In reply to George Friedman's piece on ISIS, I find your confusion as to the source of the weapons that ISIS is using perplexing, George. The weapons are funneled via covert channels from Libya or directly through the Iraqi army "unintentionally". It is quite clear that ISIS was created (or at least enabled) by the U.S. to achieve some geopolitical foreign policy objective, though exactly what remains unclear. Perhaps ISIS was intended to re-establish the balance of power between Sunni/Shiite in the Middle East after the destruction of Iraq and the hegemonic rise of Iran as a regional power player. Perhaps it was intended to castrate Russian plans to use Syria as a dependent state to eventually give it easy access to the Mediterranean for a gas/oil line and a base from which to attack or at least threaten Turkey. Or maybe even both simultaneously. Except for the minor inconvenience of ISIS attacking Western targets... which conveniently gives the state further justification for further castrating freedom. What President Bush began overtly, President Obama continues covertly, which is in line with his training/indoctrination.
Even this "crock" website has done enough research to reliably connect the dots from the U.S. to ISIS: http://stormcloudsgathering.com/the-covert-origins-of-isis
So, I think your confusion as to the source of weapons is, at best, staged, and at worst, deceptive. I know that you are fairly well connected, thus I suspect you know already where the weapons came from and are required by the security establishment to stage confusion since it is likely classified, which I will get to at the end.
So, with that out of the way, the question of what to do about ISIS, now that the unintended (or maybe intended) consequences of increased terrorism in the West are manifesting themselves?
Do we destroy ISIS? Because I have no doubt that the U.S. military is capable of doing this, just doubts as to the fiscal and general prudence of what is the obvious implementation of this course.
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Let's assume we choose to destroy ISIS, like probably Louis R. Woodhill (in the comments) would support. Clearly, we cannot send in the army, because we know how that ends: in nation-building that we cannot afford financially. And if we are going to commit to destroying them, we must use overwhelming force to shorten the conflict to a fiscally sustainable effort. Which leads us to an obvious and straight-forward answer: nuke ISIS.
This has a whole host of positive effects, and a number of negative ones. First, it is affordable, both from a fiscal standpoint and from an American lives standpoint. Obviously, it will result in the complete and total destruction of any state that ISIS is trying to build and correspondingly any power that they might wield, both soft "influential/inspirational" power and all direct hard power in the region. It eliminates almost any American casualties and achieves a foreign policy objective with little to no American lives lost. It removes an enemy of Iran/Shiite power bloc, which is both good and bad, good because it makes the Russians happy (and the Saudis and other Sunnis correspondingly unhappy) and bad because it re-opens the door to Iran becoming a hegemonic power after the billions of dollars spent building ISIS in the first place, which, in my humble opinion, were wasted. With the destruction of ISIS' soft power goes any inspirational power they might wield in the West, which will automatically stifle terrorism since nuking them will be a complete and total victory, at least militarily. However, the unspoken message to Iran will be received loud and clear, striking utter terror and uncertainty into the hearts of Iranian leadership, -- along with unnerving every other world leader -- immediately whipping them into a nuclear frenzy to acquire both weapons and delivery systems, which the Russians will be happy to sell them assuming that the Iranians are willing to pay/can afford. So, despite the boost to the Russian economy, the fear and power of nuclear weapons will once again be at the forefront of every mind worldwide which will lead to a second Cold World War, which might be enough to dissuade actual wars manifested from the currency wars already raging around the world.
This has a handful of very negative effects, such as lowering the ephemeral threshold for "going nuclear" that has existed since the Cold War. The obvious consequences being every state becoming nuclear armed as fast as possible, and perpetuating another Cold War and a nuclear arms race, as well as enabling future nuclear wars. In the past that threshold existed as a "last resort" when faced with total annihilation, so lowering this threshold to "when it is expedient to achieve foreign policy objectives without risking domestic lives", is an obvious negative and furthers the trend of making war too easy. However, the humanitarian costs of this action will be staggering and many tens of thousands of innocent people will die.
-- Side rant: I love how we always claim everyone is innocent until they act in a crazy manner, as if we are qualified to determine guilt and innocence of every man, woman, and child on planet Earth... --
Ultimately, though, it might be better to die in a nuclear flash, than to be raped daily at the hands of ISIS savages. This humanitarian cost will also remind the world that "war is hell" and needs to be treated as such and not cleaned up or neatly wrapped and packaged in nice little drone-sized packets.
So, nuking ISIS is AN answer. Not an easy one, and maybe not the correct one, but it would definitely make a splash.
If we do go this route, we would need a lot of other nation states on board (barring any with ties to ISIS) in order to reduce the diplomatic fallout that would naturally occur after such an event; but, in the end, the increased uncertainty of U.S. nuclear threshold and the re-establishment of the Big Stick diplomacy and the associated and necessary fear that comes with using the biggest of sticks will once again restore American integrity and hopefully transparency, such that when we say "No", other countries will sit up and listen. The cost of this is another Cold World War and a worldwide nuclear arms race, which given our culture's technological bias, I am confident that we will win.
I believe that a such course -- perhaps not as extravagant as nuking ISIS, although I see few legitimate alternatives -- is necessary to clamp down on terrorism abroad so as to drive it away from Western homelands, much like President Bush did by bringing the war to them in Afghanistan. However, I suspect that President Obama has neither the appetite nor the gonads necessary to take such bold action. But the consequences of waiting are potentially even more dire.
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Let us now assume that we do not nuke -- or destroy in some manner -- ISIS, like probably Mike Harrison (also in the comments) supports. This also has a whole host of positive and negative effects.
In the negative, given the obvious intention of the ISIS savages to destroy -- or at least convert -- Western civilization, as has been attempted many times throughout history; not destroying ISIS will allow them to continue to build their caliphate with the eventual goal of forcibly converting all of the world to Islam, or rather their sociopathic brand of it. I am guessing many people might be resistant to this point for ideological reasons, but I doubt that anyone can rationally disprove this. So given their stated goals, if we let them continue to accrue power, eventually, they will become adequately significant to actually force the "clash of civilizations" that they are looking for, and we will be forced to destroy them anyway, but at much greater cost both in time, money, and lives. Similarly, if we let ISIS continue to accrue power, the nations with interests in the region will continue to fight and perpetuate the endless war that is raging in the Middle East, which while being good from a purely geopolitical standpoint, carries with it horrendous humanitarian costs, many of which are already being paid by millions of refugees. Refugees, as both Mauldin and George have addressed, are an economic burden, at least initially, to the host nations. A burden that will very likely sink the European Union as a political entity. I suspect the refugee stream was intentional -- by way of their intentional and very public use of savagery -- on the part of ISIS to weaken Europe's economy and to allow them to more easily infiltrate Europe in order to conduct more terrorist acts to further their goals. I have no doubt that they will use the same opportunity if the U.S. allows it. So given the obvious influx of a handful of terrorists -- which is all that is required amongst the 10,000+ refugees coming to America, most of whom will be "good" people who are actually trying to escape the insanity foisted upon by the U.S. -- the U.S. government will use the terrorist attacks that will follow as an excuse to further strip freedoms from us allowing the state to accumulate even more power, through fear, than we will be able to reverse, opening the way for the Empire of America to begin, with the bread and circuses social programs leading the way.
So, the costs of doing nothing are probably more than all of the wars of the past 30 years combined, simply due to the necessity of people to flee the insanity in the Middle East and the West's endless desire for providing social programs to domesticate citizens. So given the seemingly endless appetite for social programs, both sovereign debt and taxes on both businesses and individuals/families will go up, further castrating the U.S. economy until the U.S. goes 'bankrupt' by lending money until we cannot pay back and then printing money to devalue the massive sovereign debt that we have accrued to 'pay' it off. This will -- or at least has the potential to -- incite a hyper-inflationary economic collapse, much like the Weimar Republic in Germany 19-oughts, as well as end the U.S. dollar hegemony of the world's reserve currency, -- which is already being eroded anyway -- and will either pave the way for new economic superpowers, like China, Russia, or the Islamic State to dominate the global scene or result in complete global chaos if the economic contagion spreads around the world via globalization.
There are a handful of positive effects of doing nothing. For one, the balance of power in the Middle East that President Obama has tried so hard to rebuild will hopefully hold, at the already expended cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, millions of refugees, and billions -- or trillions if you consider the cost of hosting refugees -- of dollars to the West. I can't think of any others off of the top of my head at the moment, but I am sure there are other positive effects.
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So, the case for destroying ISIS is fairly solid, just the manner in which this occurs is in contention. If we can nuke them safely without too much diplomatic chaos and if the world is willing to accept a lowering of the nuclear threshold again and all of the corresponding arms races that will follow in a new Cold World War, then nuking them is a good option. If not, I guess we do nothing and hope and pray that we don't sink ourselves economically as a result and incite all of the chaos that such a sinking will entail.
One final point on the secretive security establishment. While I understand the some secretive stuff is necessary to maintain technical leads, this cloak and dagger geopolitics needs to stop. It is catastrophic for a number of reasons, the chief of which is that it destroys the ability of the American people to actually have a legitimate say in what happens with OUR government, leads to natural abuses and corruptions in the government as power is concentrated in a few sociopaths -- who are no less sociopathic than ISIS, simply less savage... for now -- and to continued degradation of our freedom in the name of national security. Ultimately, I stand with Benjamin Franklin and say: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." and "Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight." These two guiding principles will go a long ways towards restoring the American republic and the American people to their rightful place as masters of this country.
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