Here is my master plan for the dreaded ISIS
Bomb the shit out of them
Kill their leadership
Warn all US citizens to stay the **** out of Iraq
Point to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar and tell them ISIS is THEIR problem
Trouble is, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar cannot stop ISIS, and, un-stopped, and eventually, and in a big way, ISIS will become our problem anyway.
Might as well get this the hell over with now.
Not my problem
Bout time the power brokers of the Muslim world have to stand up to the problems they have created
So Saudi Arabia......what ya gunna do?
And there is the difference.
If left un-checked, and given sufficient victories to establish a state (and an accompanying military) of its own, in a decade or two, it will be your - our - problem - or that of our children or grandchildren.
Best to kill the beast will it can still be killed at a relatively low cost.
Sounds like our justification for Vietnam
Yes it does.
It sounds one helluva lot like our justification for Vietnam.
Take care of the problem now or it will become un-manageable later.
Turned out not to be true with Vietnam.
Small comfort though that is to the shades of the 50K boys and girls we lost over there.
But here's the difference, in that regard...
The Vietnamese were not driven by a 1300 year-old Warrior Religion whose founder and godhead gave permission for such war upon nonbelievers and which made it a duty of believers to undertake such war and which promised Paradise-through-martyrdom to the fallen and which has ready-made age-old enemies (Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc.), and which was being utilized as the emotional (rather than political) basis to conduct significant terror campaigns on a global basis.
There is a
much greater chance that an un-manageable state will actually materialize from an un-checked ISIS which results in a Caliphate, than there ever was that all of Asia would fall to Communism had we failed to fight in Vietnam.
A
much greater chance.
Symmetry with justifications utilized in a previous era should rightfully be held-up as a red flag but it should not blind us to prospects and likelihoods in a scenario fed by vastly different inputs..
Your position here seems closely akin to not being able to see the forest for the trees.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't feel like it, at present.
Preemptive war is always a crap-shoot in connection with predictions about the future.
One must look at each scenario with fresh eyes and a clear mind.
It's OK (even necessary, I'd say) to keep the past in mind, when doing so.
But we should not allow the past to paralyze us nor to lose one-time opportunities to intervene effectively or to kill or neutralize a threat-vector before it matures into something a thousand times more lethal - assuming that we have judged there to be a realistic chance that such a lethal outcome is well within the realm of possibility or probability.