Mass Shooting in the USA

[Moonlight Graham]

To be more accurate, it was the argument made during the cold war, when the West confronted an expansionary Soviet Union across the world in many locations. It was not an incorrect argument, either.

We're fighting in a real live civil war right now, shooting bullets and bombs. You want to go all-in like Vietnam, which was also a civil war, and think we'll win because all we need is the will. i guess the US lost Vietnam because they didn't have the "will" right? Even if true, the will of people fighting for their own self-determination is always going to be stronger than the will of foreign armies fighting preventive war. They'll fight for the next 40 years if they have to. The Israelis and Palestinian Arabs have been fighting longer than that. No thanks!

Your reading of history is different from mine.

Tell me when preventative war has worked out? It didn't work out in Vietnam or Iraq.

Not really. Arabs are crappy soldiers.

So crappy we can't defeat them, nor could the USSR. Most aren't even soldiers they're guerrilla fighters.

Instead the pie-in-the-sky Americans spent ten years trying to introduce democracy into a region which was entirely unprepared for it.

And Canadians.

ISIS is a hell of a lot less organized, capable and disciplined than the Revolutionary Guards, and a lot smaller. And the RG collapsed like a stuck balloon when facing western forces.

The RG quickly turned into Sunni insurgents in Iraq, and members of ISIS, which the US and for some damn reason now Canada are still fighting. Even if we "defeat" ISIS like we did the RG something else will pop up under a different banner. You can't kill every Sunni in Iraq/Syria.

Edited December 18, 2015 by Moonlight Graham

[WestCoastRunner]

How do these last few pages relate to the op?

[eyeball]

This topic needs to be changed to Terrorist Attack in America.

Same old same old.

Six of one half a dozen of the other.

Been there done that.

Hey this is fun!

[dre]

Two reasonably well equipped divisions would evict ISIS from anywhere they cared to try and set up shop in fairly short order

This way of thinking is exactly why we have ISIL in the first place. First of all you're wrong... the entire coalition tried to get rid of these exact same people during the Iraq war for 10 years and they failed. ISIL isnt going to meet you on the battle field like in the movies... they are going to fade back into Sunni communities, where they have quite bit of support from the local population, and US troops would be fighting a prolonged urban insurgency with a lot of civilian casualties, and all it would do is further radicalize the locals. Even if they DID manage to quell the insurgency after a few years eventually they have to leave, and the you'd be right back where you started.

And even if you killed every single member of ISIL it wouldn't make any difference because ISIL is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is a political one... there's nearly 30 million Sunnis that are being forced to live under Shia governments in Iraq, and Syria. Both of which are Iranian proxies.

The ONLY solution that has any chance of working is partition. Give the Sunnis their own state, and have Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria etc hold their borders with it and give them some military aid where its needed.

And for god sakes end this idiotic policy of going after both ISIL and Assad at the same time.

[Bonam]

The ONLY solution that has any chance of working is partition. Give the Sunnis their own state, and have Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria etc hold their borders with it and give them some military aid where its needed.

Yeah not sure why people don't get this. The Iraq and Syria that are drawn on maps are nothing more than fantasies at this point. The area needs to be partitioned along ethnic/sectarian lines. Along with a Sunni state, there also needs to be a sovereign Kurdish state consisting of parts of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Critically though, it can't be external powers imposing new partitions/borders, the people of these areas have to get there themselves. And the only realistic way for them to get there is the same way most other borders have been established when countries have fallen apart: civil war. The West needs to get out of the way and let the people of the middle-east determine their own destiny.

We don't really need their oil any more, there's a global oversupply. Let them fight it out and stop interfering.

[dre]

Yeah not sure why people don't get this. The Iraq and Syria that are drawn on maps are nothing more than fantasies at this point. The area needs to be partitioned along ethnic/sectarian lines. Along with a Sunni state, there also needs to be a sovereign Kurdish state consisting of parts of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Critically though, it can't be external powers imposing new partitions/borders, the people of these areas have to get there themselves. And the only realistic way for them to get there is the same way most other borders have been established when countries have fallen apart: civil war. The West needs to get out of the way and let the people of the middle-east determine their own destiny.

We don't really need their oil any more, there's a global oversupply. Let them fight it out and stop interfering.

Yeah I wouldn't impose the solution on them. ISIL has taken most of the predominantly Sunni areas, already and those can be the new borders. So we could sit down with Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.... make them realize the reality which is its not in anybodies interests to force these Sunnis to submit to rule by Allawites and Shia and possibly give them some cash and weapons to make sure ISIL does not advance further.

Its possible that this limited role might have a positive effect on the outcome.

Or... like you said, completely disengage, and spend the money we are wasting there on infrastructure projects here at home, or whatever else Canadians need (or Americans, Brits, etc etc)

[Moonlight Graham]

We don't really need their oil any more, there's a global oversupply. Let them fight it out and stop interfering.

The oversupply is a manufactured one, by Saudi Arabia. They've increased production and manipulated the price of oil, which is exactly the reason the US etc. think they need to have a heavy influence in the region: to control the flow of oil. There was another time OPEC manipulated the price of oil heavily, and that was the 1973 oil shock crisis. It was purely political, and OPEC drove the price of oil through the roof and drastically impacted the global economy. It significantly changed the dynamic of the middle-east and West-ME relations.

The problem with the West leaving the ME, which seems ideal at first, is that it will create a power vacuum. It would likely be filled by Russia and/or China. Then you'd have those 2 countries with significant influence on the price and production of the world's most strategically important natural resource (water and food is found in every country, but reserves of cheaply extracted oil is concentrated in the ME). Even if magically nobody fills the power vacuum, you still have a few countries in the ME able to manipulate the global price and production of oil as leverage for whatever aims they want...like they did in 1973.

The solution to get out of the ME is to somehow greatly reduce our reliance on oil. Be it coal, nuclear, renewable energy...whatever. This doesn't even address the problems caused by the military-industrial complex and what foreign arms sales provides to our economies.

[DogOnPorch]

The solution to get out of the ME is to somehow greatly reduce our reliance on oil.

While letting the Middle East move to the West en masse. :D

[eyeball]

Yeah not sure why people don't get this. The Iraq and Syria that are drawn on maps are nothing more than fantasies at this point. The area needs to be partitioned along ethnic/sectarian lines. Along with a Sunni state, there also needs to be a sovereign Kurdish state consisting of parts of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Critically though, it can't be external powers imposing new partitions/borders, the people of these areas have to get there themselves. And the only realistic way for them to get there is the same way most other borders have been established when countries have fallen apart: civil war. The West needs to get out of the way and let the people of the middle-east determine their own destiny.

I think a lot of the resistance to the formation of new states stems from the fear doing so will fan separatist flames smouldering elsewhere around the world. The fact is the borders in the worst impacted parts of region were never more than fantasies to start with.

Unfortunately the West has more to answer for than just getting out of the way militarily in the region will address. Where the West may need to flex military force in the pursuit of non-interference as a policy in the region is in front of other super-powers bent on interfering.

We don't really need their oil any more, there's a global oversupply. Let them fight it out and stop interfering.

No, we don't need their oil we need their peace and unless everyone is forced to get out of the way of that it'll never happen.

[Bonam]

I think a lot of the resistance to the formation of new states stems from the fear doing so will fan separatist flames smouldering elsewhere around the world.

Good. The age of empires is over. There is no reason for groups of people that want to form a sovereign state to be forced to remain subjects of another state.

[eyeball]

You can bet new states are the farthest things from the minds of negotiators in the peace process being cobbled together at present.

Maybe after another 10 - 15 years of killin and dyin. They'll wage a ground war or two against a couple more ISIL like Frankenstate's before embracing the apocalypse.

[Big Guy]

It appears that Americans are learning from the recent mass killings using guns. There are about 30,000 Americans who are killed by guns every year. Americans are not stupid.:

http://time.com/money/4136456/gun-sales-2015-san-bernardino/

Even before the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., this week, gun sales in America have been on a blistering pace. On Black Friday, which has evolved into a big day for shopping for guns alongside clothing sales and door buster deals on TVs, the FBI processed 185,345 background checks for gun purchases, an all-time high.

Looks like hundreds of thousands of new guns will be found under the American Christmas trees this Christmas.

That should really bring down the number of people who die from gun deaths in America in 2016.

God Bless America!

[eyeball]

Looks like hundreds of thousands of new guns will be found under the American Christmas trees this Christmas.

That should really bring down the number of people who die from gun deaths in America in 2016.

And there's still 2 shooting days left before xmas.

[Bonam]

You can bet new states are the farthest things from the minds of negotiators in the peace process being cobbled together at present.

Then they are the wrong negotiators. Creating new states is hardly unprecedented as a way to try to resolve a conflict. See South Sudan or Kosovo. Why force people that hate each other to live under the same government? Stupid.

[eyeball]

Then they are the wrong negotiators. Creating new states is hardly unprecedented as a way to try to resolve a conflict. See South Sudan or Kosovo. Why force people that hate each other to live under the same government? Stupid.

No kidding it's stupid, it's why things are such a godawful mess. But like I said, negotiators, at least the most powerful ones will do everything in their power to avoid creating any new states. They will be dragged kicking and screaming every inch of the way.