Attacks in Paris Stadium, concert hall

I'm not saying to go Ghandi. I'm not in favor of bombing away. I think it is often counterproductive because of long or maybe short term reactions to them.

I do get that bombs have gotten some redoing over the years and come in different sizes and accuracies, or I hope they have. I'm no fan of drones either, even for amazon delivering books, but I do get they have some accuracy. I think there's a level of chickenshitness with bombing from a desk far away but also understand it while not being delighted. I gather drones sometimes mess up too, re collateral damage.

As some know, the bomb I have lived my life aware of is Baker, at Bikini. Not all bombs are Bakers, but to me they are all relatives, all horrid. I've met Teller, oddly (to me) at a catholic meeting one evening when I was first at university, very early sixties. My father, who knew him and Oppenheimer and so on, saw that Teller would be there and urged me to go. It was a short meeting, less than ten people there, and I remember not understanding whatever he was talking about. It wasn't about bombs, probably spirituality related. At the time I was too befuddled to form a question. I gather from looking him up years later that he lived local to us in the LA area.

We're a bit more secure, for a start we've got water between us and borders. You could drive from France to Austria and back, (one of the terrorists did,) without any border checks or need for documentation. You can't come to the UK from France without going through passport control, and it's nigh on impossible to get your hands on a Kalashnikov.

oralloy wrote: "The Iraqi Sunnis were happy to be done with al-Qa'ida in Iraq once we gave them a better option. They only welcomed them back under the name Islamic State after we had left Iraq and the Shia had set about exterminating them."

There's something to this, but though the Shiites used various types of repression including death squads, there was no campaign of extermination.

Don't forget that the Sunni minority was used to having the political power and the perks that came with it. Once the shoe was on the other foot and they became the marginalized step-children, promises to restore Sunnis to their "rightful place" which played on preexisting religious biases became attractive.

Another important difference between al Qaeda in Iraq and ISIS is the level of services, not only for those who join but sometimes for those who play ball.

The IS government infrastructure seems better developed in Syria than in Iraq, but in a country where poverty is endemic, price controls on basic goods and subsidies for food, housing, and healthcare are appealing. ISIS also inculcates a legal system which, for cooperative Sunnis who aren't enemies of the state, is a lot less corrupt by Middle East standards than some. This must be weighed against strictly enforced laws banning the use of tobacco and alcohol and fraternization between the sexes.

As for western style political freedoms, in a country like Iraq where Sunnis lived decently under Sadaam Hussein as long as they stayed out of politics and did what they were told, I'm not sure they're looking for that.

Some insider insights from a Syrian ISIS defector:

* * *

“I rented a house, which was paid for by ISIS,” Abu Khaled told me. “It cost $50 per month. They paid for the house, the electricity. Plus, I was married, so I got an additional $50 per month for my wife. If you have kids, you get $35 for each. If you have parents, they pay $50 for each parent. This is a welfare state.”

“This is why a lot of people are joining,” said Abu Khaled. “I knew a mason who worked construction. He used to get 1,000 lira per day. That’s nothing. Now he’s joined ISIS and gets 35,000 lira—$100 for himself, $50 for his wife, $35 for his kids. He makes $600 to $700 per month. He gave up masonry. He’s just a fighter now, but he joined for the income.”

* * *
For all its means of self-enrichment, ISIS hasn’t forgotten about the little guy. It has constructed a social safety net for those it rules in its Islamic welfare state, a linchpin of which is Baghdadi’s own Affordable Care Act.

ISIS members are entitled to free medical treatment and pharmaceuticals, and anyone living in the caliphate can apply for free health care, provided need can be established. “You can go to the doctor or hospital for no money,” Abu Khaled said. “If you can’t go to the doctor or hospital in Islamic State territory, if you have to go abroad, they pay you. No matter what the amount. If you have cancer and you need chemotherapy in Turkey, they will pay for everything, including your hotel. Even if it’s tens of thousands of dollars.”

And doctors in al-Bab hardly complain about losses because medicine is one of the most profitable careers one can have in al-Dawla. Physicians are paid between $4,000 and $5,000 a month to keep them from running off to Turkey.

For these reasons, Abu Khaled said, Syria is the “five-star jihad,” at least compared to Iraq. “Over there is nothing, but you come to al-Bab, there are coffee shops, there are nice things. You can have a decent life.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/17/inside-isis-torture-brigades.html

* * *

oralloy wrote: "If we were to split the Kurdish and Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria off into separate states, it is likely that the Sunnis, free from worry about being massacred by Assad or Iraqi Shia, would be happy to form a moderate government again."

Well, who is this "we" that will unilaterally determine the borders of the sovereign state of Iraq, which has a government? As for Syria, no doubt the largely sectarian, educated, general population would agree with you. But even if we get rid of ISIS tomorrow, there is still al-Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate, which along with its Islamicist allies would then be (if they aren't already) the strongest rebel group.

If Syria is split up into an Alawite coastal state, a Kurdish state in the north, a non-ISIS radical Islamic state in the central portion, and a moderate FSA controlled state in the south, that still leaves a Sunni radical controlled state in place; and who will keep them separated and at peace? All of the pragmatic alliances between rebel groups that now exist to fight Assad will fall apart once the central government falls. The end of Assad need not mean the end of civil war in Syria. And from Syria, Islamic radicals can still subvert Sunni Iraq.

oralloy wrote: "Until recently Islamic State was no in need of any donations, as they made lots of revenue from stealing and then selling Syria's oil."

They still do. They also make lots of money from taxes (both personal and business), fines for common infractions like smoking, the international drug trade, and even banking, as well as extortion and kidnapping. I thought this was particularly interesting:

* * *

Oil, naturally, is a big source of revenue. ISIS controls of all of Syria’s eastern oil fields, making it the premier energy supplier for the country and a racketeer for fuel. The Bab al-Salameh crossing, which is now ISIS’s only means of entry into northern Syria, is responsible for feeding the entire caliphate, from Aleppo to Fallujah. “So imagine how many trucks are crossing every day,” Abu Khaled said.

Yet Bab al-Salameh is controlled on the Syrian side by the non-ISIS rebels, and of course on the Turkish side by the government in Ankara. Why can’t either simply shut down the crossing and deprive ISIS of its revenue stream?

“Because there is no choice. ISIS has the diesel, the oil. Last time, a little bit before Ramadan, the rebels closed ISIS’s crossing.” ISIS responded by turning off the tap. “The price of oil in Syria went up. The bakeries stopped because there was no diesel. The cars, the hospitals, everything shut down.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/17/inside-isis-torture-brigades.html

BillRM wrote: "You have an interesting idea that any one is more mobille then the current US military let alone ISIS."

U.S. special forces are mobile, but the vast bulk of American ground troops are not light infantry but rather conventional armored infantry trained to a support role for tanks and artillery. They move in fairly predictable, easily spotted convoys which can be seen coming from miles away. When they aren't moving this way they spend most of their time in triple barbed-wire camps for security, not imbedded in the urban terrain they need to control. The American army, like many, just isn't designed for unconventional warfare which relies on stealth, concealment, ambush and counter-ambush. It takes lots of training and practice to get good at that.

The undersupplied Kurds are an effective light infantry force against ISIS precisely because they have spent decades waging a guerrilla insurgency against the Turkish government. They have mastered the tactical techniques through long and bloody experience.

You may very well be right as far as what the impetus for the first airstrikes was, but I believe the air campaign that followed was prompted by the beheadings.

This is more of the argument that we need to be careful in how we react to terrorists for fear of creating more terrorists. Anyone who will join the terrorists because they think we have "gone too far" in responding to people who swear by God they will kill us and then make good on that assertion, was, in my opinion, never someone who was ever really on the fence as respects this war. If they join the terrorists because of the unintended deaths of innocents in retaliation for the intended murder of innocents, then I don't think they were on the fence either.

I can understand how a specific individual who loses a loved one in an attack against terrorist may be so overwhelmed by grief and rage that they don't stop to consider the whole picture but only want revenge, but it is not possible to wage war on the terrorists and completely avoid "collateral" death or injury. Take reasonable efforts to avoid such consequences, but when those efforts hamper the ability to defeat the terrorists, they have been taken too far.

Unfortunately this war, like every war, is not a series of precise movements that can be planned to the last detail, and there is a grim calculus involved in determining what is acceptable and what is not. If ISIS is not destroyed or degraded to the point of rendering it effectively impotent, it will kill more people and not just Westerners. As has been pointed out ad nauseum, it has already killed far more innocent Muslims than Westerners. How many innocent lives can be justifiably lost to prevent ISIS from taking a great many more? Of course there is no magic number so effort is made to keep that number as close to zero as possible. At some point the math doesn't make any sense if the ultimate goal is not achieved.

Right now there are military experts who insist that the current rules of engagement are hampering the achievement of the ultimate goal. I am not so naive as to not believe that this happens with every conflict or to deny that Obama has military advisors telling him that the ROE is just fine, but there are already indications, through inspector general investigations, that the Pentagon may be fudging the numbers so as to paint an inaccurate picture of success. Whether or not this is true, I doubt that anyone in this forum doesn't believe such things have happened in the past, will happen in the future and could be happening now.

We know Obama wants his current strategy to work (perhaps desperately) and he wants, just as much, to believe it is working ( I don't dislike the man so much that I think he is entirely comfortable lying to the American people and the rest of the world). I've watched human nature works for over 60 years now and one of the things I've noted is that when people are desperate for a particular outcome they very often get it even if they need to violate all of their ethics to do so and that includes creating a false impression that they have actually obtained it. He is a very powerful man and everyone in his circle wants to please him. If these people see that displeasing him by telling the truth results in, at least, his disfavor, it's not difficult to imagine how many of them will react.

No matter what one thinks are his reasons, it's clear he very passionately does not want to involve the US in another war anything like Iraq or Afghanistan. The question is whether or not his extreme reluctance is preventing us from getting into a war that we must wage and if the immediate benefits of refraining are worth what eventually will come next. That's the question on which many people, of good faith, differ.

And returning to the matter of the number of ISIS victims who are innocent Muslims, it's difficult to wrap my head around the idea that anyone (not driven mad by grief) is going to join forces with barbarians killing innocent Muslims on a grand scale, because those trying to stop them unavoidably kill a far smaller number in their efforts. Again, if they do and they use the collateral deaths as their justification, I'm afraid I don't, to put it mildly, accept that they are sincere. They were embryonic terrorists to begin with.

There's a bit of unexpected bluster from a dove. If you weren't female, I would describe it as machismo. Is it "chickenshit" to kill people from 40,000 feet in the sky? How about from a warship off shore, or from an artillery battery more than a mile away? For that matter what about snipers? Do your prefer our warriors to get bloody in hand to hand combat?

The drones seldom "mess up." If there is collateral damage it is anticipated and accepted or it was the fault of insufficient or inaccurate intelligence or poor targeting by the operator.

As an aside, what to you have against Amazon using drones to deliver books?




Interesting. You must have had a number of great opportunities.

Teller was a brilliant scientist who, if the suggestions are accurate, was unfairly lampooned as Kubrik's "Dr. Strangelove." He is portrayed in some circles as having a gruesome passion for the weapons he helped create and for being indifferent to their effects on human life. Ironically the charismatic Oppenheimer who is often unfavorably contrasted with Teller was one of a group of Los Alamos scientists (that didn't include Teller) who urged the military to use the bomb in a direct attack against Japan and not, instead, to attempt some form of a warning test.

Professional differences which may have morphed into personal ones led Teller to testify against Oppenheimer in a hearing on whether or not his security clearance should be extended. Although Oppenheimer had made serious enemies among the Red Scare crowd in DC, Teller's testimony didn't at all imply that his former friend was in anyway disloyal to the nation. Instead, he questioned Oppenheimer's judgment and asserted that for this reason he shouldn't be trusted with such serious and secret policy. Incompetence vs disloyalty. In all likelihood the ultimate decision to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance had already been made before Teller even testified, but considering his stature and close working relationship with the man, Teller's "betrayal" was deemed to be the coup de grace.

The scientific community that adored "Oppy" saw this as horrendous behavior and ostracized Teller. Teller's genius for physics didn't extend to personal relationships or his own judgment. I believe he allowed his professional/personal differences to influence his own judgment and intentionally or otherwise used the hearings to score points against the man who was once his friend but eventually was seen as an adversary. I'm not filled with admiration for the scientific community of the time either, as I think its reaction was as much a circling of the wagons for one of their own as an honest rejection of Teller based on ethical concerns. I don't believe Oppenheimer was a communist agent or a threat to national security, but my sense is that even had the evidence been stronger that he was, his comrades in the scientific community would have allowed their allegiance to him to color their judgment and back him to the end. Scientific geniuses, after all and despite what Oppenheimer probably thought, demonstrate the same personal foibles as the rest of us lesser mortals and don't operate in a rarefied atmosphere of exceptional morality and judgment.

yes

preferably leader to leader

I still think Erich Maria Remarque got it right.



full film

FA wrote: "If they join the terrorists because of the unintended deaths of innocents in retaliation for the intended murder of innocents, then I don't think they were on the fence either."

Yet you subsequently wrote::

FA: "The drones seldom "mess up." If there is collateral damage it was anticipated and accepted..."

How can it be called "unintended" if it is anticipated and accepted?

These strikes are mostly illegal anyway, taking place in sovereign nations against the wishes or without the permissions of the government. They occur because the United States wishes to avoid casualties and so instead of commando raids or infantry actions which might result in the death or kidnapping of American troops, stand-off weaponry is used.

Bombs are by their nature indiscriminate, destroying whatever is in their large blast radius, even when they hit their target. In urban areas that means hitting homes and businesses or streets with traffic.

Imagine your wife and children stopped by the bank one day, and were held hostage by criminals or terrorists who wanted to use them as bargaining chips or human shields. If the SWAT team stormed the building and in the process they were killed by stray bullets, you might not blame the police. But if instead the police dropped a bomb on the building, you'd call the action grossly irresponsible and ask for criminal charges against them.

Now imagine that the bomb is dropped not by the police, but by a foreign government acting without invitation or legal authority; one that furthermore has a longstanding habit of doing this. They rarely acknowledge civilian casualties, and when they do, they employ an absurd euphemism (collateral damage) to make the event sound bloodless and abstract; and instead of taking responsibility for their actions, they blame their targets for hiding behind civilians, in a meaningless press release that's as close to an apology as they ever come, but is really nothing more than a justification offered in a public relations statement. You might be upset. All the more so if you read about such incidents all the time in your own media,but theirs never mentions it, except when the bombing is conducted by their geopolitical enemies.

Obviously its wrong to take revenge for the death of innocents by targeting more innocents for a reprisal attack (terrorism). Yet western governments and many of their citizens routinely do and urge to be done this same thing. Bomb foreign cities because militants operate there. If civilians are killed, that's war. Maybe they'll think twice next time. But western governments don't think twice the next time a terrorist attack occurs, do they? Why expect terrorists to respond more rationally?

Is it "chickenshit" to kill people from 40,000 feet in the sky? How about from a warship off shore, or from an artillery battery more than a mile away? For that matter what about snipers? Do your prefer our warriors to get bloody in hand to hand combat?

I don't like any of those, but the last is preferred.

The drones seldom "mess up." If there is collateral damage it is anticipated and accepted or it was the fault of insufficient or inaccurate intelligence or poor targeting by the operator.

Forced to choose, I can understand going with drones.
Re Amazon, I don't like a cluttered sky, and this is past weaponry. I also don't like sales messages in the sky, art in the sky (I whined about that going on over New York's Hudson River once), and I'm not at all interested in the Balloon Festival in Albuquerque. Ms. Picky doesn't like the sky above played with. I realize I'm a little late on some matters.

Interesting. You must have had a number of great opportunities.

I met Teller (listened to him for probably a half hour) when I was eighteen and, though I was introduced politely, we didn't converse. On Openheimer, I remember being interested, now a long time ago. I don't remember being against him, and am not clear that I was against Teller either. My father died when I was 26, and there were hundreds of conversations we never got to have.

I did meet interesting people at greater length. My father's cohort in the plane that shot down into Baker was Col. John Craig, who manned the camera. He was an early deep sea diver, wonderful story teller, had a TV show called Danger is My Business. My father was head of photo at Bikini.
He had other interesting friends - the irish priest who started what was known as "The Rosary Crusade" and had a radio show (Fr. Patrick Peyton), who used to come to dinner at our house, and John Farrow, a lieutenant in the Canadian Navy, film director, author of Damien the Leper, husband of Maureen O'Sullivan (Jane in Tarzan). I met them one day at their house in the valley with my parents, when I was thirteen, but not since then. I could go on, but a lot of those memories are followed with rue for the shortness of them.


On all this about the world and its present problems (not to mention past and future ones) I'm not particularly interested in arguing. I pop up and say what I am thinking from time to time, but I'm mostly listening. Sometimes what I think moves a bit. Sometimes it doesn't.

P.S. During the Second World War both the Axis and Allied governments targeted enemy civilian populations on a vast scale, using both conventional and incendiary bombs. The idea was to undermine the morale of foreign populations to undermine or end the war effort. Bomb the Huns. Bomb the Japs. Gott strafe England. (OK, that's a slogan from a different war. The point is the same.)

Totally immoral. But do we expect the Third World to adhere to higher standards when it comes to redressing grievances against "them"?

I don't see Middle Eastern terrorists attacking Mexico. Or Finland. Or New Zealand. Is that just a coincidence?

Sorry but the weapons of the time did not allow fine targeting and at least in the beginning of the war you was lucky to hit a city let alone a military target within a city but we was going mainly after oil fields and ball bearing factories as must as possible given the technology at the time.

In fact the US mounted raids in daylight unlike the Brits, taking heavy losses as a result to try to not to do area bombings but instead take out the military targets.

Nor did we make a habit of cutting heads off prisons unlike the Japanese who it memory serve me correctly did so to the few of the Doolittle Raiders that ended up in their hands.

But in any case I am all for sending in the troops and killing every one of the SOBs we can find.

BillRM wrote: " Sorry but the weapons of the time (WW II) did not allow fine targeting... In fact the US mounted raids in daylight unlike the Brits, taking heavy losses as a result to try to not to do area bombings but instead take out the military targets."

Here's a concrete counterexample:

"At this point, LeMay ordered the B-29 bombers to attack at a relatively low altitude of 5,000 to 9,000 ft (1,500 to 2,700 m) and at night, because Japan's anti-aircraft artillery defenses were weakest in this altitude range, and the fighter defenses were ineffective at night. LeMay ordered all defensive guns but the tail gun removed from the B-29s so that the aircraft would be lighter and use less fuel.

"On the night of 9–10 March ("Operation Meetinghouse"), 334 B-29s took off to raid with 279 of them dropping 1,665 tons of bombs on Tokyo. The bombs were mostly the 500-pound (230 kg) E-46 cluster bomb which released 38 napalm-carrying M-69 incendiary bomblets at an altitude of 2,000–2,500 ft (610–760 m). The M-69s punched through thin roofing material or landed on the ground; in either case they ignited 3–5 seconds later, throwing out a jet of flaming napalm globs. A lesser number of M-47 incendiaries was also dropped: the M-47 was a 100-pound (45 kg) jelled-gasoline and white phosphorus bomb which ignited upon impact. In the first two hours of the raid, 226 of the attacking aircraft unloaded their bombs to overwhelm the city's fire defenses. The first B-29s to arrive dropped bombs in a large X pattern centered in Tokyo's densely populated working class district near the docks in both Koto and Chuo city wards on the water; later aircraft simply aimed near this flaming X. The individual fires caused by the bombs joined to create a general conflagration, which would have been classified as a firestorm but for prevailing winds gusting at 17 to 28 mph (27 to 45 km/h).

"Approximately 15.8 square miles (4,090 ha) of the city was destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

Here's another one:

The bombing of Dresden was a UK/US aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, that took place during the Second World War in the European Theatre. Germany would surrender three months later. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed over 1,600 acres (6.5 km 2 ) of the city centre.

An estimated 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

You might also find this of interest:

" One of the aims of war is to demoralize the enemy, so that peace or surrender becomes preferable to continuing the conflict. Strategic bombing has been used to this end. The phrase "terror bombing" entered the English lexicon towards the end of World War II and many strategic bombing campaigns and individual raids have been described as terror bombing by commentators and historians. Because the term has pejorative connotations, some, including the Allies of World War II, have preferred to use euphemisms such as "will to resist" and "morale bombings". "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing#World_War_II

BillRM wrote: "Nor did we make a habit of cutting heads off prisoners unlike the Japanese who if memory serves me correctly did so to the few of the Doolittle Raiders that ended up in their hands."

But there's this:

"The phenomenon of "trophy-taking" was widespread enough that discussion of it featured prominently in magazines and newspapers, and Franklin Roosevelt himself was reportedly given, by a U.S. Congressman, a gift of a letter-opener made of a man's arm (Roosevelt later ordered that the gift be returned and called for its proper burial). The behavior was officially prohibited by the U.S. military, which issued additional guidance as early as 1942 condemning it specifically.

"Nonetheless, the behavior continued throughout the war in the Pacific Theater, and has resulted in continued discoveries of "trophy skulls" of Japanese combatants in American possession, as well as American and Japanese efforts to repatriate the remains of the Japanese dead."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanese_war_dead

By the way, did you know that the Japanese were prosecuted for the war crime of waterboarding as an interrogation technique?

I agree. Recently the US bombed a Medecins Sans Frontiere hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing a few French and Afghan doctors and staff.

It's also quite ineffective as a stand-alone approach, which is why I would much prefer a ground assault, prepared as it should be by well-targeted bombing...

Letting IS grow and prosper is the last thing the entire world needs.


Tell us again: when is that (going to happen)?

The current extent of IS influence is map below, for as far as we know.

Got to cut the image down, use the image button and
put img width=850 in the front bracket

I agree re stopping IS, am listening as to the hows.

Oops, you caught the width thing.. pretty swift!