European views on ISIL

Sin the UK weather is pretty mild even by European standards, there is rarely extremes in temperatures, and Petty is right, there is a reason we have such green landscapes, it rains and it rains.  Summer is a bit of a laugh, it rarely gets above the middle 20s. One of the reasons I left the UK is the dreary weather, but now I get extreme hot 40 degree Summers and skeeters which sucks, literally.
As for jobs theres a list of skills and work that get favourably viewed for visitors wanting to settle, its on the gov.uk website under visas etc. skilled workers, artists, sportspeople, medical things, and a host of other professions you just have to fit into one of the categories. It would be easier if you were European, but I doubt citizens from the US, Canada or Ozzies would have a particularly hard time getting a visa. Once in the UK I think theres no shortage of work. I recently tried to help two kids from Senegal leave Italy to find work, because theres nothing here for them but illegality, racism and slave labour. One of them went to Finland to work in the fisheries, and the other wanted to go to the Uk but its virtually impossible to do legally as he didn't have a skill on the list and was from Africa. The poor kid who went to Finland must have had a shock when he got there, perpetual darkness, Northern Lights and cold like he has never experienced before. I sometimes wonder what he must have felt like in that alien landscape. I told him to expect extreme cold, but you cant prepare anyone in words. I often think of him. I hope he has a better life.

That was all very evocative.

those 3 girls going off to be ISIS sex slaves really makes me angry, and I don't know who makes me angrier most. the stupid dumbass kids, their ignorant parents (as in not knowing what their kids were doing) the government for letting them travel, or the bastards who radicalised them. its probably the bastards who radicalised them with lies, its hard to imagine the horrors they face, they were probably told that some smiling handsome young man will marry them and they will be queens in the desert envied by their friends. its not going to be like that, and its beyond belief the things they are going to suffer. they will most likely never be found.

Yeah I fear they are going to get a shocking awaking to truth when they do arrive.

the first thing that will happen is all their nice Western clothes and teenage stuff is going to be taken off them. they will be punished for being British too. probably humiliated. it makes me shudder.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Its only a coup if there is anyone left- I am not talking about piddling about- support troops ect- I am talking a full on coalition, not thousands, tens of thousands. A serious attempt to just wipe them out utterly. Not a half hearted gesture but a full on war.

And once you kill all the ISIS fighters, who is going to take their place? Because if you go on and start killing tends of thousands of people, you're gonna kill a lot of civilians too, and you are going to create a lot more sympathy for ISIS than they would have had otherwise. Remember that ISIS initially gained traction because of the power vacuum created by US military intervention and because of having your country invaded and your fellow citizens murdered and tortured tends to radicalize people.

Also, a lot of ISIS' military success came because of their tribal allies. If you want Iraq to be a stable country you have to deal with the Sunni-Shia-Kurd split. Another factor in gaining ISIS sympathizers is Sunni anger over having been knocked from their perch as the top group in Iraq, which they were under Saddam (despite being a minority group in the country). Even if you could kill all ISIS' fighters faster than they can replace them (which is a big if), you're not going to remove the underlying reasons for the conflict.

Getting involved in another ground war in the Middle East where there's no plan for how to assist in creating long-term stability region in the area is just repeating the same mistakes we made before. Obviously ISIS' atrocities merit a response, but there's a reason we don't automatically invade countries because atrocities are happening there.

you're gonna kill a lot of civilians too, and you are going to create a lot more sympathy for ISIS than they would have had otherwise.- Eldo

Not if your leading troops are all from surrounding Muslim nations. Then you are liberators not invaders and those suppressed will join your numbers not the oppositions.
Thats why it has to be boots on the ground, and it has to be led not by the West but by a coalition of Muslim nations, backed by the West. Its the only way town by town, village by village. You cant blanket bomb for the very reason you point out.

I agree, it has to come from Arab countries like Jordan. its in their interest to crush this now.

In that case I don't necessarily disagree then. You still need some sort of political endgame, though, and "kill 'em all" is not one.

it has to come from Arab countries like Jordan- Figg

Not just them almost every other country n the region is under threat if ISIS aren't checked. The West can provide cash and logistics support and weapons if need be. But the Muslim nations have to get boots on the ground at the front and take the war to them.
This isnt like Bin Laden and co, they are trying to set up a state, they cant be given the time to start to create the infrastructure of that state, as without it it will collapse.


'You still need some sort of political endgame, though, and "kill 'em all" is not one.'- Eldo

Kill them all is a huge simplification of the options. There is a lot of common ground for these states to work on. Yes there are huge sectarian issues, and they arent going to go away whether we do anything or not. Better to have that problem and no ISIS than that problem plus ISIS.

unfortunately you cant do business with ISIS. its morally indefensible to try. so whats the alternative to killing them? round them all up in another Guantanamo bay, what do you do with them if they are bent on murdering anyone who isn't them.

For real?  No one adopted mass execution policies towards the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, or the Rwandan Genocidaires, even though all of those groups were even worse than ISIS.

yeah but once the Nazis had been neutralized because basically they killed the leaders, and the country was destroyed and bankrupt, the mass of the population gave up the fight. they didn't have revenge attacks or car bombs or continue the fighting, because they were bound by normal human laws. Do you really think that just getting rid of the leaders of ISIS will mean they throw down their weapons? and obey international law? ISIS is like a hydra head, cut off one and two take its place. why are those groups worse than ISIS? the Rouge lot didn't want to take over the world as far as I remember it was localized to their country, as per Rwanda, localized to one country.

ISIS doesn't actually want to take over the world either.  Maybe some of their stupider overseas recruits do, but they're still very much a local Sunni militia that is more bloodthirsty than most and happens to be really good at propaganda and branding. Hence why you hear about ISIS in the context of Libya and Nigeria because local jihadists adopted the name and symbols.

Misjudging al-Qaeda as an existential thread to "the West" was one of the biggest reasons why we fucked up so bad with the War on Terror, and while there are plenty of differences between ISIS and al-Qaeda, the fact that neither is even remotely capable of conquering the world is one of the constants.

I agree about that. But I think this time is different.

For an example of what I'm talking about, look at this hilariously awful article from CNBC: http://www.cnbc.com/id/102440491#.

Let's focus on just one paragraph:

The jihadist organization may even be spreading further across North Africa, as some reports suggest groups with allegiance to ISIS may already operate in Tunisia and Algeria.

OH MY GOD, holy shit, ISIS is already in North Africa and is spreading even further!  But wait, what does the second part of the sentence say?  "Groups with allegiance to ISIS?"  You mean like how ISIS itself was a "group with allegiance to al-Qaeda" until they decided they didn't want to be anymore, and al-Qaeda was powerless to stop them?  How does ISIS plan on enforcing its supposed authority over its Libyan "affiliates" when it has no navy and no forces from "ISIS central" operating outside of Syria and Iraq?  At least the article reluctantly acknowledges this, half a page down, by which most people have stopped reading.

According to Bokhari, the only certainty about ISIS is that it is fighting on multiple fronts just to maintain the land it has already seized in Iraq and Syria.

"In light of all of this, I just don't see how a group that is trying to sustain its territory can possibly expand to AfPak [Afghanistan and Pakistan] or Libya," Bokhari said, explaining that the terrorists in Libya seem more likely to be loosely affiliated locals.

Additionally, he said, the "jihadi market is so saturated" in the embattled North African country, that ISIS is unlikely to easily win ground. Explaining that he understood the need for governments to assume worst-case scenarios, Bokhari said that some of the comments coming from European officials is "almost paranoia."

Mrs Figg wrote:I agree about that. But I think this time is different.

Why?

You make a good point, Eldo, that in terms of people killed ISIS is not as bad as the Khmer Rouge, or the Rwandan genocides. I think where the difference lies is how ISIS flaunts it, and actively recruits. Khmer Rouge was something most of the world only heard about after the fact, and Rwanda took far too long for the world to wake up to.

ISIS seems worse because they are so proud of what they do. It's the exact opposite of trying to keep things quiet like the Khmer Rouge. Numerically ISIS may not be as bad, but when they publicly brag about burning someone to death rather than hide it like a normal sadist, it becomes even more insufferably evil. Even the Nazis had enough sense of humanity to hide what they did.

Okay...?  ISIS is an insurgent group (despite their desire to dress up and play at being a state).  They need to attract attention to themselves in order to continue recruiting, fundraising, and keeping their political goals in the news.  The most common way for insurgent groups to do this is through violence, but once a conflict has wound on for decades, they have to become more theatrically and flamboyantly gruesome to continue to attract attention.  Of course, becoming ever more violent runs the risk of alienating your support base, which is why insurgents want to provoke counter-attacks against the civilians on "their side", to drive them towards the insurgents for protection.  ISIS wouldn't have found the success they have if they didn't have sympathizers in the civilian population (primarily the Sunni tribes in western Iraq).  ISIS may well have pushed their luck too far with how gruesome they've gotten, but a foreign invasion would lend more credibility to ISIS.  I'm not saying the proper response is to just ignore them, but you have to be very careful about engaging a entrenched insurgent groups because it's very hard to meaningful hurt them without causing a lot of collateral damage in the sympathetic/potentially sympathetic civilian population, which can make the insurgents stronger in the long run.

In any event, basing foreign policy decisions on how "insufferable" one finds a group seems like a really terrible idea to me.

No, I'm right with you saying in many ways it's better for the West to starve them to death than fight them to death. But they sure don't make it easy to take the more passive approach.

On the other hand, part of their attraction is they have won so much. Defeat in battle may not necessarily attract more recruits - not if they start to look like losers. Especially if it's defeat at the hands of other muslims.

Will losing battles help ISIS recruit dumbass teenagers and 20-somethings from Europe and North America?  No, but those guys were always more far useful as propaganda tools than anything else.  In terms of actual combat efficacy, ISIS' strength depends on its relationship with and support from the people in the area where it operates.  And it's a basic lesson of counterinsurgency established through decades of painful experience that when you try to approximate conventional warfare against them, you'll beat them every time you're able to corner them, and you'll kill lots of people, and you'll probably lose the war.  The smarter insurgents know this and they try to goad their state-level enemies into using this same stupid tactic again and again.

The Provisional IRA did this in the early Troubles when their strategy was escalation.  The initially took strength from the Northern Irish civil rights movement and split from the Official IRA in order to provide greater protection for the Catholic community in Northern Ireland. (Official IRA were more Marxist and thought of themselves as above the religious divide, which made them unpopular with the Nationalist-sympathizing civilian base when the anti-Catholic race riots started up, which is why the Official IRA faded into irrelevance only a few years later.)  However, the Provos knew that a purely defensive strategy wouldn't get the British to leave Northern Ireland, so they deliberately did their best to escalate the conflict and prove the Brits into targeting the Catholic community.  The Brits fell for it, due in no small part because of centuries of institutionalized anti-Catholic bigotry, and this increased the Provisional IRA's support tremendously.  They didn't succeed in kicking the Brits out, but 40 years later, Northern Ireland no longer has a racialist, borderline neo-fascist government but a power-sharing one in which the Provisional IRA's political wing is an integral part.  The escalation strategy works when your enemy plays along.

The National Liberation Front (FLN) did an even more extreme strategy like this in Algeria in the '50s and '60s.  France considered Algeria to be an integral part of their republic but had formal racial classifications for the people of Algeria that privileged French settlers and kept the native Algerians down.  The FLN were hardly alone in wanting the French out, but not everyone shared their "at any cost" sentiment.  So the FLN deliberately escalated the situation.  They bombed restaurants and cafes knowing that it would lead the French to crack down on what semblance of civil rights existed in Algeria and further alienate the native population.  They massacred French civilians knowing that the French military and paramilitaries would respond with even larger massacres against Algerian civilians.  This also had the added benefit of alienating the French military from the civilian population in metropolitan France, who were increasingly appalled at the violence being done in their name.  Eventually the French had enough, de Gaulle pulled out (despite a couple of assassination attempts against him by his own military), and after the better part of a decade and a staggering cost in human life, the FLN took control of Algeria.  The escalation strategy works when your enemy plays along.

ISIS' ascension to the jihadi big leagues occurred in the chaos of post-invasion Iraq.  Both Sunnis and Shias were angry about their country being invaded and occupied (as citizens of most countries would be), but the Sunnis were especially angry because they lost their position as Saddam's favored group and, and the US started making comments about majority rule, which would mean the Shias were in charge.  A huge part of the success of jihadist groups in Iraq in the first 3-4 years of the war was support from the Sunni tribes.  In 2007-ish, during "the surge", an equally huge part of the US' temporary success was because Petraeus started applying basic counterinsurgency principles and reached out to the Sunni tribes (essentially through bribery) and offered them a better deal than the jihadists did.  The Shia-majority government did not continue to do this after the US left, so ISIS and co. had an opportunity to make a comeback in a big way by re-allying with the Sunni tribes (obviously this is a simplification).  Petraeus managed to de-escalate the conflict to some extent and he downplayed the US' role by paying the Sunni tribes to fight the jihadists for/alongside us.  Re-invading the country now would be a massive re-escalation, a much bigger one than ISIS' successes last year were.  Keep in mind that ISIS only "conquered" the Sunni parts of Iraq, where they had latent allies and supporters.  Once they started running up against Kurdish areas in the north and Shia areas around Baghdad, they stopped in their tracks quite fast, and with very limited foreign intervention.

I should wrap this post up by noting that there are occasionally exceptions to the rule that escalation works against the state faction in a counterinsurgency conflict, but they are comparatively very few.  Sri Lanka more or less managed to pull this off in ending their three decade struggle with the Tamil Tigers (so far there doesn't seem to be a resurgence from the Tigers), but it came at a horrendous cost in civilian lives.  That's not to say that if you kill enough civilians of the same tribe as the insurgents you'll eventually win, though.  Over two million Vietnamese died in the American war there, but that wan't enough to bring America a strategic victory, our tactical successes notwithstanding.  In fact, those successes were almost completely irrelevant, because the American leadership refused to acknowledge the kind of war we were fighting (the guys who are like "we should have won Vietnam" as if the VC cheated somehow still don't get it).

"And it's a basic lesson of counterinsurgency established through decades of painful experience that when you try to approximate conventional warfare against them, you'll beat them every time you're able to corner them, and you'll kill lots of people, and you'll probably lose the war. The smarter insurgents know this and they try to goad their state-level enemies into using this same stupid tactic again and again."

Tell it to the Romans.

I was actually hoping for an engaging back and forth on this topic since I find it fascinating.  Maybe I should go to grad school after all.

I had typed up a short rebuttal but no one here would take it seriously anyway so why bother?

You provided your usual thoughtful, well researched analysis. It's clearly so well reasoned and close to truth that a real response would require at least equal thought and research to even discover any possible weaknesses in your argument, which few of us are equipped to do.

So if you don't have the time or background to provide a worthy reply, you do a quick one-off.

Eldo I appreciate your thoughtful approach to the matter and maybe you could call me a rightwing neo conservative, but I stick to my opinion on this. these people need exterminating. sorry if its bloodthirsty, but some people are too evil to be allowed to continue. they have to be stopped at all costs because innocents are getting murdered. if they get their hands on libyian oil its curtains, if they infiltrate the boats going over to Italy and fill them with sleeper terrorists its curtains, if they join up with Boko Haram its curtains for the people of north Africa. I am not stupid I know a lot of it is propaganda, but this is just the start of it and everyone is twiddling their thumbs and letting them round up villages and killing them. are you prepared to wash your hands of all that?