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The dangers of overreaction to terrorism
#1
Yea!

Quote:Sulaimaniya, Iraq — As one could see from President Obama’s recent interview in The Atlantic, he pretty much hates all the Middle East’s leaders including those of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Iran and the Palestinians. Obama’s primary goal seems to be to get out of office being able to say that he had shrunk America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, prevented our involvement on the ground in Syria and Libya, and taught Americans the limits of our ability to fix things we don’t understand, in countries whose leaders we don’t trust, whose fates do not impact us as much as they once did. After all, the president indicated, more Americans are killed each year slipping in bathtubs or running into deer with their cars than by any terrorists, so we need to stop wanting to invade the Middle East in response to every threat.
Does Obama Have This Right? - The New York Times

Again the question surfaces, what did that $2 trillion invasion in Irak actually deliver. Is the US any safer after all those lives wasted?
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#2
But there is also another side, from the same article:

Quote:But sitting here also makes you wonder if Obama hasn’t gotten so obsessed with defending his hand’s-off approach to Syria that he underestimates both the dangers of his passivity and the opportunity for U.S. power to tilt this region our way — without having to invade anywhere. Initially, I thought Obama made the right call on Syria. But today the millions of refugees driven out of Syria — plus the economic migrants now flooding out of Africa through Libya after the utterly botched Obama-NATO operation there — is destabilizing the European Union. The E.U. is America’s most important economic and strategic partner and the other great center of democratic capitalism. It amplifies U.S. power, and if it is hobbled, we will have to do so much more on our own to defend the free world. We and the E.U. together have got to think about how to create safe places in Libya and Syria to stem the refugee tide before it breaks the E.U. History will not be kind to Obama if he just turns away.
Does Obama Have This Right? - The New York Times

The question is, how to get the balance right, and what can the US actually do. This is much more complicated than the usual rightwingers solution has it, you're not going to bomb these people into submission. That's like stepping into a puddle, it spreads and multiplies.
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#3
The article has a few very useful suggestions:

Quote:At the same time, Obama has an opportunity that no U.S. president ever had before. Two fledgling democracies have emerged in the Middle East — on their own. One is in Tunisia, whose civil society leaders won the Nobel Peace Prize, after writing the most democratic constitution ever in the region. But today guns, refugees and Islamist terrorists coming from Libya, which we recklessly uncorked, are helping destabilize the Tunisian experiment. The West should be all over Tunisia with economic, technical and military assistance. “Tunisia is a start-up democracy,” its former Prime Minister Mehdi Jomaa told me. “It may be small, but its leverage for the future of the region is enormous. I can’t imagine any stability in the region if Tunisia doesn’t succeed.”

The other self-ignited democracy experiment is Iraqi Kurdistan, where the Kurds on their own built an American-style university in Sulaimaniya, because they want to emulate our liberal arts, and just opened a second American University, in Dohuk. But tiny Kurdistan today is hosting 1.8 million refugees from other parts of Iraq and from Syria, and with low oil prices, it’s almost bankrupt. The Kurdish government, which was allowing a strong opposition party to emerge and a free press, is now backtracking, with its president, Massoud Barzani, refusing to cede power at the end of his term, and the stench of corruption is everywhere. The Kurdish democratic experiment is hanging by a thread. More U.S. aid conditioned on Kurdistan’s getting back on the democracy track would go a long way. “It is one big game of survivor out here,” said Dlawer Ala’Aldeen, president of the Middle East Research Institute in Kurdistan. “America needs to constructively engage the Kurds, offer them conditional help and make them the partner that America deserves. Here, everyone listens to and likes America. [The Kurdish] people want America to protect them from Iran and Turkey.” Kurdistan and Tunisia are just what we dreamed of: self-generated democracies that could be a model for others in the region to follow. But they need help. Unfortunately, Obama seems so obsessed with not being George W. Bush in the Middle East that he has stopped thinking about how to be Barack Obama here — how to leave a unique legacy and secure a foothold for democracy … without invading.
Does Obama Have This Right? - The New York Times
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#4
Flow of foreign fighters plummets as Islamic State loses its edge

LONDON — The flow of foreign fighters to the ranks of the Islamic State — once a mighty current of thousands of radicalized men and women converging on Syrian and Iraqi battlefields from nations across the globe — has been cut to a trickle this year as the group’s territory has shrunk and its ambitions have withered.
The decline, officials and experts say, has been dramatic, prolonged and geographically widespread, with the number of Europeans, Americans, North Africans and others joining up to fight and die for the idea of a revived Islamic caliphate falling as precipitously as the terrorist group’s fortunes. 
From a peak of 2,000 new foreign recruits crossing the Turkish-Syrian border each month, the Islamic State and other extremist groups operating in Syria are down to as low as 50, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.
...

More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eur...%252Bworld


It will be interesting how the Republicans can spin the 'Obama is losing the war against ISIS/terrorism' argument in the face of facts such as this, if indeed true.
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#5
(09-09-2016, 06:32 PM)BobL Wrote: Flow of foreign fighters plummets as Islamic State loses its edge

LONDON — The flow of foreign fighters to the ranks of the Islamic State — once a mighty current of thousands of radicalized men and women converging on Syrian and Iraqi battlefields from nations across the globe — has been cut to a trickle this year as the group’s territory has shrunk and its ambitions have withered.
The decline, officials and experts say, has been dramatic, prolonged and geographically widespread, with the number of Europeans, Americans, North Africans and others joining up to fight and die for the idea of a revived Islamic caliphate falling as precipitously as the terrorist group’s fortunes. 
From a peak of 2,000 new foreign recruits crossing the Turkish-Syrian border each month, the Islamic State and other extremist groups operating in Syria are down to as low as 50, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.
...

More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eur...%252Bworld


It will be interesting how the Republicans can spin the 'Obama is losing the war against ISIS/terrorism' argument in the face of facts such as this, if indeed true.

They will probably just ignore it and move to the next talking point.

Or we can simply ask Trump for his secret plan to defeat ISIS in, what was it, a week?
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#6
Here is what the Breitbart and the whole right-wing scaremongering have achieved

The biggest concern of US citizens is.... terrorism!

This is completely irrational. Terrorism is one of the smallest causes of death in the US. What kills multiple orders of magnitude more people, stuff like traffic accidents, opiate addiction, gun deaths, pollution. It's really boggles the mind that rightwingers are terrified about terrorism (at least they claim so) while gun ownership is so staunchly defended that even people on the no-fly list (potential terrorists) are deemed save to buy a gun.

[Image: CyD6QX8WgAYjAbY.jpg:large]
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#7
Quote:The presentation marked a coming-out of sorts for Jones, who had announced the event a month earlier at a regular weekly luncheon in nearby Winston-Salem that features different conservative speakers and Republican elected officials. About 20 people attended, representing professional conservative activists, GOP volunteers and militia types. Reading from the text, Jones recited to about 20 of his fellow hard-right activists: “Brotherhood-linked organizations are establishing networks throughout the Bible belt.” Turning his head from right to left, he paused for dramatic effect and remarked: “I think that’s where we live.”

J
ones’s presentation was repeatedly interrupted by comments about killing Muslims from Frank del Valle, a staunchly anticommunist Cuban immigrant, with little or no pushback from the others in the room. “Can we not kill them all?” Del Valle asked, about 15 minutes into the presentation, during a discussion about the differences between the Sunni and Shia sects of Islam.
Islamophobia grows louder in North Carolina: 'Can we not kill them all?' | US news | The Guardian
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#8
Immigration bans and the hyped up rhetoric could just push more domestic wolfs over the edge


Quote:The reactions to Khalid Masood’s attack last week played out with script-like predictability: rightwing commentators tried desperately to blame the actions of this Kent native on immigration, while the media pored over whatever anecdotes they could find from neighbours and schoolmates. All The Day Today cliches were ticked off: he was “always polite”, he came from “a normal family”, he once “got drunk” as a teenager. This kind of desperate profiling plays to people’s desire to believe we should be able to spot terrorists. But while rent-a-gobs flail around naming and shaming Kent and drunk teenagers, it is telling how rarely one feature common to many “lone wolf” attackers is called out: a history of domestic abuse.
What do many lone attackers have in common? Domestic violence | Hadley Freeman | Opinion | The Guardian

It's very difficult to argue where psychological problems end and terrorism begins, most of these are just people who are very sick and cling to some narrative that is endlessly repeated in the media to do something that matters.
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#9
Quote:You could almost hear the sighs of relief as CBS News tweeted out the news: “NYPD says crash in Times Square was likely DWI, not terrorism.” The news came after a car on Thursday crashed into a crowd at Times Square, killing an 18-year-old woman and injuring 22 others — triggering fears that this was yet another terrorist attack like those we had seen in Nice, FranceLondonBerlin; and Stockholm, Sweden.

Immediately, just about everyone in media knew what this would mean: This story would suddenly get a lot less attention. If it was a terrorist attack, it would lead to days of 24/7 news coverage about the threat of terrorism. If it’s just a drunk driving incident, maybe it’ll get some traction for the day, but not much after.

We should care about both terrorism and alcohol-related deaths. But terrorism kills at worst a few dozen Americans each year, while alcohol is linked to at least 88,000 deaths annually, of which more than 10,000 were driving-related in 2015. Yet terrorism gets far more media attention.
The Times Square car crash probably wasn’t terrorism. It was something deadlier. - Vox
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#10
Overreaction indeed..

Quote:Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins ® responded to an attack in downtown London over the weekend by calling for a mass extrajudicial killing of people suspected of adhering to “radicalized” Islam. “Not one penny of American treasure should be granted to any nation who harbors these heathen animals. Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter,” he wrote. “Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.” Notably, Higgins advocated for the killing of anyone even suspected of having links to terrorism, and gave no definition of how that should be determined. He described the fight as a “war” between Christendom and “Islamic horror,” echoing a rallying cry of the far-right.

Such black-and-white rhetoric also dovetails with one of ISIS’ stated goals: To divide the world into two camps, those who believe their ideology and everyone else. In so doing, they aim to eliminate the “grey zone” and convince other Muslims that their faith is unwelcome and incompatible with the West, radicalizing them.

The statement also hedges close to allowing ISIS and other militant groups to represent Islam as a whole, even though the group is deeply unpopular in huge swaths of the Muslim world, and scores of prominent Muslim leaders have condemned them.
House Republican calls for mass killing of ‘radicalized Islamic’ suspects
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