If only that gumption extended to the US tax payer footing the bill to be spied upon.
I am dismayed, nay, infuriated that we waste taxpayer dollars in such a manner when the returns have been found to be non-existent. Yet, I read about atrocities committed every day by ISIS and the US government sits back and does little.
This is not the world I want to live in, and I have no idea how to solve these non-technical problems.
EDIT: Regarding downvotes and the replies as of 1433272217:
If ISIS wants us to engage them, we just sit back and allow them to rape whole villages and sell women into the sex trade?
You don't go to war for oil. You go to war for human rights and to prevent the slaughter and abuse of innocent people.
Perhaps this is venturing into political territory, but what "returns" would you expect from an expedition into Syria to engage ISIS?
Letting them continue to alienate themselves amongst all the other Muslims on the planet by the way they treat their fellows (if you're Muslim, but don't believe in IS's specific notions of the caliphate, you're an apostate, and must be killed) will, in the long run, do more to destroy them than even nuking all of Syria ever could.
EDIT: re your edit: if the West engages militarily with IS, that becomes an even bigger recruiting tool for them than did the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine how many villages will be raped and killed and sold into sex slavery when IS has three times as many crazy fucknuts who all believe their heinous idiocy?
So, yes, by all means. Let's just go ahead and print their recruiting posters too, while we're at it.
This is long, but it's well worth the read. The Atlantic's article, titled "What ISIS Really Wants": http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isi...
Don't mistake me. I think IS and what they're doing are heinous and disgusting. But to react to what they're doing and try to stop them with force of arms will be massively counter-productive. Sometimes, blowing shit up just makes it worse. I mean, IS wouldn't even be a thing if the US hadn't blown up Iraq. How, exactly, is doubling down a good idea, again?
In the days immediately after 9/11, I said in an online forum to some friends that I really didn't want the US to spend the next several decades playing Whack-a-Mole with the jihad-inclined parts of Islam. Guess what we've done, and what you seem to be calling for doing...
Waiting it out is not an option.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-bur...
"Amid all the atrocities carried out by Isis — its massacres of civilians, its beheading of hostages, its pillaging of antiquities — the systematic violence the jihadists have carried out against countless enslaved women and girls never fails to shock. For months now, we've heard appalling testimony from women who escaped Isis's clutches, many of whom endured rape and other hideous acts of violence."
"Here's a chilling excerpt: "After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness. The youngest, and those considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices and are sent to Raqqa, the IS stronghold."
"We heard about one girl who was traded 22 times, and another, who had escaped, told us that the sheikh who had captured her wrote his name on the back of her hand to show that she was his 'property'."
"Estimates vary, but there are believed to be somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 women enslaved by the Islamic State. Many are Yazidis, a persecuted minority sect that the extremist Islamic State considers to be apostate "devil-worshippers," in part because of the Yazidis' ancient connection to the region's pre-Islamic past. The jihadists' treatment of Yazidi women, in particular, has been marked out by its contempt and savagery."
Here's Bangura again: "They commit rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and other acts of extreme brutality. We heard one case of a 20-year-old girl who was burned alive because she refused to perform an extreme sex act. We learned of many other sadistic sexual acts. We struggled to understand the mentality of people who commit such crimes."
This is where I am torn. The short term is horrific, but by engaging militarily it seems that we ensure that we have the same problems in the future.
How do we break the cycle? How can we use the resources and technology at our disposal to protect the innocent, without adding more fuel to the fire?
An open ended question. I'm not sure what the answer is. We look at it in terms of "non violent intervention" vs "military operation" and I can't help but wonder what options in the middle we are leaving out due to the myopic nature of our society.
So, like what Australians did to their indigenous population right until the 70's for example:
>The Stolen Generations (also known as Stolen children) were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals occurred in the period between approximately 1909 and 1969, although in some places children were still being taken until the 1970s.
The children were placed in concentration camps, forced into servitude for white families, and often raped.
>The report said that among the 502 inquiry witnesses, 17% of female witnesses and 7.7% of male witnesses reported experiencing a sexual assault while in an institution, at work, or with a foster or adoptive family.
The main idea was to "white out" their population (sometimes decorated with some racist BS about protecting the children from their savage parents that were unfit to parent them etc, but other times spelled out clearly).
Or how about what the current "allies", and highly sophisticated people, the Germans did, less than a century ago, to several million jews, gays, gypsies and commies...
Or how about the ever popular torture, rape, sexual assalts etc. perpetuated by armies wherever they ventured to bring "democracy" to (it's not like the pictures from that prison in Iraq were that far back).
I'm giving those examples to put what's happening there in some perspective, because some people just see "them, uncivilized subhumans" and "us, sophisticated democrats", whereas it's more like the pot calling the kettle black, with the exception that the pot has better PR and pisses far away from where he lives, so the stink doesn't come as easily...
The problem is they haven't just "previously been committed" they are constantly being commited by people who pretend to have the "moral high ground".
Even on a much larger scale than ISIS.
So it helps to a) highlight the hypocrisy, b) highlight the unsuitability and inner motives of self-proclaimed saviors, c) bring to the front additional atrocities that need to be aknowledged and stopped.
If there's a serial killer in your town that's killed 300 people, it's not actually optimal to mobilize the whole town to go catch a gang that killed 2 people in a nearby village.
Especially if your actual target is to get some access to some nice beach-front property in the nearby village, so you could not give less fucks about the effectiveness of your methods or what happens after your involvement. (E.g. civil war, chaos, and hellish instabililty in what were more of less stable societies for decades).
Case in point: who destroyed Iraq's stability and helped ISIS take over in the first place?
The last time we "had to" intervene in the Middle East because "waiting it out is not an option", we generated the conditions giving rise to the Islamic State.
Perhaps we need to consider more than whether there is something we don't like going on in the region, but also whether we have a the capability to actually execute something that has net positive result, when considering the social/political impacts of our involvement, including the reactions of people in the region to the US specifically acting in the region, given our historical and current involvement with regional actors.
Everytime the US acts in the region, it promotes, rather than reduces, anti-western Islamic extremism. There's lots of obvious and subtle reasons for that (the least subtle being the convenient propaganda magnet for extremist groups that our involvement with Israel, combined with the Israel/Palestine conflict, combined with pretty much any of the inevitable accidents of war -- and even worse, any actual abuses by US troops, whether as policy or by rogue bad actors -- provide.)
America did not intervene militarily in Syria (covertly, perhaps, but not militarily) yet Syria managed to fall apart. Similar to Syria, Iraq was an autocracy/oligarchy in which a religious minority ruled over a religious majority with pretenses of secularism. If these conditions were sufficient for the destabilization of Syria, it seems to me unclear whether the conditions for destabilization of Iraq were introduced with American invasion or were simply dormant.
Oh, you mean like Saddam putting his soccer coach in a plastics shredder? (Didn't happen. Nobody followed up on who planted that story.)
ISIS are an insignificant mock army of goat herders with guns. They could be eradicated in an afternoon. It's presense though helps with strategic goals of instability for the region.
>You don't go to war for oil. You go to war for human rights and to prevent the slaughter and abuse of innocent people.
That has never happened in the history of modern war. It was all about strategic interests, political influence and resource grabbing.
Heck, if anything lots of dictators have been put to place and pampered, allowed to "rape whole villages" and kill innocent people, by the same people pretending to care for "human rights" in other instances. From Mossadeq to being in bed with Shaddam, the Taliban, Pinochet, Saudi Arabia, El Salvador "death squads", etc. And then bringing even more death and chaos when those deals went out of favor or allies changed.
Besides that's the role of cops. Who appointed any country world cop? Should third countries had invaded the US to end "slavery", seggregation, the "police state" killing blacks etc?
You don't appoint someone to do the right thing. The US civil war was large enough that it was tantamount to another country (the North) overthrowing the South to end slavery.
Only slavery was just a pretext for that war.
The North claimed that the war was about preserving the Union, not about slavery.
So how was slavery a "pretext" for the war?
Its being about slavery was just the story offered to the polity in order to sell them on having a war at all.
The Union never claimed the war was about slavery (which would have been counterproductive, since the North contained slave states), but instead consistently said the war was about preserving the Union.
So, no, it wasn't a story offered to the polity to sell them on having a war. Because it wasn't the story offered to the polity at all.
This is true, if you omit the 'all'.
> That has never happened in the history of modern war.
This is not true.
A state may go to war for both human rights and self-interests; these are not always contradictory. One casus belli does not preclude others, and it is better that a state have more than one reason to go to war. It might be rare for there to be a war that is actually fought for humanitarian means, but I would argue than one modern example is the Cambodian-Vietnamese War [0]. A Cynic might say that this war was for solidifying Vietnam's influence in the region, and the international reaction was to view the war as such, but perhaps there was a hint of sincerity in the Vietnamese propaganda claiming one reason for the war was to stop Khmer Rouge's domestic terror.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_Wa...
Because that is a problem we don't have in the U.S...
That is the only way. Other way is to use your second amendment rights.
For any other cause let people contribute out of their own volition.Which works much better.