I will freely admit that when I heard about the ISIS prisoner burned to death in a cage, I would have supported a massive air strike that leveled everything ISIS controls, and all its encampments, to molten glass.
And then I read this:
“We have had reports of children, especially children who are mentally challenged, who have been used as suicide bombers, most probably without them even understanding,” Winter told Reuters. “There was a video placed (online) that showed children at a very young age, approximately eight years of age and younger, to be trained already to become child soldiers.”And I don't feel any less that such people should be exterminated: violently. Until I read this:
The committee condemned “the systematic killing of children belonging to religious and ethnic minorities by the so-called ISIL, including several cases of mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children and burying children alive.”
In September, the United States launched a bombing campaign targeting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. U.S. intelligence officials told the Daily Beast this week that since the U.S. began bombing Islamic State targets, an estimated 4,000 new fighters have joined the group. (emphasis added)Which violence is the good violence? Which violence will stop the violence? Which violence will dissuade such people from being violent? Can we truly eradicate such malevolence, as we did smallpox? Or might we just as well try to eradicate cockroaches?
This fire cannot be allowed to burn; but are we pouring water on it? Or kerosene?
Nuke it from space...etc?
ReplyDelete*sips red wine thoughtfully?*
They're saying this is a turning point in Jordan, and perhaps elsewhere on the worldwide "Arab Street". Only if the Arab Street turns against ISIS, definitively, will the growth in recruits slow then stop.
ReplyDeleteThe West has been misunderstanding those countries for centuries, violence only increasing a violent response. After what came out of Reagan's policy in Afghanistan you'd think people could learn something about the creation of these mega-terror groups but now we've got one spawned from Bush II's invasion of Iraq.
ReplyDeleteBygones.
ReplyDeleteIf we kill 'em all this time, there will be no more backlash. Alternately, we can invent a time machine and go back to some convenient point in history, maybe 1953, and stop CIA coups and whatnot...
"Then Jesus said to him, ‘Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword."
ReplyDeleteDoes the passage apply to drone bombs, suicide bombs, beheadings, burnings, automatic weapons, or just to swords?
We don't know what we are doing over there. We don't know who are our friends and who are our enemies, and that can change in a day. A simple question we ought to ask ourselves but will not: Are the people in Iraq better off since we invaded? We should just say we've won, get the hell out, and let the people in the Middle East straighten out the bloody mess...or not.