Quote:
Originally Posted by Armistead
but take a world effort, meaning, not gonna happen.
|
Well exactly. A coalition large and powerful enough to defeat Islamic State will be a ramshackle disaster that's one major diplomatic incident away from bursting at the seams. The US is already in a bind, having to chose between practical necessity and the luxury of being morally uprighteous. For example, having to choose between arming the good kind of Syrian rebels at the risk of arming the bad kind. Or deciding to work with an Egyptian government that came to power in a coup against a supposedly democratically elected one that everyone was afraid of because it was Islamic.
Although the people who look fondly on WWII like to cast it as a black and white proposition, there was actually something of a debate in Washington and London over backing Joseph Stalin. The problem many folks realized, is that if you join up with a murderous mustachioed totalitarian to defeat a murderous mustachioed totalitarian is that you end up subsidizing a murderous mustachioed totalitarian, Sure, the Nazis were pounded flat, and the Russians did most of the dying, but the winning Allies ended up in an eyeball to eyeball staring contest that parked civilization on the edge of an abyss for half a century. What will the blow back be this time?
And when you scale up such a contest to 2015 standards in terms of population, destructive power of weaponry, environmental consequences, oil disruption, the fact that Muslims currently make up about 23.4 % of the people living on this planet, I don't see how civilization survives.