The hysterical, foamy-mouthed, knee-jerk reactions from American conservatives have been god-awful too. Xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism -- they're pulling out all the stops. It's demagoguery at its worst. The lowest of the low. The. Absolute. Pits.
- The Obama administration has agreed to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees in 2016. Twenty-some Republican governors informed the President that they will not accept any Syrian refugees in their state, although they have no authority to refuse.
- Ben Carson and Marco Rubio want to block all refugees from any Middle Eastern country.
- Jeb! Bush would offer asylum only to Christians refugees.
- Chris Christie would refuse asylum even for 5 year-old orphans.
- Ted Cruz asserted that the refugees include "jihadists coming here to murder us."
- John Kasich* wants to sell religion by creating a new federal agency to "promote Judeo-Christian values" in Islamic lands.
- Donald Trump says we can't let any refugees in because it might be a "Trojan Horse." He wants to establish a database registry of all Muslims in America (just because they're Muslim), and he wants to put American mosques under surveillance.
- The mayor of Roanoke said we may need internment camps for any Syrians in the U.S., just like our camps for Japanese-Americans in WW II.
- The U.S. House just passed a bill which would stop all Syrian and Iraqi refugees from entering America by adding even more requirements to the screening process, even though there is no evidence of anything wrong with the current process, which is already 18-24 months on average. (It's another GOP special -- a show bill with no chance of becoming law.)
The conserva-tards are confusing refugees with terrorists. The masses of refugees across Europe are not terrorists, they are fleeing terrorists! The refugees are risking their lives and everything they have to escape ISIS, not to become ISIS.
The last thing a would-be terrorist wants to do is get on a refugee asylum waiting list and be thoroughly vetted for the next two years.
The terrorists in the Paris attacks were all European. They weren't refugees. They didn't sneak into any country. They were already there.
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Now, everywhere you turn there's talk of going to war against ISIS, defeating ISIS, destroying ISIS. Whether from the right or left, an unfortunate choice of words. What they mean on the right, clearly, is big-time military intervention. They accuse Obama of being a sanguine sissy for not "doing something." (Never mind the fact that the U.S. has been bombing selected ISIS targets for the past two years.)
To combat ISIS, our conservatives are embracing the same old bad ideas they always come up with, the things that got us into this shit in the first place -- invasion, ground troops, heavy bombardment, occupation, and then??
Almost all the GOP presidential candidates want to send our ground troops into Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS. Most won't specify the number of troops, saying they'll defer to the military experts. (Oh yes, do whatever the generals tell you to do. Always a great idea. Military intelligence.)
Lindsay Graham and Rick Santorum want to send 10,000 American troops. Bill Kristol, publisher of the Weekly Standard, says he'd send 50,000. (Easy for you to say, Mr. Publisher.)
Donald Trump has channeled his inner Curtis LeMay. Bombs away! Quoth the Donald: "I'll bomb the shit out of them, every single inch, nothing left." (It occurs to me that Trump is very much like a barstool pontificater with a drunken opinion on everything. At once funny and frightening.)
When is the last time any of this conventional stuff worked? Our military misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq have been disasters, serving only to create ill-will throughout the destabilized region and spawn ISIS in the process. And now these geniuses want to do more of the same in Syria? Brilliant! I'm sure the outcome will be different this time.
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I'll stick with Obama on this one -- his cool, calm, considered approach is much wiser than the conservatives hair-on-fire freak-out. Terrorism is a problem across the globe. Not the biggest problem, but it's scary and a problem nonetheless. And America is not immune. But we must not succumb to fear and act rashly or stupidly.
Terrorism is not a nation. It has no specific location or organized military forces. Terrorism is just a noun. You can't wage war on a noun. Terrorism does seek power or money or territory for its own sake. It cannot achieve "victory." Terrorism is just a tactic. You can't bomb a tactic. The terrorist/bully wants your reaction, your fear, pain and anger. That's the payoff. When the right wing indulges in their pandering clueless cacophony, they're giving the terrorist/bully ISIS exactly what it wants.
Ergo, all the over-heated rhetoric about defeating ISIS is bullshit. The world will not defeat ISIS any more than it defeated Al Qaeda or Boko Haram or the KKK. You don't "defeat" terrorism. You learn, adapt, and live with it the best way you know how. You out-smart it. You maintain perspective. You take all reasonable precautions. Maybe you engage in a little old-school spycraft, or even work to provide an alternative message* to the radical terrorist message. You play the long game. With patience and time, you take them down notch by notch. Your more rational viewpoint makes them less attractive and less relevant to their audience. You work to shrink them. The bad guys don't disappear entirely, but eventually, the better ideas always rise and take the forefront.
*(I grudgingly concede that Kasich was sort of on the right track, but his idea of promoting Christian "values" to the Islamic world is fucked up. Instead of trying to persuade Muslims that Islam sucks and Christianity is wonderful, the better approach would be constant messaging to reaffirm the peaceful nature of true Islam and stress resistance against the lunatic few who would hijack it. But John-Boy didn't put it exactly that way, did he?)
What you don't do is try to fight unconventional ISIS terrorists with conventional military operations. We can always bring in the sledgehammers and blow up a country and its innocent civilians. We're good at that. It will destroy a region but it won't destroy terrorism. Same-old, same-old doesn't work in this instance. Terrorism is too volatile, too mercurial. Try to hit quicksilver with a sledgehammer and see what happens.
No easy questions, no easy answers. Gotta go with sound long-haul strategy, not bomb-happy instant gratification.
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P.S. If we want to do something intelligent to reduce our risk here in the U.S., we should immediately close the gun show loophole which allows any wanna-be terrorist to buy a small arsenal of military-grade firearms without any background check, and immediately tighten up our lax "law" which keeps those on our so-called terror watch-list from boarding an airplane, but still allows them to buy guns. Unbelievable! 'Murica.
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