My thoughts on what to do about ISIS follow.
We need to use military force to a purpose and “crushing” terrorists, who are widely dispersed in more than 80 countries isn’t feasible. The military force needs to be about taking away territory controlled by ISIS and insuring a political situation on the ground follows that does not embrace radical Islam. The proponents of “go crush them” almost invariably are the same ones who don’t want us getting bogged down in the ME again and a common refrain is “we go crush them and come home”, except that is a ridiculous idea, because unless there’s a dramatic, long-term political change on the ground, Islamic terrorist groups keep springing up in the ME.
Trump tough talking points aren’t a strategy, they’re his usual mindless bluster and what he thinks will play well in the polls. Trump decides merits on the polls – national security is just a huge popularity contest to him – if most people agree with it, it’s “great”. You want to see how Trump really operates, just peek at the internal chaos inside his campaign or that he’s at the general election stage and still doesn’t have a viable ground game or that none of his plans is ever well-thought out with clear, coherent planning. You want to see what Hillary is like, well, just look to the carefully focus-group tested parsing she engages in as she tries to find the right words to sell herself. In real world tests of foreign policy chops – look at the mess in Libya as exhibit A on her foreign policy “successes”. Both of them are unfit to be commander-in-chief and both lack any real understanding of foreign policy. Their foreign policy ideas are always about what words and phrases will poll best, not about sound national security strategy.
I’m all for profiling and being tougher, but tougher needs to be smart and it starts with a comprehensive national strategy that incorporates every tool of national power to deal with the real problem and that’s not primarily ISIS, it’s a much larger threat – the collapsing Islamic civilization. As their civilization keeps falling apart its tremors and eruptions keep impacting us more and more. Some of our strategy needs to be offensive, but a lot of it also needs to be defensive to protect Americans from the fall-out. We can’t go in and fix Islamic civilization, so we need to use our military options carefully and where we have regional leaders working with us to stabilize the situation on the ground and we need to choose the areas we expend military force to ones that are of vital national interest to us.
My views are controversial. Frankly, jumping into the hot mess that is Iraq and Syria impetuously isn’t smart imho. The Russian are there, the Iranians are there – we will only get played for fools if we rush into Syria. In Iraq, Obama walked away and Iran now is the driving force behind the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government relies on Shia militias to fight ISIS and those militias are funded and controlled by Iran, so our military actions are bolstering Iran in Iraq these days, not doing a thing to defeat ISIS. The Shia control in Baghdad assures the Sunni insurgency (ISIS and other Sunni tribal groups) will continue. Let Iran and the Russians cope with that. We need to use our military force where it benefits us and rushing into Syria is a strategic trap where we will end up being the dupe.
I would engage in some tough foreign policy talks with regional leaders and Russia and China, before blabbing about carpet bombing ISIS or destroying ISIS. That entire “moderate Syrian rebels” malarkey was an hostile foreign propaganda coup and that the Institute for the Study of War was a prime spreader of that should raise a lot of red flags. It was a wild goose chase, because vetted US intelligence knew early on that the Syrian rebels were radicalized early and all of those groups were Islamist – some more Islamist than others, but nonetheless Islamist. These “experts” pushing for us to rush in and destroy ISIS are 3rd rate checkers strategic players. Putin would love to see us bogged down in Iraq/Syria, as he and the Chinese make military moves elsewhere and we are unable to respond. We need to wake-up and play the “diplomacy” game like chess players and quit being the 3rd rate checkers player on the world stage!
Obama has gutted our military and infested it with social engineering policies designed to destroy military cohesion and effectiveness. We need to rid the military of Obama’s policies and rebuild our military. We aren’t ready for some ramped up ISIS war or carpet bombing for that matter. That’s the real truth and that alone should scare every American. We need to rebuild our military
I think we should use the laws already on the books and place a ban on immigration from several radical Islam hot bed countries due to the political instability in those countries and then we need to have an across the board standard that every immigrant or refugee coming into America needs to be thoroughly vetted. Obama wants to let in 10,000 before he leaves office. It goes without saying we should have secured our borders all along – why we haven’t is a national disgrace. Putin, Soros and and other American enemies are fueling this entire “refugee crisis” – they are using it to destabilize Western countries – that is obvious. All sorts of “NGOs” are set-up from the fake passport shops to locations all along the route into Europe to feed, clothe, direct the flow of “refugees”, provide them cell phones, etc. There are Soros-funded groups in America to promote the “refugee” policy here too, but even more alarming is many Christian charities get big bucks from the federal government to provide “refugee services” and they are propaganda machines too.
As to domestic policing – how about we untie their hands and let’s quit with all the Islamophobia hype and focus on finding these ISIS terrorists and connections in America. We can do that while still protecting the civil liberties of all Americans.
Here’s an excellent big picture piece by Daniel Greenfield on the civilizational crisis in the Islamic world:
