Mosul is falling to Iraqi insurgents

Who bought you those toys, if not your parents?

They did. Like I said it was a change. Before it had been ok, but then some sermon or other freaked her out, and then away they went.

Growing up was weird.

These Islamic State guys are fucking horrifying.

Time for the US to go back in, sadly.

As much as I hate to say it, we probably should never have left.

Yep.

Eastern TN here, raised by Catholics amidst a sea of Baptists. My parents made me stop playing Diablo out of the blue one week, were generally leery of videogames and fantasy novels (so I just read a ton of science fiction instead), and right up until my early 20s, were still refusing to buy me CDs because they were labeled “pagan metal” at the store. Oh, we also engaged in a years-long boycott of Disney over them hiring a child-diddler through some partially owned studio or something like that. Actually we took part in a lot of boycotts when I was a kid, but the Disney one sucked, since it meant I missed most of the “Disney Renaissance” titles, IIRC.

My current meter for that one is the reaction to Harry Potter.

If you say “Witchcraft” seriously, I will laugh at you.

Isil just released video of them beheading James Foley, who’s been missing since 2012, and they’re threatening to kill another American if Obama doesn’t “end military operations in Iraq.” Not very bright, are they? We’re certain to ramp up our intervention now instead.

Of course, you can’t really deal with IS in Iraq without dealing with IS in Syria, as the “Islamic State” they claim to manifest spans both countries. Which puts us back into the discussion of what we should do/should have done in Syria. Some are saying that if we had intervened earlier in Syria, IS would never have been able to get as far as it has. Of course, most of the probably intervention scenarios didn’t seem, then, to promise much chance of actual success, and it’s still likely that such intervention might have precipitated more backlash of the sort that created IS than it would have prevented. But it’s also possible, I suppose, that effective intervention (whatever that might have been) could have caused a FSA victory and at the very least confined the fighting with the Islamist within Syria.

Or, from a more pragmatic or cynical perspective, perhaps we should have backed Assad and helped him crush all the dissidents, and therefore pretty much short-circuited all the Islamists! Not that that is a palatable alternative, really, but certainly what we have done so far has been enormously ineffective.

I’m not sure what sort of assets we have available to strike IS more than we are doing. Have we deployed air units to Iraq, or are they all flying off of carriers? Are we using lower level stuff like drones mostly? Have we used an cruise missiles? It seems we may be at the point where we have to either refuse to do the things that might actually roll back IS, or commit to a much more significant effort.

Pragmatism would have been to leave Saddam in power as well, which would have saved the US a ton of cash and greatly reduced the complications.

US Airstrikes helped the Kurds recapture the Mosul Dam and now other Iraqi forces are reinforcing the area as well. Killing hostages is the only response IS can muster for the moment.

Surely they don’t think their murders and threats against the US and our allies will cause us to back down. Afghanistan taught us what happens when leaving groups like that a safe haven.

The religion of peace strikes again. Tell me again how you are more frightened of christians. They behead people all the time right?

I’d be a lot more afraid of your fanaticism than I would the average Muslims.

Way to not read my posts, olaf. Christian extremists who deny science are pushing policies in the developed world that could lead to human extinction. Tell me again how individual beheadings are worse than that. Then for good measure explain away the genocide of Bosnian Muslims by Christian Serbs, the Irish conflicts, abortion clinic bombings and murders, violence against gays, and the rest of an endless list. So yeah, I’m more frightened of Christian radicals by orders of magnitude.

I hate all religions equally, they are all stupidity and superstition based on books from a time when we didn’t know shit. Anyway, The conflicts however have more secular goals really, they are all warlords who use the usual methods to conquer land, Isil is in no different and not particularly more brutal than others of the same type.

Religion is a need I think, like masturbation, so it can’t really be completely eliminated. Nor you want to. Is a irrational way to vent some stress and let people have some hope when the rationality says hope is misguided.

People find strength in religion, and while religion is a lie, strength is not. Of course strength can be used for evil, like here.

CNN is covering this beheading this morning, headline news: Should we stop airstrikes in Iraq? Way to play right into ISIS hands, you idiots.

Beheadings, no. Murder in McDonald’s because you wouldn’t give them your cell phone number? Yes.

We shouldn’t have gone in there in the first place. But that’s not the point, really.

If you were in charge, how long would you have Americans overseas in Iraq doing all the policing the police don’t want to do, the soldiering all the soldiers don’t want to do, and the governing the government can’t do?

How long should we stay there? At the point we left it was 10 years. If you stay much longer than that you are starting to fight a generational war. At 18 years kids who were not even born yet when it started might be shipped out to fight in a war that has been going on their entire life. How long is enough? When do we hand goverance over to the people of the land we occupy? I think we thought they were ready, but clearly they were not. It must be supremely frustrating for veterans of the Iraq was to see the soliders they trained laying their uniforms down in the street and leaving all their equipment behind. And you suggest we go back?

War is terrible at any cost. I feel some responsibility as a nation for destroying Iraq’s central leadership, but at some point you have to trust the people to govern themselves. Do we really want to be Rome in Judea?

I don’t know, I would guess unless they’re actually just completely ignorant, the desired response is to provoke more intervention from the US, with the hope of eventually getting lucky with something like a plane having a malfunction over IS territory and the pilot having to eject, or a botched special forces raid, or something. Keep the US rolling the dice and eventually some 1s will come up.

You caused the mess and the resulting power vacuum, you stay until that’s fixed. Might take awhile.

Also should be pointed out that the Islamic State threat to Iraq is effectively an external threat, and the US has an obligation to assist and protect Iraq in that sense as well. The good news is that US troops would pro9bably be viewed with more appreciation this time around.