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Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

"Universal condemnation" is precisely what they're seeking. The more notoriety, the better. Hence, pushing gay men off of buildings and drowning men in cages (with underwater cameras filming). They are seeking street cred, a rep, a mystique of fear.

Condemnation doesn't work. What does work is a combination of excellent police work in routing out cells of recruiters and operators, and precise, devastating bombing raids followed by boots on the ground to protect and empower the civilians, most of whom would never support these psychopaths by choice.

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Bombing? Boots on the ground? You think these things work? Have you been asleep for the last 15 years?

In comparison to the state of things in Iraq now, they did work. The problem is that the American public(rightly so) were tired of the decade+ long wars and wanted the troops home, so we pulled out. As we saw, the Iraqi military still wasn't able to stand on its own legs against a relatively organized and well-equipped guerilla force.

If Iraq had a fully capable military(instead of the partially capable one they have now), ISIS would never have spread into the country. For all the problems the US and its allies created in Iraq, the country was comparatively much more stable, and for the most part people got on with their lives.

They work but there has to be a commitment to seeing things through no matter the extent of the ensuing carnage, something most western countries have lost their stomach for. See: Chechnya.

> "Universal condemnation" is precisely what they're seeking.

I think they are seeking both selective (that is, among non-Muslims) and poorly focused (at Muslims in general, rather than focused on Daesh in particular) condemnation, rather than "universal condemnation". And they seek that specifically so that the Muslims, who are the population they target to establish dominion over in the form of a Caliphate, will see non-Muslims as a threat (because Muslims become seen by non-Muslims as a threat) against whom Daesh is the only defense, and that the cost of accepting the dominion that Daesh offers is lower than the cost of being outside of it (they also want Muslims to be afraid of defying Daesh, which also makes the cost of accepting dominion less than the cost of rejecting it.)

I agree that they are seeking universal condemnation, which at the same time confuses me. It seems to me that no matter what the differences are, eventually everyone will unite with a single goal to defeat them. Angering the entire world in order to get publicity and instill fear is only going to backfire on them in the end. It seems that they're already on a steady path towards failure.

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