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Originally Posted by spence
Nobody, including Obama, is stating we don't defend ourselves. The difference is simply that Obama's policy has an appreciation for the real root-cause drivers of the terror problem. A big piece of this is how disillusionment feeds the radicalization engine.
If disillusion is the freeing of self from illusion doesn't that free the self to see what is real? If one were disillusioned with his religion wouldn't he abandon it rather than embrace it more deeply?
If the disillusion is in other people's way of life, should he not be happy that he did not have to live their way? Why would he sacrifice his life to destroy someone else's illusion? And if he were disenchanted with the illusion that someone other than of his religion or people occupied his territory, why would he not be satisfied when those others left?
Could it be that disillusion is not a "real root cause driver"?
ISIS was begging the US to invade a few years ago. Had we done so the situation today would likely be 100x worse than it is. There's a reason we're not carpet bombing as Ted Cruz promises to do, because it would turn the entire population against us leave millions without any infrastructure in which to live.
Need we conjecture about what if? What if we hadn't pulled our troops out of Iraq in the first place? We don't know, do we? And 100x worse is a tad exaggerated, don't you think? Isn't that the type of hyperbole that Jim in CT is criticized for? And aren't millions leaving the ISIS areas as it is? If the entire population was against us, maybe they wouldn't want to come here. Many of us would think that is a good thing.
At any rate, what you conjecture verges on gibberish.
The big pieces of this puzzle have been slowly moving in place for a century, there's no simple or quick solution. I'd note that over the past year ISIS leadership and their territory are both shrinking...
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It's good that over the past year ISIS leadership and territory have shrunk. If ISIS is eradicated, with a protracted soft war rather than a precipitous harsh one (occaisionally infused with Russian harshness) will that solve the "puzzle?"
So it's a puzzle. And we are appreciating the "real root cause drivers" of the puzzle. And we are a century into the appreciating, but haven't quite got it yet.
Some, on the other hand, see the "puzzle" as having moved for well over a millennium. And not gotten any nearer a solution. Rather, the pieces periodically fall apart and re-pattern in various ways, but always a puzzle.
Except for those pieces of the puzzle who are not illusioned. Who are, and have always been, sure. They have always held to the confidence of their convictions. Gee, I wonder who they could be. Perhaps, if the rest of us were disillusioned about the nature of Islam the puzzle would fit together perfectly. But we must never point to Islam being a part of the puzzle. There are, after all, fixable parts . . . such as "real root cause drivers."