Attacks in Paris Stadium, concert hall

Wow! You just described GW's reaction to 9/11 to a T.

Only now we know that he'd been planning it for a year with UK's Blair.

Article here.

Airspace is determined by ground borders. Turkey unilaterally annexed the territory in question decades ago, and Syria has never recognized the territory as belonging to Turkey. See the Wiki article on Hatay Province.

Turkey hates Assad for two main reasons:

(1) Syria supported the PKK (Kurdish independence movement in Turkey), as it did so many Marxist or Marxist-inspired militant groups.

(2) The Assad government is dominated by Alowites, an obscure sect of Shia Islam, whereas Turkey's government is increasingly dominated by Sunni Muslims. The two branches of Islam have been at war in both Syria and Iraq, as well as Yemen and elsewhere. That's also why Turkey is funding and supporting Muslim radical militants in Syria.

Turkey became a member of NATO back when it was a secular military dictatorship (essentially). Now that Turkey is increasingly dominated by Sunni Muslims of a fairly fundamentalist (if pragmatic and gradualist) stripe, and the Cold War rationale for Turkey's NATO membership no longer exists, the idea that NATO obligations should be reflexively honored makes less sense.

The scary scenario is that Russia responds militarily against Turkey, whether that means shooting down a Turkish fighter jet, or bombing the Turkmen militants who shot the Russian pilot to death after he had safely ejected and was descending by parachute. Since Turkey claims that land (under that airspace) it could claim this as an attack on itself rather than the militants there, and invoke its right to NATO defense under Article V. Theoretically that could escalate into world war.

You have the order of events backward: First France began bombing in Syria, about a week before the Paris attacks; then the Paris attacks occurred, with the attackers explicitly telling the French police that it was revenge for French bombing in Syria.

The New York Times reported the earlier French bombing of Raqqa, and if you check previous thread comments you can find a link to the story.

oralloy wrote: "After we destroy Islamic State, we will be the military in charge of the Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria."

Not even remotely. ISIS controls areas of northern and eastern Syria. Al Qaeda and its hardline allies in Jaish al Fatah control the northwest and substantial chunks of the center of Syria. Getting rid of ISIS does not mean getting rid of radical Islamic militants and terrorists in Syria nor their subversion of Sunni Iraq.

oralloy: "I expect that their government will not be composed of out of control nutcases that cut off everyone's heads and conduct terrorist attacks against the Western world."

That expectation seems unwarranted. Saudi Arabia cuts off more heads than ISIS, and 15 of the 19 al Qaeda highjackers behind the far more professional and destructive 9/11 attacks came from Saudi Arabia. When the U.S. led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003, Saudi Arabia sent more foreign suicide bombers than any other country. Saudi Arabia is the force behind the worldwide dissemination of the Wahhabi Muslim ideology that was once regarded as a radical fringe movement but which now dominates Islamic thought in many parts of the world. Saudi Arabia supports al Nusra, the al Qaeda affiliated rebel group that rivals ISIS for domination in Syria.

At least ISIS permits the practice of Christianity in its "caliphate" provided the jizya is paid (which also exempts Christians from military draft). Just try to open a Christian church in Saudi Arabia, no matter how discreet, and see how long you avoid jail or worse. See how many lashes in the public square you get for criticizing the government. Raif Badawi, the blogger behind the website Saudi Arabia Liberals was only sentenced to 1,000. Compare this to the "cushy rehab center" where it sends terrorists. I'm not making this up.

You may imagine that what you call "the universal right of self protection" gives western governments the legal right to invade Iraq and Syria against the wishes of their sovereign governments but who will agree with you? Certainly not the United Nations or even the U.S. government despite the bluster of members of Congress who are so cowardly that they refuse to bring an authorizing resolution supporting the use of military force in Syria, in case the shite hits the fan and public opinion turns against them.

oralloy wrote: "Dronestrikes may not completely eliminate every bit of a militant group, but they put a serious dent in them."

Really? Does al Qaeda have more worldwide members (including affiliate groups like al Nusra in Syria) before we started drone strikes, or now? How about ISIS? Could it be that drone strikes are actually a powerful recruitment tool for jihadist organizations? Could it be that the United States is shooting itself in the foot simply in order to appear to its citizens that it's doing something?

oralloy: "We have declared war against al-Qa'ida and all of their allies."

Really? Is that why we've largely left them alone in Syria (al Nusra), leaving them to the Russians? Why haven't we sanctioned Saudi Arabia and Turkey for providing material support to this terrorist organization?

"Turkey and Saudi Arabia are actively supporting a hardline coalition of Islamist rebels against Bashar al-Assad’s regime that includes al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, in a move that has alarmed Western governments.

"The two countries are focusing their backing for the Syrian rebels on the combined Jaish al-Fatah, or the Army of Conquest, a command structure for jihadist groups in Syria that includes Jabhat al-Nusra, an extremist rival to Isis which shares many of its aspirations for a fundamentalist caliphate."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-crisis-turkey-and-saudi-arabia-shock-western-countries-by-supporting-anti-assad-jihadists-10242747.html

I disagree with everything I've quoted.

Not a surprise I'm sure - but making sure it continues to be clear.

I think you, personally, have never been very close to war.

France and the US have been bombing ISIS since last summer, I think.

Hollande has also announced that this atrocity will not affect the amount of refugees France will take in. He is to be congratulated on his brave refusal to give into the bigots and instead embrace humanity. He also shows the cowardly Republicans for the spineless losers they really are.

No, thank goodness, I have not been personally closer to war than my father who saw combat in Korea, an uncle who stormed the beach at Normandy and lost half his leg, friends who saw combat in Vietnam, and nephews who have seen combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I certainly don't have a romantic notion of war and agree, entirely, that it is truly horrible.

I don't, however, need to have seen combat to know that war, for the foreseeable, future is here to stay, because so is individuals' sick lust for power.

Remove the latter, and it is very likely we would never see another war, but that's not going to happen any time soon.

So given that war is a fact of human life, it is silly, in my opinion, to make a statement like hand to hand combat, rather than the use of drones, is preferable.

You cannot deny there is no shortage of books, play and films that have a strove very hard and been quite successful in depicting the horrors of war. Yet wars continue to be waged. It's not a case of just needing a few more gory pictures or hideous personal accounts and suddenly humanity will get the message.

In war people die. People who deserve to and people who do not. Unfortunately the number of the latter usually far outweigh the former, so any advancement in war technology that can reduce the latter and more precisely take out the former is, to my way of thinking, something to be welcomed.

Unless one has a romantic notion of war and killing, hacking your enemy to death with a machete in hand to hand combat is no better (or worse) than dispatching a drone to do so from an office somewhere in Nevada. The drone operator is not going to kill more people than the soldier on the ground because he doesn't get his hands bloody - quite probably the opposite.

But on a very limited basis. Not enough to get the job done.

Oh please.... Hollande is not playing anything. He is being very cautious, as always. Too cautious for my taste, as always.

Gratuitously bad mouthing people who happen to be in power at difficult times does not make you an "anti-elite hawk". It just makes you a noizy, permanently unsatisfied bitch.

Yes yes yes. You know my take.

The majority of the commentary I have read takes the opinion that Hollande post attack is much different than pre attack. When you mock me for saying what a lot of others are saying (Europeans) you look bad.

Those saying such things are misinformed. Hollande has always been better as an emergency leader than as a regular caretaker. His leadership in Mali 2 years ago was quick, courageous, politically deft, and low-key as usual. He's not playing cowboy. If anything, he is playing Lt. Colombo.

Olivier5 wrote: " France and the US have been bombing ISIS since last summer, I think."

And to think that comment got three thumbs up. Amazing.

France had been bombing ISIS in Iraq for some time. But it only began bombing it in Syria (Raqqa, the de facto ISIS capital in Syria) on October 8, about a week before the Paris attacks. According to France, this was a "preemptive" strike. France received "vague but credible" information in September about a possible attack by "Syrian jihadists". So the political leadership decided to drop some bombs on Raqqa. Brilliant. Less than a week later, the Paris attackers strke, explicitly telling the French police outside the Bataclan that it was revenge for French bombing of Syria.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/europe/inquiry-finds-mounting-proof-of-syria-link-to-paris-attacks.html

Well, I guess it's pretty obvious then, eh, PP. They didn't do enough bombing the first time around. Now they need to lay it on THICK. As in nuclear kinda thick, know what I'm sayin?

If I was prez, and my advisors said to me:

"OK, these maniacs are threatening to blow up the white house. But they promise not to do it if you will just hand over one American for a public beheading by them. And we know they will keep their promise on that."

Then I would probably ask if there was any way we could stop them. Let's suppose they answer:

'No, we can't, not unless we want to nuke about a million muslims, most of them non-combatants."

OK, so it comes down to 1 American, or one million muslims, eh?

****, that's easy enough. Launch them nukes, posthaste.

First of all, while I agree that the majority of victims of radical Islamic terrorism are other Muslims, I know that as a literate American who has access to a wide variety of media sources and who has taken a dispassionate interest in ascertaining the facts. Considering how few of my fellow Americans know this -- the popular impression is that Americans and Europeans are the primary victims-- it wouldn't surprise me if even fewer third world Muslims know this, particularly since the media sources that speak loudest and most frequently to them may not make this inconvenient truth known with any more regularity than FOX News does for its American viewers.

Secondly, if you're a Pakistani whose close relatives were killed at a wedding in a drone strike, you probably aren't reacting to hypothetical events in Iraq involving sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shias, even assuming that your local media presents a full and accurate representation of such events, which it probably doesn't.

On the other hand, your local media probably does play up American drone strikes, bombings, invasions, engineered regime changes, destructive meddling, and Romanesque moral degeneracy (from your traditional cultural perspective). And now to top it all off, your brother and his wife and your grandmother were just massacred at a wedding by the cold blooded imperial force for evil that your local media keeps telling you about.

If you were an American, you'd be screaming for air strikes in retribution. But you don't have an air force at your disposal as a Pakistani, at least, not one capable and willing to do this. But you can show them how it feels and maybe get them to stop; and you're willing to sacrifice yourself in the process.

Of course, this sort of indiscriminate revenge is totally immoral. But then, so was bombing a wedding simply to get at an actual or suspected terrorist.

Does someone joining ISIS believe what the western media reports, or do they dismiss that as propaganda and accept the propaganda of ISIS?

Does an American join the army believing it is an organization of fascistic baby murderers, believing reports of Mai Lai atrocities, village burnings, napalm attacks and carpet bombing? Or does an American join the army believing that it is a force for justice and freedom protecting American values? Or does an American join the army simply because he has no better career prospects and they pay well and don't require any special skills or experience, but only demand obedience?

Finn dAbuzz wrote: "I don't buy that we in the present are bound by whatever sins may have been committed in the past. If, for the sake of argument, we accept that Dresden and Tokyo were horrific sins, does it mean we are somehow bound to accept similar sins visited upon us?"

That isn't what I was suggesting. I was simply pointing out that if the well educated, sophisticated, modern population of "the greatest country on earth" reacts to Pearl Harbor with popular cries to bomb the Japs back to the Stone Age, why expect third world Muslims to react any more rationally or morally to the odious "them"?

How many British said it was good to bomb German cities because those war-loving Krauts swooned over Hitler and put him in office?

How many Americans who were told by the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was a co-conspirator in the 9/11 attacks, and who considered Arabs in general to be anti-American fanatics of a different (and wrong!) religion, were particularly finicky about taking names and kicking ass in the land of the towelheads/sand-niggers?