Quote :

"Speaking of which, what does our leadership do when one of their own makes a statement they want the country to forget? Redirect! Focus on evil whitey."

seriously?

2/20/2015 10:50:27 AM

Let's not forget people, that Islam was woven into the fabric of America by our founding fathers - Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the Quran.

Betsy Ross even had some Islamic thread that she used for that flag. She wove it into the flag.

2/20/2015 12:25:52 PM

It doesn't say IN ALLAH WE TRUST on our coins!!!

[Edited on February 20, 2015 at 12:34 PM. Reason : Murica ]

2/20/2015 12:33:59 PM

Maybe they should. Then we'd only have to worry about those right-wing terrorists, who now pose more of a threat than ISIS.

[Edited on February 20, 2015 at 12:38 PM. Reason : asdaf]

2/20/2015 12:37:49 PM

I know, right.. Obama's speech on terrorism a couple days ago was all about this domestic threat I'm sure.

Don't worry the DHS will be shut down soon anyway so they won't annoy you.

2/20/2015 12:54:18 PM

shutting down the DHS would be fantastic

2/20/2015 1:02:01 PM

^^ Haha, ISWYDT





[Edited on February 20, 2015 at 1:03 PM. Reason : [Edited on February 20, 2015 at 1:02 PM. Reason : zxv]]

2/20/2015 1:02:23 PM

just for fun, let's re-read (or read, if you didn't originally) this part of the article you posted:

Quote :

"Absent from the White House conference is any focus on the domestic terror threat posed by sovereign citizens, militias and other anti-government terrorists that have carried out multiple attacks in recent years. An administration official says the White House is focused on the threat from all terrorists, including from sovereign citizen and other domestic groups. "I don't think it's fair to say the (White House) conference didn't address this at all," the official said, adding that President Barack Obama addressed the need to combat "violent ideologies" of all types. An official at the Justice Department, which is leading the administration's counter-radicalization effort, says many of the tactics aimed at thwarting radical Islamic recruitment of young people can also be used to fight anti-government extremist groups. While groups like ISIS and al Qaeda garner the most attention, for many local cops, the danger is closer to home. A survey last year of state and local law enforcement officers listed sovereign citizen terrorists, ahead of foreign Islamists, and domestic militia groups as the top domestic terror threat."

so if you read that, how in the world did you come to your conclusion of "Speaking of which, what does our leadership do when one of their own makes a statement they want the country to forget? Redirect! Focus on evil whitey."

2/20/2015 1:10:35 PM

When it becomes the primary CNN headline, in 102 font across the top page...

2/20/2015 1:21:43 PM

but you blamed the administration, not CNN

2/20/2015 1:27:56 PM

You're lying to yourself if you don't thing CNN is a mouthpiece for the administration.

2/20/2015 1:48:14 PM

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/19/opinion/bergen-terrorism-root-causes/

Someone forgot to tell Bergen.

2/20/2015 1:58:31 PM

You're lying to yourself if you don't thing CNNfox news is a mouthpiece for (any republican) administration.

so who gives a shit? each side has its cheerleaders.

2/20/2015 2:22:04 PM

CNN is just sensationalist crap. They are beating the war drums over ISIS louder than Fox even...

2/20/2015 2:47:40 PM

Quote :

"You're lying to yourself if you don't thing CNN is a mouthpiece for the administration."

so you think that they are in so deep that they write headlines for them?

2/20/2015 4:48:52 PM

CNNfox news is just sensationalist crap. They are beating the war drums over ISIS louder than FoxCNN even...

same shit, different channel

2/20/2015 5:09:19 PM

The difference here is that I don't deny Fox News is an outlet for the right. It very much is. But not really - they just know what sells. And the right sells. They're making money hand over fist. MSNBC?...crickets.

2/20/2015 6:24:37 PM

I believe you just pulled a Rick James

2/20/2015 6:43:45 PM

I'd rather belong to the party that watches the least amount of cable news. That's just me.

2/20/2015 6:56:02 PM

Quote :

" http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ Long, but good read about what these guys are all about and the quandary they present. I learned, among many other things, that ISIS (and I assume various other sects of islam) expects jesus to come back much like christians do, except he's on their side."

I have not read that yet, but I just stumbled upon this:

The Atlantic’s big Islam lie: What Muslims really believe about ISIS

Trolling the Internet with stories dressed up as sober, centrist scholarship -- it's what the Atlantic does best
http://www.salon.com/2015/02/19/the_atlantics_big_islam_lie_what_muslims_really_believe_about_isis/

I have not read that either. Will read both soon and comment. In the mean time, I hope those who read the Atlantic piece will read the Salon piece and post what they think.

P.S. Found one on the side of the Salon piece:

Noam Chomsky: America paved the way for ISIS
http://www.salon.com/2015/02/16/noam_chomsky_america_paved_the_way_for_isis_partner/


[Edited on February 21, 2015 at 12:21 AM. Reason : Atlantic vs. Salon]

2/21/2015 12:15:52 AM

I don't think I've ever seen Noam Chomsky not blame the US or US policy for something. If you asked that guy why the milk he left in the back of his fridge started to smell he'd say it was because of US aggression. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to answer for based on our meddling in the affairs of others, but we aren't the root cause of the middle east's problems.

Great linguist, but he's more than a bit of a blowhard.

Anyway, I think a lot of this shit can be traced back to the way the middle east was apportioned post World War I and the creation of states full of disparate ethnic and religious groups.

2/21/2015 9:45:09 AM

^ that was just another article i found, but not the main one i want people to read.

and "root" depends on how far you want to go. there are terminal roots, and there are branching roots in between the terminal ones and the stem. the US is definitely one of the recent causes here due to the power vacuum left by removing saddam.

go back further, we have a more 'main' cause, the one you mentioned.

go back a lot further, to the terminal root, you have the shia-sunni split 1,400 years ago.

2/21/2015 10:59:57 AM

For sure there are other factors at work in the middle east, but I firmly believe that not allowing self determination in the region after the Ottoman Empire collapsed fucked that region up as much as anything since the Mongol eruption.

2/21/2015 11:32:59 AM

The root cause of the problems in the middle east was the split between Muhammad's family and heirs after he died.

Carving the area up after WWI didn't help, but the problems go back much further.

2/21/2015 2:26:37 PM

Quote :

"I don't think I've ever seen Noam Chomsky not blame the US or US policy for something."

Could you provide examples of him unjustly blaming US or US policy?

From my understanding of Chomsky, he criticizes foreign governments for their wrongs; however, as a US citizen, he feels that it's his responsibility, more so, to criticize the policies of the US and its state actors.

2/21/2015 4:37:59 PM

It's not like any of this wasn't predicted, other than by the Bush administration who decided to oust Saddam despite inevitably bad outcomes like ISIS. Saddam was a bad dude, but taking him out without any inkling of how to fill the vacuum was the biggest foreign policy blunder of ours, or any American generation.

[Edited on February 21, 2015 at 4:45 PM. Reason : b]

2/21/2015 4:42:55 PM

Quote :

"One of the effects of the invasion was immediately to institute sectarian divisions. Part of the brilliance of the invasion force and its civilian director, Paul Bremer, was to separate the sects, Sunni, Shi’a, Kurd, from one another, set them at each other’s throats. Within a couple of years, there was a major, brutal sectarian conflict incited by the invasion. You can see it if you look at Baghdad. If you take a map of Baghdad in, say, 2002, it’s a mixed city: Sunni and Shi’a are living in the same neighborhoods, they’re intermarried. In fact, sometimes they didn’t even know who was Sunni and who was Shi’a. It’s like knowing whether your friends are in one Protestant group or another Protestant group. There were differences but it was not hostile."

Well, this whole premise is shit. I know it makes it much easier to lay all the blame on the US if you pretend like Pre-invasion Iraq was full of handholding and kumbaya, but it's completely untrue. Iraq was held together by a strongman who empowered the Sunni minority. The fallout once he was ousted was fairly predictable. Now, you can certainly make the argument that US intervention led to this current situation, and it did, but pretending that peaceful coexistence was the previous state is nonsense and ignores the foundational problems in the region.

Chomsky is a very relevant figure in the scholarly world, but he's gotten less and less nuanced in his views over the decades. It's the proverbial "when all you have is a hammer everything begins to look like a nail" issue. His view that the US as the sole global superpower must be at the root of any conflict is so firmly entrenched that he refuses to acknowledge even the possibility that we aren't at fault.

2/21/2015 7:13:47 PM

Quote :

" the biggest foreign policy blunder of ours, or any American generation. "

It was pretty bad, but I think that's a little hyperbolic.

2/21/2015 10:47:59 PM

I hope we send our baddest guys over there for a turkey shoot.

2/22/2015 12:50:22 AM

^^ Which was worse? Slavery? I got nothing after that.

2/22/2015 12:01:19 PM

So I have read both the Salon and The Atlantic articles and I feel like The Atlantic one does a lot better job of getting to the truth of the issue while the Salon is more like, "Well lots of muslims disagree with what ISIS is doing so therefore it can't be any fault of Islam." It can be both and I don't see why we should suppress either. Sure there are plenty of great people who are muslim, I have a few muslim friends who are great people and they would never ever support the things that ISIS does. At the same time, that does not change the fact that what ISIS is doing is based on the letter of the law of Islam.

2/22/2015 1:56:39 PM

Getting involved in WWI was easily worse than anything that has happened in the middle east. IMO Vietnam was a bigger foreign policy disaster, and I think our handling of Cuba with Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis (which legitimately almost ended the world) were worse. One could also argue for our treatment of the Philippines following the Spanish American war.

I'd say the last 12 years in Iraq ranks in the top 5 though.

2/22/2015 3:40:37 PM

The salon column was trash. Didn't actually address any content of the Atlantic piece

2/22/2015 6:58:38 PM

it's the worst of our generation

2/22/2015 7:13:03 PM

That's probably a fair statement. I don't think we've had a president who has done a good job of handling foreign policy since maybe Eisenhower.

2/22/2015 10:54:40 PM

Quote :

"Which was worse? Slavery? I got nothing after that."

Off the top of my head...

Operation Ajax, where we overthrew a not-particularly-bad leader of Iran for not-very-good reasons in order to install an asshole whose sheer assholery would foment a fundamentalist revolution which would, in turn, shape our Middle East policy in very bad ways for decades to come. For example...

Helping Saddam Hussein to fight the Iran-Iraq War arguably had worse consequences than our own invasion of Iraq. Not only was the war horrifically bloody, it further enraged Iran and empowered, well, Saddam Hussein.

Failing to do anything at all during the Rwandan genocide helped close on a million people die, making that particular mistake a bloodier one than Iraq.

The War of 1812 got our capital burned to the ground for no really good reason.

The Vietnam War killed shit tons of Vietnamese and some 57,000 of our own guys, not to mention inflicting lasting damage on most of the neighboring countries, and for what? Nobody hates a red more than me, but this war was a clusterfuck from the Gulf of Tonkin on. And Vietnam helped saddle us with hippies, for which it cannot be forgiven, to say nothing of a wave of disillusionment that poisoned our own politics for years.

Joining WWI was meh, but failing to follow through with our goals at and after Versailles was really, really dumb. Look, Woodrow Wilson was a racist dipshit, but if we had followed through, even a little bit, for just those first few years, we could have averted a lot of pain in the time since. The League of Nations was doomed no matter what, but if we had been in it for those crucial early years we might have at least staved off disaster.

Handing Eastern Europe to the communists was not only disastrous and morally reprehensible, it was born of simple - and avoidable - misunderstanding. Not to say stupidity.

Propping up the Saudi Royal family has done us incalculable harm, and we get it coming and going -- supporting the family pisses off one group of extremists who hate the Saudis. It also helps enable extremist Saudis to support terrorists.

I'm sure I could think of more, if I wanted. The point is, invading Iraq without a follow-up plan was a disaster, but a relatively small one compared with the above. Though I will add the caveat "so far." Hard to know what the future holds, and in the long term Iraq might turn out to top them all. Or maybe a more hard-line Iran will get the big one, drop it on Tel Aviv, and ignite WWIII, and we can all comfortably say that in retrospect, yeah, Ajax was worse.

Quote :

"I don't think we've had a president who has done a good job of handling foreign policy since maybe Eisenhower."

I dunno about all that. Arguably the only good thing about Nixon was his foreign policy. I tend to think that ending the Cold War without missiles flying is a pretty massive accomplishment, so I tend to let that clean the slate for Reagan's mistakes, and George HW Bush managed to the collapse (to say nothing of Gulf War I) very nicely.

2/23/2015 3:28:44 AM

Some of those were worse "moral" decisions, like Rwanda, but we didn't incur much in the way of direct costs for them. What makes Iraq standout for me is the sheer cost benefit analysis at the time. More historical context will only help, but 13 years later and the anti-war camp's day zero predictions are still the most accurate. I can forgive bad policy outcomes when the original idea was (somewhat) sound, but the invasion of Iraq was a telegraphed disaster.

2/23/2015 5:00:55 PM

^ Sort of my line of thinking. Yeah, getting involved in Vietnam was stupid and got a lot of guys killed...but at least our heart was in the right place even if the Domino theory was just wrong. It's still unfathomable to me that we burned a trillion dollars and caused so much destruction in Iraq on what really seems like some power hungry white dudes wanting to wage their version of a religious war and we appear set to have to pay for this for decades to come as every marginalized Muslim in the Middle East keeps coming out of the woodwork to join the latest terrorist craze.

2/23/2015 10:09:53 PM

http://www.vocativ.com/world/isis-2/isis-beheading-video/

Don't worry, there is no video in the link. Interesting short article about how they target the appropriate audience depending on who they behead.

2/23/2015 10:50:43 PM

http://www.vocativ.com/world/isis-2/isis-beheading-video/

Don't worry, there is no video in the link. Interesting short article about how they target the appropriate audience depending on who they behead.

2/23/2015 10:50:43 PM

How was our heart more "in the right place" with Vietnam than in Iraq? In both cases we thought we were combating a threat -- not an imminent or existential one in either case -- and in both cases the fighting started over bad information.

This bit about "power hungry white dudes waging religious war" is pretty screwball, too. I've heard a lot of crackpot theories about why we invaded Iraq, but if we wanted a crusade, Iran would have been the logical choice (and probably an easier sell to the public).

Shrike -- I think part of the issue here is our lack of what you call historical context. You were around for the debate about Iraq. Hell, there was a public debate about Iraq. There were plenty of people who saw the writing on the wall when we started ramping up Vietnam, too, but you weren't there to see it. I'm sure there were people who predicted bad, bad outcomes from Ajax, but they were in a CIA office somewhere, so we don't hear about it. The invasion of Iraq was based on ideas no less sound than these, but it was recent, it happened in the open, and so it seems like the worst idea of all time...without any historical context.

2/24/2015 2:54:39 AM

We didn't think we were fighting an imminent threat with Iraq, the administration knew the evidence was false but led an intentional misinformation campaign to get us to war.

2/24/2015 8:24:20 AM

Quote :

"This bit about "power hungry white dudes waging religious war" is pretty screwball, too."

Ummm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century#Post-9.2F11_call_for_regime_change_in_Iraq

?

You should read their document.

2/24/2015 12:56:10 PM

Quote :

"we aren't the root cause of the middle east's problems. ... Anyway, I think a lot of this shit can be traced back to the way the middle east was apportioned post World War I and the creation of states full of disparate ethnic and religious groups."

(and that's not even what Noam was talking about. We're talking about ISIS here, not ALL THE PROBLEMS IN THE MIDDLE EAST.

Quote :

" Iraq was held together by a strongman who empowered the Sunni minority. The fallout once he was ousted was fairly predictable. Now, you can certainly make the argument that US intervention led to this current situation, and it did, but pretending that peaceful coexistence was the previous state is nonsense and ignores the foundational problems in the region."

So wait are you saying you STILL think invading Iraq was the right thing to do? If so imma need you to post here: message_topic.aspx?topic=642386&page=3

2/24/2015 1:30:07 PM

Quote :

"Shrike -- I think part of the issue here is our lack of what you call historical context. You were around for the debate about Iraq. Hell, there was a public debate about Iraq. There were plenty of people who saw the writing on the wall when we started ramping up Vietnam, too, but you weren't there to see it. I'm sure there were people who predicted bad, bad outcomes from Ajax, but they were in a CIA office somewhere, so we don't hear about it. The invasion of Iraq was based on ideas no less sound than these, but it was recent, it happened in the open, and so it seems like the worst idea of all time...without any historical context."

It's an interesting comparison because both were undertaken for basically the same reasons: control of oil reserves and exerting western influence on the region. It could be argued that Ajax achieved roughly the same goals for cheaper, until the revolution 30 years later.

It's why a lot of people thought that if the main reason was "Saddam bad", just assassinate him and his sons, arm the Kurds, and let the chips fall where they may while maintaining a no fly zone. But it was never about Saddam, or any reason other than the above.

[Edited on February 24, 2015 at 2:16 PM. Reason : :]

2/24/2015 2:14:44 PM

Quote :

"But it was never about Saddam"

Yup, and it's amazing how some people can't see past that.

2/24/2015 2:46:45 PM

0EPII1 -- I have no doubt that there were power hungry white dudes who were in favor of the war, but I've seen zere credible evidence that they wanted a "religious war."

Quote :

"But it was never about Saddam, or any reason other than the above."

I strongly disagree. Exerting Western influence played a role, and oil to a lesser extent, but Saddam and the regime around him were central to the war. Otherwise -- in a counter to your "why not just assassinate him?" which is easier said than done, and indeed which we tried to do -- why go through the destabilizing process of de-baathification? Why bother even attempting to build up the country? I'm sure we could have found a general perfectly willing to assume control (dictatorial, naturally, but with the usual democratic window dressing). Then we prop them up in exchange for serious oil concessions. This is Resource War 101.

No. Our goal biggest goals were to purge the Baathist regime and install a model democracy. Those may have been stupid goals but at least our "hearts were in the right place." Meanwhile, we didn't give a shit about either with Ajax -- we just wanted the oil and to keep the commies out, so we did the simple thing to accomplish that goal.

2/25/2015 6:50:16 AM

Yeah i think you're giving the morons who planned this way too much credit while doing some serious revisionist history. We may not agree on their goals, but we know what their plan was: "We Will, In Fact, Be Greeted As Liberators". In other words, let's just wing it and the big bad US military can handle any contingencies.

Maybe the original plan was to assassinate him, but if so, they went about it in the worst possible way. You don't tell a mother fucker you're coming for him and ramp up no-fly zone enforcement (ie. preparing for ground invasion) a year before. The administration should have kept all the domestic and global focus on Afghanistan, while letting the CIA/Mossad do their thing in Iraq. We know WMDs was bullshit, we know links to terrorism was bullshit, and establishing a "model democracy" was just an excuse when all else failed. Better to be a total fucking idiot than a war criminal.

[Edited on February 26, 2015 at 6:42 PM. Reason : moron]

2/26/2015 6:30:59 PM

im having a hard time finding anything about bush / cheney being war criminals

could you please elaborate

[Edited on February 26, 2015 at 10:35 PM. Reason : -]

2/26/2015 10:19:39 PM

Quote :

"We may not agree on their goals, but we know what their plan was: "We Will, In Fact, Be Greeted As Liberators". In other words, let's just wing it and the big bad US military can handle any contingencies. "

I agree and this is my primary problem with the invasion of Iraq -- not that it occurred, but that it was not thought through all the way.

As to the rest...we know that WMDs were bullshit, yes, and the links to al Qaeda (I won't say to terrorism in general), sure. But I think you've got it backwards. These things were the excuse and the cover for establishing the "model democracy," which is exactly the kind of things neoconservatives believe(d) in.

This was the pervasive strain of thought that gave rise to the "greeted as liberators" idea, that if you could just clear out the dictators and provide some basic help, democracy would flourish in Iraq and spread in the region. On the surface, not knowing much about Islam or the ethnic tensions in the region, it kind of makes sense -- establishing the first true Arab democracy. Sounds good. Then you realize that Iraq is split between two religious factions that hate each other and a Kurdish minority that wants out, and also we're not the only ones meddling in Iraqi politics so it's not quite the nation building play-doh we thought, and, whoops, here's the Arab spring happening on its own for reasons totally unrelated to us, and it's not going real well either.

Obviously this was all naive and ignorant. But I don't think it was rapacious, either (though I'm sure resource-hungry actors were in play).

2/27/2015 4:36:30 AM