re: #3 Great White Snark

1. Okay, say we send thousands of troops in and the jihadis melt into the civilian population. Then what? How do we tell them apart? Do we just go ahead and kill innocents along with the bad guys? And what about the right-wing Christian nutters in the military—there are still a bunch of them—what happens when they start up again with Bible verses on rifle scopes, or passing out Bibles in the local language as “gifts”, like they did in Afghanistan?

You could also pick any of the 10 items from this list. And all that’s not even counting private contractors overstepping, American soldiers killing & raping (not many, but it did happen), or things like Abu Ghriab, pissing on corpses, etc. I know what Daesh does is worse and/or on a larger scale, but is that really against whom we want to measure ourselves?

I understand that war is tough & stressful and there are going to be excesses, but the added religious element in dealing with Muslims makes it much, much more of a minefield (pun not intended), especially considering the centuries-long animosity between the West and the Muslim mideast. And now that everyone has smart phones and access to social media…

Add to all of that our decades of using the Mideast as a proxy theater for fighting the Soviets, our support of despotic tyrants, the disastrous results of our ill-conceived “nation building”, our very close relationship with Israel (Netanyahu just made things way worse this week), and I really have trouble being optimistic about us getting involved again. We thought AQ was really bad until Daesh came along—what if we go in there and make it even worse?

We have a LOT of baggage, my friend.

2. I believe the local Arab states can be rallied, but we keep enabling their reluctance, IMHO. Why should they fight when we’re willing to do it for them?

3. Let’s say we do go in—how are we going to pay for it?