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Paul Krugman: Conscience of a Liberal
The Confluence
Suburban Guerrilla Ian WelshAtrios this morning on the bombing of Iraq.
The war in Iraq was stupid and expensive. But we are responsible for the humans we left behind in the country we messed up.
Filed under: General | Tagged: Atrios, bombing, humanitarian, war is stupid and expensive |
Corrente (Lambert) Avedon’s Sideshow
The Confluence 
This was my response to Atrios:
Options other than bombing to stop ISIS murdering everyone who refuses to join them? Okay, I’m certainly open to suggestions.
(crickets)
Bombs are usually NOT the answer. That doesn’t mean they are never the answer. And that we’ve bombed too often in the past is really irrelevant to making a decision on this now: such questions have to be examined on their own merits, and not as a means of keeping some overall score of right and wrong. No one threatened with being beheaded or crucified by the lunatics of ISIS cares whether we should have invaded Iraq in the first place, anymore than they care that we should have stayed out of Vietnam. Like the people of Bosnia and Kosovo (and Rwanda), they just care whether anyone is going to save them. Personally, I’d prefer we repeat Bosnia and Kosovo over repeating Rwanda.
Ditto
You have to give him credit for resisting a knee jerk response.
Uh, about that “saving” of the people of Bosnia and Kosovo…
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/08/05/washingtons-alliance-with-traffickers-of-human-organs/
And what does Atrios mean, “we”? Can the working classes be truly said to be members of those abstract collectivities called “nations”, rather than the slaves of those collectivities?
Colonel Lang has a very useful post in this vein at his Sic Semper Tyrannis blogsite. Here it is.
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2014/08/if-you-want-to-build-an-effective-local-coalition-of-forces-against-is-a-concert-of-the-middle-east-you-have-to-stop-tryin.html
One of the governments he notes as being necessary to work with in order to stop and destroy ISIS is the government of Syria. Yes that means Assad. I agree. We should drop our support for the rebellion and join Russia and Iran in supporting Assad so he can crush the rebellion and in particular exterminate all ISIS personell in Syria. Then we should move on to helping all these governments to exterminate all ISIS personell and all foreign jihadis who have joined them throughout Iraq. If the Middle East governments consider ISIS the kind of danger which Colonel Lang considers them to be, then they will share his goal.
I believe he merely states his goal for ISIS as defeat. The governments there may decide that the only guarantee of defeat is the physical extermination of every ISIS member and jihadi there. I
find myself unable to disagree with that assessment, if that is their assessment.
I don’t think Colonel Lang is calling on us to go to war against ISIS our own selves. He is just calling on us to support the counter-ISIS governments there while resistance is still possible.
>Uh, about that “saving” of the people of Bosnia and Kosovo…
Uh, as usual you (and your usual left-wing sources) don’t know what you are talking about.
>Can the working classes be truly said to be members of those abstract collectivities called “nations”, rather than the slaves of those collectivities?
Followed by rhetoric many decades past its sell-by date, so that is hardly surprising. If the Right often acts as if nothing happened after 1600, too much of the Left seems stuck in the 1840s, which is still almost 200 years behind reality.
I have no idea whether or not Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com reads the comment threads of this blog or not, but if yes, he must be ROTFLHAO that General T. D. Ripper labelled him “left-wing”. 😆
I don’t think “exterminate” is ever a strategy, but fortunately we don’t need to: not every member of ISIS (or any armed group) is a fanatic who will fight on no matter what. It will be enough to shatter their capability to wage conventional war, and given their “army” is hardly more than a division in size, that is a goal that can be achieved. Right now what is needed is air support to compensate for all the abandoned weapons they picked up when the Iraqi army we failed to build (after disbanding the actual Iraqi army) collapsed at first contact with an enemy.
As I understand Colonel Lang to be implying, America has no valuable contribution to make to anything in terms of actually fighting there. What America can do is work with the governments to give them whatever they need to defeat ISIS to whatever level they think will assure ISIS’s non-presence in the future going forward. If that can be achieved short of comprehensive extermination of every member of ISIS, then I feel confident the governments can be trusted to settle for complete defeat short of actual extermination.
I remain convinced that crushing ISIS will require switching sides in Syria and giving Assad all the help he needs to crush the rebellion and in particular to eliminate ISIS as a presence within the borders of Syria by whatever means the Government of Syria may find expedient or convenient.
And you are correct. “Exterminate” is never a strategy. But it may be a necessary tactic in some cases, and the cannibal liver-eating head chopping dhimmi-taxing minority-exterminating scum filth which is pleased to call itself “ISIS” may well require exterminating as a tactical means of assuring their strategic non-threatingness into the future. That is not for me to determine.
Put in more respectful language, the members of ISIS may be Heroes of Islam who will be all that they can be and will fight to the last man rather than endure the indignity of surrender. (I remember a militarily-interested friend of mine telling me many years ago just after the Argentina-Brittain war over the FALKLAND Islands that whereas many Argentinian soldiers etc. surrendered to the British, not one soldier surrendered to Nepalese Gurka units involved in the fighting.
The Gurkas were somehow able to inspire the Argentinian soldiers to amazing feats of military heroism such that the Argentinian soldiers fought to the last man. Not one Argentinian soldier surrendered to the Gurkas. Not one Argentinian soldier allowed himself to be taken alive.
They fought like kamikaze pilots. That is what the Gurkas said when asked why no prisoners were taken.)
Gurkhas: The Klingons of Earth.
Yes. And Brittain loves them for it. Till they are too old and physically broken to fight any more. Then they have to sue for benefits promised and honor pledged.