Here's Everything You Need To Know About I.s.i.s

[Derideo_Te]

The roots of ISIS can be found in the fundamentalist Wahabbist movement that began in Saudi Arabia around the time the British were partitioning the middle east. Essentially they are no different to any of the other extremist groups like Al Queda that are also based in Wahabbism.

It is a fallacy to believe that you can "defeat" a religion by warmongering. You cannot kill an idea. To this day there are still those who believe that Nazism is the only way the world should be. However they are marginalized and treated with the scorn and derision they deserve.

That is not as easy with those who are willing to die for their extreme fundamentalist beliefs and kill innocent women and children in the process. So there needs to be a two pronged approach to dealing with them. One is definitely based in the military but that must be composed of those who have the most to lose under an extremist cult. If they won't fight for their freedom then there is no reason why anyone else should do so on their behalf in my opinion.

The second prong is the 'war" for the hearts and minds of normal average Muslims. This is a propaganda war and it needs to be funded by governments and it must use the talents of normal average Muslims to demonstrate that life does not need to be one of constant strife. Your neighbor might not be Shiia or Sunni like you but he is still your neighbor. You both live in the same town, buy food and clothes in the same shops and read the same books. Your children will play soccer together. What divides you is not as important as what you share as humans. The internet is the tool to use to spread this message and we know it works because it helped in the Arab Spring.

Using both approaches the extremists like ISIS are seen for what they really are, a threat to the peace and stability of the lives of ordinary people. Once it becomes apparent that they are can be beaten they no longer be allowed to intimidate without repercussions. They will be marginalized and ridiculed and if they commit atrocities tried and jailed.

Failure to use both approaches guarantees that the outcome will be the same as always. Do it right this time or don't do it at all in my opinion.

You have a good argument, and perhaps it could work.

However I disagree that you cannot defeat a religion by war. We did it in World War II by totally defeating Shinto extremism. Remember the Banzai? The Rape of Nanking? Not too much difference between Shinto extremism and Islamic extremism. We did this by employing total warfare. We leveled entire cities, and used nuclear power.

Then, after we utterly defeated them militarily, we forcefully changed their culture. General MacArthur was effectively the military Governor. For the next five years we had 350,000 soldiers in Japan enforcing General MacArthur's rule. We outlawed their flag, their nationalism, their extremism. We taught western values in their schools. We broke them so badly that they relied upon us to feed them. We jailed any opposition, and we controlled the press.

We could do the same thing with ISIS, and Islamic extremism in general. We could triple the size of our military, invade (again), blow up many mosques, put observers in the rest of the mosques to ensure they only taught "approved" ideology, outlaw extremism, totally disarm the population, make the population totally dependent upon us for food, water, and electricity, take over the schools to ensure that western values are taught, etc.

It would take 5-10 years of hard-core military occupation, followed by another 10-20 years of slow withdrawal, but we COULD defeat their religious extremism.

The Japanese were contained to an island chain. Islam is the 2nd largest religion in the world and there are Muslims in every nation of the world today.

The USA simply doesn't have the manpower to enforce it's will on 23% of the population of the entire world.

So this cannot be done by force alone. It has to be a long term process of educating Muslims to reject the extremists and treat them like the outcasts that they are. They must learn to shun them, deride them and mock them openly.

This is a societal problem and society needs to learn how to deal with those would impose their religious beliefs on others by force. The concept of Freedom of Religion means freedom FROM oppressive religion too. It is a universal right as endorsed by the UN.

It is time that every child learns about that right and what it means to them and their own lives. Then in a couple of decades we will finally see the likes of ISIS relegated to the fringes where they belong.

 

[Rikurzhen]

This article is phenomenal. By far the most comprehensive and informative article ever written on ISIS without the filter of the main stream media.

Great read..

The War Nerd

So that's where Brecher publishes now. Good as he usually is.

 

[Rikurzhen]

Great article! Two points to think about though. In the 3 months since the article was published, ISIS has become ultra-rich and secondly, they have been embraced by Hamas and others.

Yet they still have faced no real opposition and only succeed like the article says, Where there is a power vacuum.

That's true and at this point I believe they could be eradicated by one U.S. Army division. And that's only if the campaign was managed by the Army and not by Obamessiah and his hordes of "yes men."

Eradicated only to see a 'new' group take their place after the US, once again, leaves. This article makes me think if its even worth it anymore. It's like fighting a cock roach infestation with a broom. Sure you can kill thousands but thousands more will take their place.

Here is my opinion/observation. If the US puts boots on the ground (which I think will happen) we will have to stay there indefinitely after we 'eradicate' them otherwise we'll be back at square one a year or two down the road fighting the same nutters under a different name (ISIS 1.1)

I like to crystallize the decision by imaging the following - A President explaining to the family of a fallen soldier why he died fighting ISIS. Why should we risk blood and treasure there?

When Muslims dream of a Caliphate rising the only way to stop them it to employe active measures of suppression forever. If you relax on the suppression, then like on a lawn, a thousand weeds will pop up.

As with communism, the only way to kill the dream for Western liberals is to allow communism to exist and then fail from its own internal weaknesses. A Caliphate will be an epic failure - a 7th Century model of governance doesn't translate well into the 21st Century. Muslims need to experience this to finally believe it.

 

[Rikurzhen]

The second prong is the 'war" for the hearts and minds of normal average Muslims. This is a propaganda war and it needs to be funded by governments and it must use the talents of normal average Muslims to demonstrate that life does not need to be one of constant strife. Your neighbor might not be Shiia or Sunni like you but he is still your neighbor. You both live in the same town, buy food and clothes in the same shops and read the same books. Your children will play soccer together. What divides you is not as important as what you share as humans. The internet is the tool to use to spread this message and we know it works because it helped in the Arab Spring

You're as deluded as the idiot neocons. You don't know the region, the culture nor the religion and you wish to impose your nonsensical "kumbaya" visions onto people. My suggestion is that you, like Claire Chennault, put together a volunteer group, say the 59th Airborne Division of Atheists, and drop into the region and implement your vision of reform. Bore these people into submission.

This is a wholly Western-Liberal viewpoint on how a society, and people, functions. It is based on a universalist philosophy. That universalism has not been empirically supported.

 

[MDiver]

Whether you are dealing with ISIL/ISIS, al Qaeda, al Shabab, Boko Haram, or some other Jihadist group. No matter how many you kill, a new group will continue to crop up. The government boasts killing of the head of a terrorist group, only to have another individual immediately replace him. Our actions solve nothing.
Westerners need to stop thinking of the terrorist groups with a solely western mentality. Think of each of group as an achenes of a dandelion. Each individual group is like a single achenes of a dandelion that floats from the dandelion. Killing each individual achenes as it starts out, doesn't do away with the root cause and thus new ones will continue sprouting up and spreading, and over time, drain the resources used against it.
You have to destroy the root plant. The root plant in this case, is the Quran and Islam. Destroy that and you win, don't destroy it and it keeps spreading and you ultimately lose.

 

[SillyWabbit]

In my opinion, any time we fight a war with no clear idea of what victory will look like and with no will to fight to an absolute conclusion, we are going to leave things worse than they had to be. President Bush made that mistake and President Obama is making that mistake as has every other President going all the way back to WWII.

Unless we have the political will to fight with overwhelming force and bludgeon the enemy into complete submission and unconditional surrender and then act like victors and set the terms for what the people have to do to get their country back, we will leave enemies, not friends, in our wake. And since we seem to have no such political will, I don't thing we should invest any more precious blood and treasure into making things worse for other countries.

And yet, here we are again.

 

[Derideo_Te]

The second prong is the 'war" for the hearts and minds of normal average Muslims. This is a propaganda war and it needs to be funded by governments and it must use the talents of normal average Muslims to demonstrate that life does not need to be one of constant strife. Your neighbor might not be Shiia or Sunni like you but he is still your neighbor. You both live in the same town, buy food and clothes in the same shops and read the same books. Your children will play soccer together. What divides you is not as important as what you share as humans. The internet is the tool to use to spread this message and we know it works because it helped in the Arab Spring

You're as deluded as the idiot neocons. You don't know the region, the culture nor the religion and you wish to impose your nonsensical "kumbaya" visions onto people. My suggestion is that you, like Claire Chennault, put together a volunteer group, say the 59th Airborne Division of Atheists, and drop into the region and implement your vision of reform. Bore these people into submission.

This is a wholly Western-Liberal viewpoint on how a society, and people, functions. It is based on a universalist philosophy. That universalism has not been empirically supported.

Pastor Rikurzhen has arrived to spread the sacred Gospel of Conservatism that will be the Savior of the Entire Western World.

Listen carefully, children, to the wise Pastor Rikurzhen because he has been blessed with a special power to see religions where no one else can see them. The voices in his head are directly from God and must be revered by all.

Pastor Rikurzhen is the "Chosen One" who can do no wrong!

 

[SillyWabbit]

Great article! Two points to think about though. In the 3 months since the article was published, ISIS has become ultra-rich and secondly, they have been embraced by Hamas and others.

Yet they still have faced no real opposition and only succeed like the article says, Where there is a power vacuum.

That's true and at this point I believe they could be eradicated by one U.S. Army division. And that's only if the campaign was managed by the Army and not by Obamessiah and his hordes of "yes men."

Eradicated only to see a 'new' group take their place after the US, once again, leaves. This article makes me think if its even worth it anymore. It's like fighting a cock roach infestation with a broom. Sure you can kill thousands but thousands more will take their place.

Here is my opinion/observation. If the US puts boots on the ground (which I think will happen) we will have to stay there indefinitely after we 'eradicate' them otherwise we'll be back at square one a year or two down the road fighting the same nutters under a different name (ISIS 1.1)

I like to crystallize the decision by imaging the following - A President explaining to the family of a fallen soldier why he died fighting ISIS. Why should we risk blood and treasure there?

When Muslims dream of a Caliphate rising the only way to stop them it to employe active measures of suppression forever. If you relax on the suppression, then like on a lawn, a thousand weeds will pop up.

As with communism, the only way to kill the dream for Western liberals is to allow communism to exist and then fail from its own internal weaknesses. A Caliphate will be an epic failure - a 7th Century model of governance doesn't translate well into the 21st Century. Muslims need to experience this to finally believe it.

In case you hadn't noticed: there are plenty of people living as though the 21st century doesn't exist--and they couldn't care less about the rest of the world.

 

[Rikurzhen]

The second prong is the 'war" for the hearts and minds of normal average Muslims. This is a propaganda war and it needs to be funded by governments and it must use the talents of normal average Muslims to demonstrate that life does not need to be one of constant strife. Your neighbor might not be Shiia or Sunni like you but he is still your neighbor. You both live in the same town, buy food and clothes in the same shops and read the same books. Your children will play soccer together. What divides you is not as important as what you share as humans. The internet is the tool to use to spread this message and we know it works because it helped in the Arab Spring

You're as deluded as the idiot neocons. You don't know the region, the culture nor the religion and you wish to impose your nonsensical "kumbaya" visions onto people. My suggestion is that you, like Claire Chennault, put together a volunteer group, say the 59th Airborne Division of Atheists, and drop into the region and implement your vision of reform. Bore these people into submission.

This is a wholly Western-Liberal viewpoint on how a society, and people, functions. It is based on a universalist philosophy. That universalism has not been empirically supported.

Pastor Rikurzhen has arrived to spread the sacred Gospel of Conservatism that will be the Savior of the Entire Western World.

Listen carefully, children, to the wise Pastor Rikurzhen because he has been blessed with a special power to see religions where no one else can see them. The voices in his head are directly from God and must be revered by all.

Pastor Rikurzhen is the "Chosen One" who can do no wrong!

So, you got caught with your pants down, a truly horrible vision for us, and now embarrassed, you have no response to the criticism.

The Neocons tried to do what you suggested, they tried to plant a Westernist mindset into the people of Iraq. It failed to take root. Go live in the region and learn how society functions there. It'll be a good experience for you. There are still some countries that are not yet ripped by war.

A fundamental truth is that in order to solve a problem one must first understand the problem. What you're doing is imposing a normative vision of how you think people SHOULD conduct themselves onto a situation and then proposing a solution which works in alignment with that vision. This approach only guarantees failure.

Keep your faith out of your analysis.

 

[LoneLaugher]

I was going to post this as a separate thread but it appears to fit here as a reply to the OP

Islamic State – How Can It NOT Be Islamic?


I wish someone would answer that question. Why do I ask? Simple. We have:


Videos of IS “officials” going through marketplaces and shops telling merchants they must shut down to attend prayers.


IS “officials” gathering up books, magazines, pamphlets, and other periodicals and tossing them into piles in the street and burning them. [Shades of Nazi Germany and Communist Europe]


Women and men wearing western clothing are ordered to remove and destroy them. Failure to do so to results in horrible punishments. Same clothing torn to shreds and tossed into piles for rags.


Public punishment such as throwing acid in a woman's face for looking at a man other than her husband. Removal of hands for stealing. Public rapine of women and girls considered to be “loose”.


Destruction of entire legal systems to be replaced by religious leaders handing out unappeasable decisions based upon “Islamic [Sharia] Law”


If this isn't “Islamic” than what is?


According to Repsac3, Accusing Any Muslim of Honor Killing, No Matter the Circumstances, Makes You Guilty of 'Bigotry' @ American Power According to Repsac3 Accusing Any Muslim of Honor Killing No Matter the Circumstances Makes You Guilty of Bigotry


The Pillars of Arab Despotism @ The Pillars of Arab Despotism by Robert F. Worth The New York Review of Books

THAT IS OFF TOPIC.

Read the article, please. Your talking points aimed at influencing the US midterms are not related to the thread.

 

[Derideo_Te]

Keep your faith out of your analysis.

The irony never stops with Pastor Rikurshen!



Your inane ASSUMPTIONS about what I know and where I have lived are amusing. For someone who has allegedly studied comparative religions you know less than nothing about how they work.

But keep on stalking my posts hoping that someday you can falsely accuse me of "plagiarism" because you have nothing of substance to add to the forum. You haven't offered a viable alternative to the ISIS problem because you don't have one and never will.

 

[Rikurzhen]

Keep your faith out of your analysis.

The irony never stops with Pastor Rikurshen!



Your inane ASSUMPTIONS about what I know and where I have lived are amusing. For someone who has allegedly studied comparative religions you know less than nothing about how they work.

But keep on stalking my posts hoping that someday you can falsely accuse me of "plagiarism" because you have nothing of substance to add to the forum. You haven't offered a viable alternative to the ISIS problem because you don't have one and never will.

High noise, zero signal.

 

[EconChick]

Shoot, thought I was logged in while typing and all my analysis went into a black hole, darn it.

 

[EconChick]

I think I said something like ....

I thought his analysis was ok but not that prescient. I thought he was myopic. I also thought he was biased. I also thought he lacked the imagination that visionaries have.

He said what ISIS was doing was "standard human behavior." Couldn't disagree more. He wrote this in June when there were 10,000 fighters. Now it's tripled.

He did make some good points. Like orders of battle details.

I would give it a C, maybe a B. JMHO.

 

[EconChick]

In my opinion, any time we fight a war with no clear idea of what victory will look like and with no will to fight to an absolute conclusion, we are going to leave things worse than they had to be. President Bush made that mistake and President Obama is making that mistake as has every other President going all the way back to WWII.

Unless we have the political will to fight with overwhelming force and bludgeon the enemy into complete submission and unconditional surrender and then act like victors and set the terms for what the people have to do to get their country back, we will leave enemies, not friends, in our wake. And since we seem to have no such political will, I don't thing we should invest any more precious blood and treasure into making things worse for other countries.

I agree with some parts of your post. Like the part you bolded.

 

[EconChick]

Great article! Two points to think about though. In the 3 months since the article was published, ISIS has become ultra-rich and secondly, they have been embraced by Hamas and others.

Yet they still have faced no real opposition and only succeed like the article says, Where there is a power vacuum.

That's true and at this point I believe they could be eradicated by one U.S. Army division. And that's only if the campaign was managed by the Army and not by Obamessiah and his hordes of "yes men."

Eradicated only to see a 'new' group take their place after the US, once again, leaves. This article makes me think if its even worth it anymore. It's like fighting a cock roach infestation with a broom. Sure you can kill thousands but thousands more will take their place.

Here is my opinion/observation. If the US puts boots on the ground (which I think will happen) we will have to stay there indefinitely after we 'eradicate' them otherwise we'll be back at square one a year or two down the road fighting the same nutters under a different name (ISIS 1.1)

I agree with the roach analogy but I also believe we have no choice. I think we'll need to keep a presence there just like we did in Korea and Germany.

 

[EconChick]

The roots of ISIS can be found in the fundamentalist Wahabbist movement that began in Saudi Arabia around the time the British were partitioning the middle east. Essentially they are no different to any of the other extremist groups like Al Queda that are also based in Wahabbism.

It is a fallacy to believe that you can "defeat" a religion by warmongering. You cannot kill an idea. To this day there are still those who believe that Nazism is the only way the world should be. However they are marginalized and treated with the scorn and derision they deserve.

That is not as easy with those who are willing to die for their extreme fundamentalist beliefs and kill innocent women and children in the process. So there needs to be a two pronged approach to dealing with them. One is definitely based in the military but that must be composed of those who have the most to lose under an extremist cult. If they won't fight for their freedom then there is no reason why anyone else should do so on their behalf in my opinion.

The second prong is the 'war" for the hearts and minds of normal average Muslims. This is a propaganda war and it needs to be funded by governments and it must use the talents of normal average Muslims to demonstrate that life does not need to be one of constant strife. Your neighbor might not be Shiia or Sunni like you but he is still your neighbor. You both live in the same town, buy food and clothes in the same shops and read the same books. Your children will play soccer together. What divides you is not as important as what you share as humans. The internet is the tool to use to spread this message and we know it works because it helped in the Arab Spring.

Using both approaches the extremists like ISIS are seen for what they really are, a threat to the peace and stability of the lives of ordinary people. Once it becomes apparent that they are can be beaten they no longer be allowed to intimidate without repercussions. They will be marginalized and ridiculed and if they commit atrocities tried and jailed.

Failure to use both approaches guarantees that the outcome will be the same as always. Do it right this time or don't do it at all in my opinion.

You have a good argument, and perhaps it could work.

However I disagree that you cannot defeat a religion by war. We did it in World War II by totally defeating Shinto extremism. Remember the Banzai? The Rape of Nanking? Not too much difference between Shinto extremism and Islamic extremism. We did this by employing total warfare. We leveled entire cities, and used nuclear power.

Then, after we utterly defeated them militarily, we forcefully changed their culture. General MacArthur was effectively the military Governor. For the next five years we had 350,000 soldiers in Japan enforcing General MacArthur's rule. We outlawed their flag, their nationalism, their extremism. We taught western values in their schools. We broke them so badly that they relied upon us to feed them. We jailed any opposition, and we controlled the press.

We could do the same thing with ISIS, and Islamic extremism in general. We could triple the size of our military, invade (again), blow up many mosques, put observers in the rest of the mosques to ensure they only taught "approved" ideology, outlaw extremism, totally disarm the population, make the population totally dependent upon us for food, water, and electricity, take over the schools to ensure that western values are taught, etc.

It would take 5-10 years of hard-core military occupation, followed by another 10-20 years of slow withdrawal, but we COULD defeat their religious extremism.

The Japanese were contained to an island chain. Islam is the 2nd largest religion in the world and there are Muslims in every nation of the world today.

The USA simply doesn't have the manpower to enforce it's will on 23% of the population of the entire world.

So this cannot be done by force alone. It has to be a long term process of educating Muslims to reject the extremists and treat them like the outcasts that they are. They must learn to shun them, deride them and mock them openly.

This is a societal problem and society needs to learn how to deal with those would impose their religious beliefs on others by force. The concept of Freedom of Religion means freedom FROM oppressive religion too. It is a universal right as endorsed by the UN.

It is time that every child learns about that right and what it means to them and their own lives. Then in a couple of decades we will finally see the likes of ISIS relegated to the fringes where they belong.

Good post. Someone taking the macro, long term view.

 

[tinydancer]

Hell our president won't even admit that ISIS is Islamic. With that kind of approach we have NO CHANCE of dealing with them.

I almost bazooka barfed when I heard the talking point from Obama AND Cameron was that ISIS wasn't Islamic.

Aye carumba! They sure as hell aren't Presbyterians.

 

[EconChick]

The second prong is the 'war" for the hearts and minds of normal average Muslims. This is a propaganda war and it needs to be funded by governments and it must use the talents of normal average Muslims to demonstrate that life does not need to be one of constant strife. Your neighbor might not be Shiia or Sunni like you but he is still your neighbor. You both live in the same town, buy food and clothes in the same shops and read the same books. Your children will play soccer together. What divides you is not as important as what you share as humans. The internet is the tool to use to spread this message and we know it works because it helped in the Arab Spring

You're as deluded as the idiot neocons. You don't know the region, the culture nor the religion and you wish to impose your nonsensical "kumbaya" visions onto people. My suggestion is that you, like Claire Chennault, put together a volunteer group, say the 59th Airborne Division of Atheists, and drop into the region and implement your vision of reform. Bore these people into submission.

This is a wholly Western-Liberal viewpoint on how a society, and people, functions. It is based on a universalist philosophy. That universalism has not been empirically supported.

Pastor Rikurzhen has arrived to spread the sacred Gospel of Conservatism that will be the Savior of the Entire Western World.

Listen carefully, children, to the wise Pastor Rikurzhen because he has been blessed with a special power to see religions where no one else can see them. The voices in his head are directly from God and must be revered by all.

Pastor Rikurzhen is the "Chosen One" who can do no wrong!

So, you got caught with your pants down, a truly horrible vision for us, and now embarrassed, you have no response to the criticism.

The Neocons tried to do what you suggested, they tried to plant a Westernist mindset into the people of Iraq. It failed to take root. Go live in the region and learn how society functions there. It'll be a good experience for you. There are still some countries that are not yet ripped by war.

A fundamental truth is that in order to solve a problem one must first understand the problem. What you're doing is imposing a normative vision of how you think people SHOULD conduct themselves onto a situation and then proposing a solution which works in alignment with that vision. This approach only guarantees failure.

Keep your faith out of your analysis.

Rik you're my bud so let's keep this civil. I spent a lot of time living in the Middle East and in Iraq in particular. Changes did NOT fail to take root. No one was ever trying to make it an American Democracy. Representative government with an Iraqi flavor is more like it.

I worked closely with Iraqis in every part of the country. Each pocket was different. I sound like I'm repeating myself on threads but I was there before the surge...for 12 straight months....then during...and then after. I could fill a book with the changes I saw. There were plenty of people there that welcomed us. There was progress on many fronts. On other fronts there was little progress. But by the time we left there, Iraq was in relatively good shape and I'll argue that with anyone from now until eternity, including military folks who disagree with me. Most military units were confined to certain areas of the country. That means they weren't afforded an opportunity to assess the entire country.

There was still plenty work to be done, but there's not a doubt in my mind ISIS would not have reached this level of power had we stayed.

 

[Care4all]

Shoot, thought I was logged in while typing and all my analysis went into a black hole, darn it.

I HATE IT when that happens!!!