Posted on 03/06/2017 6:30:07 PM PST by Lorianne
Until fundamentalist Islam gives up its goals, we can either fight it, join it, or die. Which is your preference?
The idea it cannot strike us from afar, soon, if not immediately, is naïve in the extreme. The idea it would not strike us if we leave it alone is even more absurd.
If we are not the “Sheriff”, or at least not the biggest part of the “Sheriff”, who is? Someone will be. What are the ramifications of that?
Please do not misunderstand: I believe Obama and Hillary bear much of the responsibility for about 400,000 dead Syrians, plus the rise of ISIS. That was unnecessary. But by the same token, we cannot allow fundamentalists to seriously disrupt the flow of oil & gas from the ME: The world economy is on shaky ground, and might well collapse. Nor can we allow a country like Iran to develop nuclear weapons and / or long range missiles.
Thus my melancholy. It just might be we're on an irreversible trajectory to the end of civilization as we know it.
Radical islamist kill more Muslims than anyone else. Their main focus is on creating a new umma or caliphate in the Middle East and North Africa. Sure they would like to expand ... but that is where we come in.
However, Europe is not stopping them from expanding so they are, in effect, our enemies.
Job one is we stay out of there and they stay out of here.
That is the way I look at it.
If you read history you will realize that we will never eliminate radical Islam. If we managed to do that (which we won’t) then some other radical something will take its place. All one has to do is read the history of the region. Constant war, constant genocide and general mayhem, with some period of relative peace under strongmen-tyrants.
Do we want to be there spilling our blood for decades, centuries even? It’s a vast area that we cannot cover with our relatively small population.
I do agree about nuclear weapons, but we don’t need a constant ground war to keep those in check.
Russia got its ass kicked in Afghanistan.
We’ve been there 15 years and gotten virtually nothing accomplished (except a lot of our people killed or maimed).
And that is only one country with a tiny number of the overall Muslim population.
Muslims make up almost a quarter of the world’s population (and growing). We make up barely 5% of the world’s population.
To do what some here propose we would have to devote all of our able bodied people and all of our resources and energy into that one goal. And we cannot expect help from other countries, especially if we are making enemies of them too (like Russia).
What we CAN do is protect our borders and the open seas (for now). And we can stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons (for now). Long range, it does not look good for us unless we are prepared for centuries of all out war with a good percentage of the world’s population. They are growing and we are not.
If they are killing each other, then why get in the way of that? That helps us in the short term.
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