What’s most ironic in all of this is that it the seeds of this problem can be justifiably found in the failures which took place during the Bush / Cheney administration and not with the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House. So much for all the “appeasement” prattle and whether or not the current administration uses the terms “Islamic Terror” or “Radical Islam”, which as it turns out in this case would be structurally and conceptually inapplicable.
To wit: “Haji Bakr, wasn’t widely known. But that was precisely part of the plan. The former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein’s air defense force had been secretly pulling the strings at ISIS for years.”
“What Bakr put on paper, page by page, with carefully outlined boxes for individual responsibilities, was nothing less than a blueprint for a takeover. It was not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an “Islamic Intelligence State” — a caliphate run by an organization that resembled East Germany’s notorious Stasi domestic intelligence agency.”
“ISIS has little in common with predecessors like al-Qaida aside from its jihadist label. There is essentially nothing religious in its actions, its strategic planning, its unscrupulous changing of alliances and its precisely implemented propaganda narratives. Faith, even in its most extreme form, is just one of many means to an end. Islamic State’s only constant maxim is the expansion of power at any price.”
Reference: The Terror Strategist: Secret Files Reveal the Structure of Islamic State; http://www.spiegel.de/international/wor … 29274.html
This is exactly what most experts, including Brent Scowcroft and Gen. Eric Shensheki predicted would happen after the Iraq War. Hell, some amateur made a flash game that basically predicted nearly everything that would happen and it unfolded almost exactly down to the Shia v Sunni v Kurd insurgencies, the growing influence of Iran, and chaos spilling over into Syria and Jordan, and a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran (hasn’t happened yet, but easily could).
All these ex-Baathists had nothing to do thanks to L. Paul Bremer, one of the many ‘experts’ who fucked this country up and still insists that Obama is too much of a pussy to handle ISIS. None of these folks should be listened to.
Granted, Obama shouldn’t have called them the farm team of terror, or whatever he said when he dismissed them, but blaming the 2011 troop pullout is a bit of cognitive dissonance. Convicted leaker Gen. Petraeus made gains that were entirely temporary and entirely dependent on an unsustainable near-permanent occupation of Iraq. He also was a key Maliki backer, who created the Shia dominated government that gave rise to Sunni discontent. Sec. Gates said Biden was wrong about everything the last thirty years, but Biden’s plan for Iraq looks like our only way out to me.
I got here => http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/sep/07/barack-obama/what-obama-said-about-islamic-state-jv-team/
Obama personally has a habit of letting his opponents babble on to their hearts content so as to allow them to continue, in his opinion, to publicly make fools of themselves. Evidence his silence on all of the farce and folly surrounding his birth certificate or whether or not he’s a Marxist, Leninist, Socialist, Maoist or some sort of “Dear Leader” Frankly I don’t think this tactic works as well as pointing out the fact that many of his critics are conceptually wrong in their criticism and or have little in the way of alternative ideas or programs on offer so why let them continue to lead the low information Limbaugh / Beck / Fox News addled souls astray.
In dealing with ISIS, etc., the present administration doesn’t employ the phrases “Islamic Terror” or “Radical Islam” for the simple reason that it doesn’t want to appear to be at war with Islam thereby creating more enemies. Jihad, comes in two forms, offensive and defensive. Whenever a Muslim community is attacked it is the responsibility of all of the faithful to fight back. In contrast only religious leaders can legally order an offensive jihad. When this is understood the reluctance to use the phrases “Islamic Terror” or “Radical Islam” isn’t all that much of a mystery. George Bush once appealed to the world to “Join our Crusade in Iraq” He never used the word crusade again after his advisors informed him of how it would only incite more people in the region to fight against us.
Bottom line is this, you don’t win wars by creating endless supplies of enemy fighters. If you see that in the strategy employed against ISIS and other outfits, then you’ll understand why the administration avoids the phrases “Islamic Terror” or “Radical Islam” It’s a strategic ploy and as I’ve implied in an earlier post. When Obama or his associates talk about ISIS, Al Qaedea, Al Shabab, ad infinitum what are they talking about, Islamic art and Middle Eastern food?
Look at who it is generally that continues to obsess over phraseology, those afflicted by the person of Barack Obama and the talking heads who make millions stirring up their discontent. Many of these people are the architects of the disaster in Iraq and the subsequent mismanagement of the war in Afghanistan who have to date, failed to admit their mistakes or apologize to the American people for the pickle they put this country into. So much for being accountable for one’s actions and this from the very folks who publicly preach the need to be accountable to “progressives”.
Why is it that the Pope, Cardinal Dolan, the serving heads of the armed services and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and so many of the experts who appear on the news never seem to obsess with the phrases “Radical Islam or Islamic Terror”? As I’ve already said in other posts, this fixation on whether or not the present administration uses the phrases “Islamic Terror” or “Radical Islam” is largely a waste of energy which does nothing to contribute to a solution or a successful strategy that will lead to a favorable outcome for the United States, hence what’s the point?
It seemed after that point we were treated with all kinds of video footage showing these guys were infact at the top of their terrorist game.
What would have ever possessed our president to compare these people to a JV sports team? Foolish.
a troll.
Sounds JV to me. And is there even the slightest evidence that either of those guys was responding to Obama’s comment?
Don’t you think it is more likely that they were responding to the deliberately provacative cartoon contest? If you think that Obama’s comment was foolish then surely you must think that the event that was attacked was even more foolish? Right?
had something to do with JFK’s assassination too.
ISIS is so powerful that it sends two guys to shoot a security guard in the foot in Garland. TX.
Care to double down on your JV comment? Hmmmmm? Hmmmmmmm?
Right now, I’m more dubious about the need to shoot and kill Usaama Rahim. Does it really take multiple shots to take somebody with a knife into custody?
Perhaps Aaron McFarlane was on the FBI team.
I don’t know enough about the Boston branch of the FBI, or the FBI in general, but I can say I don’t have much confidence in their ability.
My point stands though, the president underestimated them when he said ISIS was a group of people that are “JV” and just “engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”
1) Following ISIS-supporting content on Twitter does not make you a member of ISIS. I’ve read Mein Kampf; that doesn’t make me a Nazi.
2) Until we know more about why the Joint Terrorism Task Force had this guy under surveillance, I don’t think he should be appropriately referred to as a terrorist either. A terrorist is someone who has been tried and convicted of specific crimes. The man who was killed had not even been arrested for anything.
3) I would note in passing that the Joint Terrorism Task Force watches a lot of people in the Boston area, including Travis Corcoran. Being watched by JTTF isn’t of itself evidence of terroristic intent. It can be evidence of being not the sharpest tool in the shed, or simply of being involved in peaceful groups of which the government disapproves.
4) I think that the coverage of this has been appalling. The TV news eagerly echoed the police perspective that Rahim lunged at them, while refusing to cover the alternate perspective from the victim’s family, who reported that Rahim was shot three times in the back while running from police, on the grounds that the family’s perspective was not “officially confirmed.” The press should at a minimum reserve judgment and report the difference in opinions until they have more facts.
OK let me correct that for you … let me know if this sounds better.
ISIS, without lifting a finger or spending a dime, has just inspired another home grown attack on US Soil. This month, Boston MA. But for what it’s worth we checked their wallets and could not find their ISIS membership card.
Weather they had an official ISIS membership card or not, the reach and influence of ISIS as a terrorist organization is a far cry from characterization made by our president. What a foolish choice of words . . .
I meant to delete the following from the Obama quote …
America has, since our founding, preserved our First Amendment rights to speak, write, listen to, and read “objectionable” material.
Our premise, validated by our history, is that objectionable ideas are more effectively managed by drowning them out than by attempting to suppress them. Any parent who has attempted to forbid their adolescent from having contact (especially romantic contact) with a particular individual rather quickly learns that the strategy generally results in more, rather than less, contact between the two.
ISIS is a terrible thing. The ideas they promote are anathema to any civilized person. If we respond to those offensive ideas by persecuting Americans for, for example, reading the offensive sites (I, too, read Mein Kampf. I am not a Nazi), then ISIS has won. If we perpetuate the lie that our “security” is enhanced by encouraging the wanton killing of anybody a “JTF” decides is a threat, then ISIS has won.
The Boston FBI office is the same organization that executed Ibrahim Todashev in Florida, shooting him multiple times while he was unarmed and in the custody of more than a dozen law enforcement agents. It is the same organization that enabled Whitey Bulger to escape prosecution for a long list of crimes, including murder, over more than a decade. Any claim from the Boston FBI office defending their killing of yet another victim should, in my view, be evaluated with extreme prejudice.
In my view, our first response to our feelings of terror (because our own fear, panic and hysteria is the weapon used by terrorists) should be to double-down on our rock-solid fundamental principles rather than get sucked into yet another perpetual eye-for-an-eye conflict motivated by our own feelings of insecurity.
We are still just beginning to see how damaging our first declaration of a “war on terror” has been. We should steadfastly resist the temptation to be sucked into another.
I don’t want to see us become a police state, or lose our right to free speech, or have our data mined by the gov just to “protect” us. I think we can have all those rights back AND stop these people from terrorizing us.
I just disagree with hrs-kevin’s opinion that ISIS is some JV outfit. There is nothing JV about ISIS as hrs-kevin insists. I just can’t imagine hrs-kevin thinking after this most recent attack, that ISIS is some JV outfit. It’s just crazy.
You can’t prevent ISIS from having access to the Internet, or prevent people in the US from reading about ISIS on the Internet, without imposing a Great Firewall around the US for fear that foreign ideas get in.
Communism was a repellent idea, but it always found some followers in the West, including Amiri Baraka and Paul Robeson, even before the Internet. Many Americans, back in the day, went abroad to fight with the Communists in Spain against Franco’s para-fascists, and though it shocked many Americans it wasn’t criminal then to do it. Many people now fighting with ISIS are fighting against the repellent regime of Bashar al-Assad, who eighteen short months ago we were trying to unseat. So in my opinion, it should not be a crime in American law either for an American to have gone and fought on ISIS’s side against Bashar al-Assad. It has only become a crime – specifically, the crime of treason as enumerated in Art. 3 of the Constitution – since the US declared war on ISIS last September.
As for whether they’re a JV outfit, I don’t think the question is whether they pose a significant military threat to US allies in the region. They do. The question is whether they pose any sort of military threat to the United States, and I think it’s pretty clear they don’t. As Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government notes, “ISIS is not all that capable. It doesn’t have an air force, it doesn’t have serious armored forces. It’s a threat to locals in the region, but it has no capacity to hit the United States in a strategically significant way” – and the US National Intelligence Estimate concurs with that.
The point is – and SomervilleTom articulates this well below too – you can’t legislate against ideas. Having particular ideas, unless translated into criminal actions, cannot be criminalized of themselves. It is not, and cannot be, a crime in itself for an American to “be inspired by” ISIS. That’s why I deeply opposed the prosecution and conviction of Tarek Mehanna of Sudbury to 17 years in jail for translating al-Qaeda documents. The appropriate response to revolting ideas is to compete against them with better ones.
After the last attack in Garland TX, he doubled down on the infamous quote. And well, here we are just about 30 days latter, I’m wondering if he still sees ISIS as a JV Outfit? Well Kevin? What say you Hmmmmmmm? Hmmmmm?
We keep arming Islamic radicals and rogue states and then are more shocked than Captain Renault when they turn their arms against us. First it was Al Qaeda and the Taliban, both created care of the CIA and the Carter-Reagan administration responses to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Then it was Saddam, who we funded continually to fight Iran during that awful war until he turned against our allies the Saudis and Kuwaitis-two of the biggest funders of ISIS at present.
ISIS was partly the result of the Sunni awakening that General Petraeus presided over (when he wasn’t whispering state secrets to his girlfriend).
Try keeping track of this:
Hard to argue with the articles conclusion:
I would’ve ended the war on terror after Seal Team 6 put a bullet in Osama’s brain. Mission accomplished. 9/11 avenged. There is really no need to change course here, our strategy of containment is working, and none of these groups, Al Qaeda included, is capable of launching a sophisticated attack* against the US.
It’s time to start putting the eye on China which is getting incredibly assertive in it’s neck of the woods and is rapidly gaining assymetric parity against our forces. It’s time to shore up the Baltic states and set up trip wires to contain Putin. ISIL is contained, it won’t be able to expand at all beyond the borders of the two failed states it currently occupies and it is bogging Iran in two costly proxy wars. Our enemies and Israel’s enemies are killing each other in Syria, neither are really focused on harming any of our interests.
*I am talking mass casualty, more bikers have died in Waco brawls than Americans have died at the hands of the home grown losers we’ve had to deal with since 9/11. Looks like we successfully used intelligence and actual law enforcement coordination to prevent a similar tragedy this week in Roslindale, the system worked! Something to celebrate, not fear.
I’m sorry to go against many, many months’ worth of expensive military propaganda here, but it’s true.
China doesn’t want a war with us. Its military budget is twenty percent of ours. The United States is more or less uninvadeable and definitely unoccupiable, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. What they may threaten is the assumption of American naval supremacy in the Far East, but then again, why is it important for us to have naval supremacy in the Far East? Naval supremacy in the Far East was important to Britain, and they lost it; so what, frankly?
China, it’s probable, does want to reoccupy Taiwan, and the United States acts as a military guarantor to South Korea and Japan in a way that could not be sustained without that naval supremacy. So a substitute for attempting to maintain that naval supremacy at long range, would be to allow Taiwan, South Korea and Japan to develop their own independent military capabilities as a counterweight to China’s aspirations. But China poses no direct threat to us.
In the same way, let’s be realistic about Russia too. Russia’s military budget is 12% of ours. It has nuclear weapons, but the real risk from its nuclear weapons is not a governmental decision to fire them, but a non-state actor seizing and then firing one of them at us. Russia is, like China, a threat to its immediate neighbors – to Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltic states – but last time I checked they were content to leave Alaska and the Aleutians in our hands.
As with China, I say this not because a Russian invasion of those countries would be trivial. It wouldn’t. It just would not directly implicate our own interests.
The truth is, there’s no power out there capable of meaningfully threatening our security situation. If you compare our security situation to 25 years ago (1990), 50 years ago (1965), 75 years ago (1940) or 100 years ago (1915), who can dispute that we are immeasurably more secure? It’s precisely because of this hegemony that the only damage we can realistically suffer is from small-scale, asymmetric attacks by non-state actors. So, in order to justify continued overinvestment in the military relative to domestic needs, and the massive corruption, waste and loss of life that that produces, defense contractors and their shills in Congress have a deep incentive to hype up threats and make it seem as if they are legion.
They’re not legion. They’re not large-scale. Let me know when any enemy starts preparing to invade Connecticut, and I’ll get worried.
No geopolitical actor is a direct threat to the American homeland. I do think Russia and China are taking advantage of the power vacuum that has arisen due to our continual involvement and obsession with the Middle East. And that is cause for concern for us and our allies, but to be clear, it’s unlikely either power or North Korea or Iran would risk suicide and attack the US. We have a significant advantage for power-power wars and will likely not be tested other than some regional issues. And we know our platforms are all useless when fighting counter insurgencies against fanatics. Time for that phase to finally end.
Tell us hrs-kevin … tell us, do you still believe ISIS to be a JV organization Hmmmmm Kevin? Hmmmmmm? Hmmmmm?
Please share with us : )
What recent terror attack? Some lunatic with a gun shooting up some lunatics who hate Islam is now a terror attack? How come when a white person shoots up a school it’s a tragedy by a ‘lone wolf’ and the fault of ‘mental illness’ but it’s always ‘terrorism’ when the perpetrator happens to be Muslim? I wonder if McVeigh waited ten years if he’d have been called a terrorist or a lone wolf, and what difference that would’ve made to how we treated the underlying issue. Losers on ISIS websites getting guns are no different than losers on the right wing sites getting guns, The trick is to keep them from getting guns, not using the incidents to justify more war overseas.
Still looks JV to me. Let’s hope they never graduate to the varsity.
BTW, your rhetoric is not even at the JV level. 😉
hrs-kevin is doubling down.
I’ve read a lot on Iraq and very very sure the Bush Administration and lots of career people like the military and State Department effed up. There’s also a lot of natural crap in that country that prevents anyone from getting along. Could things have been done better- yes. Would it have made a difference in 2015? Unclear.
There’s no way ex-Baathists could have been kept on in the government. The Shites would have revolted immediately. The Kurds would not have been on board either. They would have conspired to restore Saddam (before his capture).
There’s also no way the Iraqi army could have remained constituted as it was. It was a total dysfunctional organization.
We need to let the thing split up. Help the Kurds (and screw Turkey, the most useless “partner” in the Middle East), let the Sunni and Shite battle and be done with it. Everyone can arm their favorites.
I don’t blame Obama for ISIS but he really needs to tone down his rhetoric. We can’t “destroy” them, “fix” anything or “draw lines.”
Also can we stop talking about training the Iraqis? Biggest waste of time and money ever.