XBradTC

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XBradTC

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CDR Salamander: What if we gave a war and everyone came

The future? At best, we cull the herd and let the scavengers fight over the remains of the Islamic State. Even if the Islamic State is defeated, thousands of radicalized young fighters who survive will return home to France, Germany, Britain, Australia and the USA. They will not come home in peace. via CDR Salamander:…

The future? At best, we cull the herd and let the scavengers fight over the remains of the Islamic State. Even if the Islamic State is defeated, thousands of radicalized young fighters who survive will return home to France, Germany, Britain, Australia and the USA. They will not come home in peace.

via CDR Salamander: What if we gave a war and everyone came.

For myself, in the short term, I see the defeat of ISIS as a pressing matter. In the  rather more long term, the containment of Iran is, I think, more important to our long term security.

Having said that, the bolded part of that piece from CDR Salamander will almost certainly haunt us for years to come.

Western societies are, by their nature, quite open. That inherently makes them vulnerable to some level of terrorist attack, be it as simple as driving a car into a crowd, or something rather more sophisticated.

We will have to deal with these radicalized people. But we also have to do so without losing the soul of what it means to be a free society. We’ve not done well on that front to date. We’ve already seen the reaction by Boston PD to what was, really, a rather small incident, essentially placing a major metropolitan region under house arrest.

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  1. Tarl

    You can have a “quite open” society without mass immigration. There is indeed no reason not to prevent immigration from the Middle East — and many good reasons to do so — while still permitting it from (say) Latin America.

    We will become less open if we stupidly, in the name of “openness”, allow an Islamic insurgency to flourish here.

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  2. jjak

    So when can we start calling this “World War Three”? Do we have to wait for Russian combat action outside Ukraine? Chinese or Indian involvement? The assorted other ‘stans to light up?

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  3. Bill Nance

    I’m curious to hear XBRADTC, your reason for seeing Iran as any real threat to us.

    Reasons for Iran BEING a regional power:
    1. More people
    2. More industrial capacity
    3. A culture that goes MUCH further than “a bunch of nomadic shepherds in the Desert”
    4. a Solid national Identity which WASN’T carved out of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire.

    Reasons Against:
    1. They say ugly things all the time to gin up domestic and regional support.
    2. They are actively engaged in supplanting Shia’a Islam as the dominant creed in the region over Sunni Islam. (The Islam that DAESH and Al Quaeda support).
    3. They REALLY don’t like the USA. (Big surprise, we REALLY don’t like them either).
    4: They ACT like a regional power. (Kinda like the US did with Mexico).
    5. (the big one) They have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon and there is not a damn thing we can do to stop that short of nuclear genocide or an invasion and occupation of a fiercely nationalist country with 77 million people who will ALL hate us.

    If I were in charge of Iran, I WOULD WANT A NUKE TOO. Because it’s the ONE guarantor of territorial and national sovereignty that even the USA cannot afford to ignore. Saddam didn’t have one. And if he HAD, and had the means to deliver it to NYC, I doubt Operation Iraqi Freedom would have happened.

    So what are your alternatives? Short of an invasion that would take every asset in our inventory to deal with and probably require a draft for manpower to deal with the rest of our obligations? I’m open to suggestions. I have no more love of the Mullahs than you do. But I’d like to hear a clear, specific and detailed counter-strategy to limited containment.

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  4. xbradtc

    That’s a good question, and one I’m not likely to get to answer tonight. I may front page this, and give a fairly comprehensive answer there.

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  5. Esli

    The reason that anybody should see Iran as a threat to us is because they have proved themselves to be a threat to us, via their proxies, and through their words, for decades. Is it an existential threat? Not yet. But there are a lot of American KIA with blood on Iranian hands. I don’t have a solution, but if I were president between 2003_2008, every time I had an American killed or found evidence of Iranian complicity, something would have blown up in the dead of night in Iran. Night to target infrastructure, not people. And I would have shut the country down economically, as well as fostering a green revolution under my watch that I would have then supported, because I would make it clear that my issue was with the Iranian government, not the people.

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  6. Tarl

    “Roll over and give them everything they want” is certainly the wrong approach.

    They have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon and there is not a damn thing we can do to stop that short of nuclear genocide or an invasion and occupation

    We can slow it down with airstrikes.

    Iran should not be allowed to have an electrical power grid or oil production/distribution system until they agree to forego nuclear weapons and accept on-the-ground inspections.

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  7. This Iranian nuke deal keeps getting better and better! | Bring the heat, Bring the Stupid

    […] In the comments yesterday, Bill asked a question: […]

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