European views on ISIL

Well and also to be fair, it seems from all the recent news that the United States has decided it's more efficient to do our public executions in the street without the unnecessary expense of arrests or trials.

There's a reason the real Jazz Age was in Paris, not America.

We have to be more back and forth when pointing fingers. We still haven't had a female president; in that respect we are still in the dark ages with respect to Pakistan, the Phillipines, Sri Lanka, Latvia, Indonesia, Kryzgyztan...all with majority or substantial minority muslim populations.

or France apparently.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/world/middleeast/isis-transforming-into-functioning-state-that-uses-terror-as-tool.html?_r=0

An interesting article that starts by pointing out how ISIS controlled territories are becoming more stable than the ineffectual governments that came before, then makes a very pertinent historical point:

"Drawing on parallels from history, experts say, the group’s violence can be seen in a different light. Mr. Walt mentioned the guillotine of the French Revolution, and the atrocities of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the Communist one in China — imperfect analogies, to be sure, but ones that underscored the violence and oppression that can precede creation of a revolutionary state.

“At the time, these movements were regarded as completely beyond the pale and a threat to international order,” he said.

Mr. McLaughlin pointed to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant organization seen as a terrorist group in the eyes of the West and now a legitimate political player, and also reached back centuries to the brutality of English royalty.

“If you look at what the English kings did to consolidate their territories in the 14th and 15th centuries,” he said, “they were not only beheading people but disemboweling them.”

William McCants, the director of the Project on U.S. Relations With the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and an expert on the evolution of the Islamic State, said the historical analogies are accurate.

“We in the West have bought into this idea that insurgency and counterinsurgency is a battle for hearts and minds,” he said. “We forget how many states have been established through brutality.”

Mr. McCants said this was an underlying theme in his forthcoming book, “The ISIS Apocalypse,” to be published in September. “You’d like to say that treating people well and good governance go hand in hand,” he said, “but it’s not the case.”

I think that's a fair perspective- we tend to forget the atrocities committed in the founding of our modern societies.

I don't think the French Revolution or Communism started off evil, or are intrinsically evil. they may have become so eventually, but at the base they were about egalitarian ideals. isis are pure evil from day one, with no redeeming features.

And there you have it folks!

ISIS, worse than Communism and the French!

(Sorry, I just dropped in and read your post out of the context of the larger discussion Mrs. Figg.)

not so sure about the French. some of their cheese is evil.

This line jumped out at me:

NY Times wrote:“We in the West have bought into this idea that insurgency and counterinsurgency is a battle for hearts and minds,” he said. “We forget how many states have been established through brutality.”

Counter-insurgency absolutely involves hearts and minds, but it's also a fundamentally tribal conflict (especially when the society is literally organized along tribal lines).  I don't think it's possible to overstate how much more forgiving people are of their own "tribe" (however that's defined in any given circumstance) than others.  The US and coalition forces, not being part of any of the tribes or other factions on the ground, had to try to build alliances from basically nothing (except for the Kurds, with whom we had some good will built up from protecting them with the no-fly zones).  But the Iraqi Shias were utterly fucked over in the aftermath of the First Gulf War and had no reason to trust the US, and of course every killing by coalition troops or mercenaries alienated more people of whatever group the deceased was from.  The US literally bought the allegiance of many Sunni tribes during Petraeus' tenure but the Shia-majority government that we left in place didn't continue that policy after the US withdrawal, so many of those tribes are now allied with ISIS.  Doesn't help that the Shia-controlled government, after having been oppressed for so long by the Sunni majority favored by Saddam, weren't interested in treating the Sunnis justly either (not that they are/were in any way as bad as Saddam).

For ISIS to become a functioning state would require not only the cessation of foreign hostilities, but a peace with (or outright defeat of) the Assad government and a defeat of the myriad of other rebel groups in Syria and Iraq. Then they would have to consolidate their control on territory outside the major cities and highways. Then they would face probably the biggest challenge, which is continuing to enforce their puritanical rules on their military and tribal allies once there is no longer an immediate outside reason for them to remain allied. It's possible this could happen (the Bolsheviks and the Ayatollahs managed to defeat all of the other strands of the Russian and Iranian revolutions respectively and create ideologically extreme states in the aftermath), but that's far from a sure thing.

Eldorion wrote:

NY Times wrote: The US literally bought the allegiance of many Sunni tribes during Petraeus' tenure but the Shia-majority government that we left in place didn't continue that policy after the US withdrawal, so many of those tribes are now allied with ISIS.  Doesn't help that the Shia-controlled government, after having been oppressed for so long by the Sunni majority favored by Saddam, weren't interested in treating the Sunnis justly either (not that they are/were in any way as bad as Saddam).

IMHO the second biggest mistake we made (after invading in the first place) was defining the Ba'athist Party as the enemy.  By "deba'athification" we opened the playing field the the ancient Sunni/Shia sectarian divisions which was bad enough. But worse, we left an ideological void for anybody who saw themselves as pan-Arab (I'm sure we were on some levels thinking "Divide and Conquor".  

If we'd had the foresight after removing Saddam from power to empower the existing nonsectarian Iraqi bureaucrats and administrators within the structure Ba'ath Party, we might not have had a failed state, and pan-Arabs in Syria would have had a western socialist model to look towards when they dreamed of an Islamic State.  The thumbnail history of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and all it's drama is well worth reading if you're going to try to understand ISIL and where it sprang from.

I agree that de-Ba'athification was a disaster, and dissolving the Iraqi army in the way that Bremer did was undoubtedly a big part of the reason why so many ex-Ba'athists ended up in the ISIS camp. Not that I'm by any means a fan of the Ba-athist regimes, and some form of ideological restructuring was probably necessary once we were in charge (though I agree we shouldn't have invaded in the first place), but it was a completely backwards attempt at nation-building. Bremer and co. should have studied the occupations of Germany and Japan more closely.

Eldorion wrote: Bremer and co. should have studied the occupations of Germany and Japan more closely.

Agreed. The world would be a safer place if the Bremer's and Rumsfeld's could be safely locked up in ivory towers to study history.

What keeps a government running is the petty bureaucrats, not the leaders. Removing the Ba'ath party in one stroke removed the entire government structure that could have been used to keep things working. Aside from history, Bremer should have studied the Iraqi government structure to realize that the only way people could work in government was to be a party member. He was criminally stupid on two fronts and we are paying for it.

BBC News reporting on a statement from the Afghan government (apparently supported by sources in the Pakistani Taliban) that Mullah Omar died from health problems in 2013. This is major news if true, and it does sound like a more credible report than most terrorist leader death stories.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33703097

This article is worth a read, its not short but its author is worth listening too as someone who knows what they are on about.

http://www.newstatesman.com/world/middle-east/2015/09/islamist-zero-hour

Authors bio- John Jenkins is a former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq, Syria and Burma. He also served as consul general in Jerusalem, as director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Foreign Office in London and with British diplomatic missions in Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Malaysia. He is now executive director (Middle East) for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and is based in Bahrain.

what is this thing about calling them deash or whatevz?

(also i love the signature forest, the revenants is a really good series)

It's all about the power of a name.  Until recently everybody has been translating their name as Islamic State in Wherever (IS, ISIL, ISIS ect. ) but in Arabic it contracted  to something like DAESH.

I understand that the Arabic-speaking world has started making puns about Daesh that translate something like "Evil Empire" which is hurting recruiting, so they're trying to get away from that.   Meanwhile it's beginning to dawn on some people in the west that if you constantly talk about an Islamic State (that doesn't really exist) you might actually be helping with the recruiting accidentally.  Suddenly DAESH starts sounding better.

brilliant. says it all really.

Woo Hoo !!

(though the pluralistic liberal side of me is indignant)

if you are referring to Neil, he isn't anti-Islam he included Zidane in that list.

I was referring to the virgins.

oh

Holy Crap!! Hilary Benn's speech. probably the best speech in 70 years. where was he when we needed a new labour leader?