option 7 is to turn the desert into glass and tell anyone who has a problem with it they're next if they don't play nice.
This is the option that results in further erosion of US support around the world, but particularly among our western allies. It elects Rand Paul in a landslide in 2016 and is followed by the removal of US forces from many of their foreign postings but almost certainly from Western Europe and the Middle East. The Japanese and South Koreans will let us stay for obvious reasons.
You have to deprogram every single one of them, which is impossible. The bigger issue is that these muslim familes are having 2-3 times the amount of kids that a western family has. In time Muslims will control the world unless something gets changed. Not in our lifetime though but they will drag the future generations back to the their 7th century ideology and lifestyle.
I just don't understand the benefits that we gain from trying to micromanage crises in the Middle East. The region is a gigantic trap for us in terms of lives and money spent. We have no chance at all of ever reaching a workable stalemate that lasts for more than a few years at the outside. We get blowback on a regular basis that affects American lives, our politics, our financial stability and our reputation in the world. It's just such a losing quagmire for us. Nothing that we do there will stand the test of time and nobody other than Israel will remain our ally through 99% of the power shifts that occur. In the past you could make the argument that Israel really needed our help in the region but at this point the Israelis are by far the most powerful country in the Middle East. They are the most capable of projecting military and covert force in the region. Nobody messes with them and that's not because the US stands behind them, it's because people are afraid to mess directly with Israel. I just don't see why we need to be part of the solution there when in fact we're more part of the problem. Al-Qaida is around because we promoted the people that founded them in the 80's. ISIS is around because we toppled the Sunnis in Iraq and allowed Iran to install a puppet government there. Then we tried to topple Russia's Syrian clients and the whole thing blew up and we got ISIS. The Iranians are who they are because we toppled a legitimately elected government in the 50's and installed a Shah to rule over the country. We're a huge part of the problem in the Middle East right now because we're overwhelmingly powerful at getting tactical things done but we're also completely blind to the long-term consequences of our actions.
Threaten to remove that big black box and they will stop all the bullshit real quickly, it would scare the hell out of them.
Not sure what this means but I am sure it's a very bad idea. People don't get scared by the loss of cultural icons, they get angry and they do irrational things. We destroyed our economy over the loss of the Twin Towers. We gave up many of our civil liberties. We apparently became a nation divided with little chance of reconciliation. We took America and we trashed it in our quest for vengeance or redemption or whatever it is that we spent so many years fighting in the desert for. We're apparently thinking about going round 3 in that conflict right now. And we're the supposedly modern rational culture. I wouldn't want to see the reaction from the Islamic world if we childishly decided to flatten one of their cultural icons as some kind of lesson to them. There are millions of Muslims in the US, right?
Yeah, that's what I thought you meant. Nuke the Saudis. That'll solve all our problems in the Middle East...
It may be what you thought he meant. But soxxx can beat the Saudis himself. He will troll their entire culture into oblivion.
I did see and I think it should not go without mention that British Muslims are becoming very vocal towards ISIS and are demanding that they release this British man they are holding captive and have threatened to behead. He was part of an aid group that was assisting Syrian children before he was kidnapped. Even some in Al Qaeda has called for his release.... this is some crazy shit.
So bombing Mecca will stop things like that kid who shot up that Newtown school and the guy who shot up the movie theater in Colorado and the Oklahoma City bombing and the Norwegian guy who killed 60+ kids at a summer camp in Norway and the people who killed dozens of innocent victims and kidnapped hundreds of girls in the Congo and the people who use death from above to accidentally massacre weddings, etc? You have a really screwed up vision of the world if you think that Islam is the problem here. The problem is a global culture of violence that universally believes that might makes right and that the ends justify the means. The problem is that everybody believes that their persecutors fully deserve whatever can be inflicted upon them and nobody is choosy about who else gets caught in the fallout. 90% of the terrorists were just following orders. They fully believed in what they were doing but they were just falling in line when they pushed the button, flew the plane, pulled the trigger, toppled the government, etc. The other 10% couldn't care less about Islam or any concept of morality at all. They'll take your gift of the destruction of a holy shrine and they'll use it for what is is to them: the opportunity to finally recruit millions to their cause.
