and other types but they finance our enemies, hid Bin Laden and would love to see us under their heels.
The US are the the "Great Satan" while the United Kingdom is the "Little Satan".
And just to refresh your memory, about half of the US population, you know, the ones who voted the current Golfer-in-Chief into the White House TWICE!!!! have always been of the opinion that we should "talk" and "negotiate" with these poor, misunderstood people. Do you really see them grow a spine and start pushing for action? Do you really think they will welcome a new war, just because THU WON!!!! is the one pushing for it? I don't know what is scarier, that or Obama actually ordering troops to move in. With the way he's gutted the military, his administrations actions against them, gutting the US military leadership into a bunch of "Yes Men". It'll be a repeat of Vietnam or Lebanon in '82. ROE will be so restrictive and schizophrenic not even an army of psychiatrists will be able to untangle it. Just watch the scene in Robocop II where the load so many new directives into Robo's brain it hampers his ability to do his job.
I remember where I was on September 11. I remember watching the second aircraft fly into the WTC. I remember the bombings in Madrid and the fact that, to this day, nobody knows what became of a female colleague who was supposedly on one of the trains, on her way to work. We kicked their asses for that. Our soldiers didn't get to finish the job because the GiC didn't want them to.
We live in a world filled with followers of Neville Chamberlain. Remember him? He who appeased Hitler, an icon to many of these nutjobs in the ME. These neo-Chamberlain's will excuse anything, give up anything just as long as they can buy themselves another second. They'll #hashtag everything, attack their own family if they don't hold the same views as they themselves do. It would take another attack on the level of 9/11 or larger to even have a glimmer of hope of making them change their stance.
Sealing off your borders isn't easy but you also should not leave them wide open like the US have been doing. How hard is it to deny entry to anyone originating from certain places? How hard is it to deny any aircraft from certain places entry into your airspace? Sure, businesses wouldn't like it but if you really want to do business with someone from the Mid-East, hop a plane and go to South America and meet them there. Or, you know, use video-conferencing, email and scanners to sign documents. Better yet, don't do business with them. Starve their economies. They want a return to the Dark Ages? Fine, we'll help them. No more buying their oil and no more selling them our products.
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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".
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"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.
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