American Journalist James Foley Reportedly Beheaded

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
101

[quote]Pearsy92 wrote:

[quote]Sifu wrote:

[quote]Pearsy92 wrote:

[quote]Sifu wrote:
I m sure that whatever is done about this, the response will be “measured” and “proportional”. Nothing scares the Jihadi’s more than the possibility that the political winds could blow strong enough for the US to muster a measured and proportional response. [/quote]

Well what can the U.S do? The country is in massive debt, has recently been in two very costly wars and is still propping up the very likely to collapse governments installed there with money and arms.

The U.S can not afford to go to war really and even if they did hatred of the U.S around the world is so strong right now that it could just make things worse.

I would love to see the U.S go in and smash IS but the problem is can they? What do they do if IS is defeated, there is a vacuum in that region after the U.S overthrew regimes, these will eventually be filled and it won’t be by a democrat or an independent, it will be by someone with views and laws we deem horrendous, the U.S can’t stay in that region forever without crippling itself economically.

On the other hand it eventually might need to. This is a very very hard topic and rashness and bravado won’t really help. The U.S has the greatest military power known to man, but its about what comes after the victory. You can’t and won’t defeat insurgencies that have popular backing. They just keep sprouting up. [/quote]

What we can do is handle it the Chicago way. They killed one of ours, now we kill all of them.

The US populace needs to grow up and stop with all this juvenile people aren’t going to like us bullshit. We need to do what is best for us and not worry about what others are going to think about it. Especially people who already don’t like us.

The Jihadists aren’t going to go away, they have designs on the entire world. Sooner or later they are going to come after us. Aside from giving up and surrendering, the only option we have is to go after them and kill all of them.
[/quote]

That isn’t a real plan that is just saying something that makes us feel better.
[/quote]

No this is about policy, national will and facing up to the very harsh reality of what we are facing and what we are going to have to do about it.

There are over a billion Muslims and a major requirement of their religion is that they engage in jihad. What this means is we are going to have to kill millions of them and this isn’t going to end for a long time.

This whole notion that we can just run home and slam the door in the face of the big bad wolf is childish and dangerous. If we don’t go after them they are going to come after us. So we need to let them know that any time they murder one of us we are going to come after them.

102

[quote]Rockscar wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

To stay with the Genghis Khan analogy, we do not apply overwhelming devastation to opposing militaries while sparing the civilians. We want too many people to like us too much.
[/quote]

Sad story but very true. Trying to win wars without offending anyone is a pipe dream and all it ends up doing is setting us up for failure and puts our boys is grave danger at the same time. Hitler got one thing right…blitzkrieg. [/quote]

Empirical data demonstrates that an insurgency needs only 5-10% of the population to be supportive or acquiescent for it to be viable. The following excerpt is from David Galula’s seminal Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice

“A victory [in a counterinsurgency] is not the destruction in a given area of the insurgent’s forces and his political organization. … A victory is that plus the permanent isolation of the insurgent from the population, isolation not enforced upon the population, but maintained by and with the population. … In conventional warfare, strength is assessed according to military or other tangible criteria, such as the number of divisions, the position they hold, the industrial resources, etc. In revolutionary warfare, strength must be assessed by the extent of support from the population as measured in terms of political organization at the grass roots. The counterinsurgent reaches a position of strength when his power is embedded in a political organization issuing from, and firmly supported by, the population.”

Public relations is an essential component in successful asymmetric military campaigns, more so than ever in the digital age.

104

[quote]Rockscar wrote:
Sad story but very true. Trying to win wars without offending anyone is a pipe dream and all it ends up doing is setting us up for failure and puts our boys is grave danger at the same time. Hitler got one thing right…blitzkrieg. [/quote]

?

So you should be trying to offend the people you’re trying to pacify and build a nation for?

106

No, we should not be trying to pacify or build anyone a nation. That’s where we failed in Iraq and that’s where we failed in Afghanistan. We won the war, but lost the peace so to speak. Guaranteed, if we organized a massive offensive against ISIS forces and drove them back towards Syria, the population which ISIS has terrorized would stand behind us.

107

[quote]pushharder wrote:
Bistro, for crying out loud.[/quote]

You disagree with the above?

108

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:
Bistro, for crying out loud.[/quote]

You disagree with the above? [/quote]

I disagree in this circumstance. It’s correct as far as most insurgencies go but when dealing with tribal Muslim societies rational self interest is going to be the primary factor not “winning hearts and minds.”

Edited

109

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Pearsy92 wrote:

So what, we should be the moral equivalent of the Mongols and wipe out entire populations…

[/quote]

Ahhh, evidence you don’t know your history. I thought as much.

The Mongols were noted for leaving infrastructure and civilian populations intact.

This might be the most insane statement on the Mongols ever, they were known for leaving civilians populations intact! Holy shit that is not the case. Before some of the Chinese advisors from the conquered lands started to act as advisors to the Khan he would simply wipe out the native population and clear the lands for Mongol farming. It took the chinese explaining if he left some of the population alive he could tax them.

Modern historians put the death toll from the genocide committed in the siege of Baghdad at 200,000 to 1 million! Others count as high as two million factoring in those who died afterwards from starvation and other related deaths.

They rounded up the civilian population and executed the in front of the Caliph and plundered the city, destroyed all the literature and most of the great achievements of what was at the time, the most progressive place on earth.

The river Tigris ran black with ink from the books from the grand library, they killed all the Caliph’s sons, executed all the philosophers and scientists and then killed the Calih by rolling him up in a carpet and trampling him to death with their horse.

They then left. However squads on horseback were sent back days later to catch the survivors who hid while they came out to bury their dead and try and survive in the aftermath of the slaughter, thousands more were killed.

They purposefully ruined the irrigation systems and canals and lay waste to the agriculture, the overall destruction and ruin is the main reason most modern historians give for the stunted development of the Islamic world.

They wiped out millions of civilians and their brutality has never been matched, for example the population of Iran only reached its pre mongol invasion levels in the mid twentieth century!

I don’t claim to be the smartest person around, I am still learning and reading and developing but one subject I have done more than my fair share of reading and research on is the step people, their rise to arguably the biggest empire ever and their eventual decline. Their customs and intra-conflicts.

If you don’t wish to go to as great of a level of research of the mongols as I did I would recommend an American conservative’s podcast called Dan Carlin’s horrible histories. He has a few 3-5 hour podcasts where he goes over the entire timeline of the mongols and only uses information he has sources for and names them as he goes through the history.

The mongols were huge fans of flaying, specific cases are cited by Carlin where the mongols flayed the skin from civilians and made other civilians eat the skin.

He also goes over how when times were really tough they would kill a horse and drink the blood and eat the organs and intestines raw, when they got even tougher they would pick straws and eat soldiers. They might be some of the toughest sons of bitches in history.

However to say we should emulate them, is Anti American anti freedom and generally puts you in the same category as people who say we should emulate Mao, Stalin, Hitler, the British Empire, Rome, Vandal and Visigoth rule.

You can’t support the constitution and support being like an empire simultaneously, they are mutually exclusive.

110

Yeah the Mongol conquests were the deadliest conflict in human history with the exception of WWII. Together with the Black Death the Mongols reduced the global population by nearly 25%. Crazy days.

111

[quote]SexMachine wrote:
Yeah the Mongol conquests were the deadliest conflict in human history with the exception of WWII. Together with the Black Death the Mongols reduced the global population by nearly 25%. Crazy days.[/quote]

You have to admit though there is something pretty cool about warrior cultures, despite the horrors they wreaked upon mankind.

I love reading about the tribes of modern day Germany and the Mongol empire and the Angles and Saxons etc.

I am just starting on a book about Attila the Hun. I have always been curious about him and the huns, I have heard Attila described as germanic, slav and Asian. I find it interesting when different groups claim the same person.

112

[quote]Pearsy92 wrote:

[quote]SexMachine wrote:
Yeah the Mongol conquests were the deadliest conflict in human history with the exception of WWII. Together with the Black Death the Mongols reduced the global population by nearly 25%. Crazy days.[/quote]

You have to admit though there is something pretty cool about warrior cultures, despite the horrors they wreaked upon mankind.

I love reading about the tribes of modern day Germany and the Mongol empire and the Angles and Saxons etc.

I am just starting on a book about Attila the Hun. I have always been curious about him and the huns, I have heard Attila described as germanic, slav and Asian. I find it interesting when different groups claim the same person.

[/quote]

I’m more of a Greco-Roman fan myself. High cultures produce superior warriors in terms of discipline and tactics/strategy.

113

[quote]Rockscar wrote:
This needs to be a world effort. Go in and blaze them out ruthlessly. None of the PC do no harm BS, just huge overwhelming force. This is only going to get worse. It’s time we recognize radical Islam for what it is and stop beating around the bush. No jails no prisoners. [/quote]

Yup…

114

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Rockscar wrote:
This needs to be a world effort. Go in and blaze them out ruthlessly. None of the PC do no harm BS, just huge overwhelming force. This is only going to get worse. It’s time we recognize radical Islam for what it is and stop beating around the bush. No jails no prisoners. [/quote]

Yup…[/quote]

Thats what happened in Iraq, which caused the instability that lead to IS being able to control large parts of it. Just as a world effort or arming IS rebels in Syria lead to the massive rise of IS.

This sort of shit sounds good on paper but in almost never works.

If I had to be pushed into recommending serious military action it would be this.

Western intelligence agencies and special forces be used to target and eliminate the command structure of IS and the people who fund them.

This has the following benefits:

No boots on the ground or perceived occupation force
Comes without the massive amounts of collateral damage that the drone program has
Costs way way less than a boots on ground military solution
Denies IS the propaganda tool of using “invasion of islamic land”
Does not result in thousands of brave infantry soldiers dead or maimed for life
Will set the ground for future joint intelligence and joint operations that will give a second option that does not include draining tax payer money and building up massive debt with useless occupations that are incapable of defeating insurgencies but just stoke support for them.
Can not be dismissed as imperialist aggression

117

[quote]Sifu wrote:

There are over a billion Muslims and a major requirement of their religion is that they engage in jihad. [/quote]

The latest numbers are actually closer to 2 billion.

And if 5-10% are the looney variety, well… do the math.

If we act like pussies we are fucked.

118

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:
Bistro, for crying out loud.[/quote]

You disagree with the above? [/quote]

Not necessarily, it’s just your style.[/quote]

I’ve found it difficult to write informally if the subject of the discussion is inherently academic.

119

[quote]UtahLama wrote:

If we act like pussies we are fucked.[/quote]

These groups understand our laws and culture of tolerance and use it against us. Our pussification is leverage to them. This is a key issue as well. CAIR is an example of an interest group advancing their Islamic agenda by using our laws and system against us.

120

[quote]Rockscar wrote:

[quote]UtahLama wrote:

If we act like pussies we are fucked.[/quote]

These groups understand our laws and culture of tolerance and use it against us. Our pussification is leverage to them. This is a key issue as well. CAIR is an example of an interest group advancing their Islamic agenda by using our laws and system against us. [/quote]

The united states is the worlds foremost super power, it has the most awesome military might to ever exist and its culture permeates into almost every nation on earth.

The U.S and its foreign policy is not one of a pussy, it is more of a bully and one that can back up its talk both militarily and economically.

The U.S public might becoming very sissified in some areas of its culture like competition being phased out for taking part and other internal social issues, but to act like the U.S state is a frightened and cowering force in society is simply not true.