We can’t beat ISIS with bombs, let’s send money

[dennishoddy]

This is stunning. Deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf was Hardball with Chris Matthews last night and gave a performance that indicates she is not only dumber than her boss, Jen Psaki, but let us know that Obama has no intention of trying to stem the spread of ISIS.


MATTHEWS: How do we stop this? I don’t see it. I see the Shia militias coming out of Baghdad who are all Shia. The Sunnis hate them. The Sunnis are loyal to ISIS rather than going in with the Shia. You’ve got the Kurds, the Jordanian air force and now the Egyptian air force. But i don’t see any — If i were ISIS, I wouldn’t be afraid right now. I can figure there is no existential threat to these people. They can keep finding places where they can hold executions and putting the camera work together, getting their props ready and killing people for show. And nothing we do right now seems to be directed at stopping this.

HARF: Well, I think there’s a few stages here. Right now what we’re doing is trying to take their leaders and their fighters off the battlefield in Iraq and Syria. That’s really where they flourish.

MATTHEWS: Are we killing enough of them?

HARF: We’re killing a lot of them and we’re going to keep killing more of them. So are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians. They’re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs, whether…

MATTHEWS: We’re not going to be able to stop that in our lifetime or fifty lifetimes. There’s always going to be poor people. There’s always going to be poor muslims, and as long as there are poor Muslims, the trumpet’s blowing and they’ll join. We can’t stop that, can we?

HARF: We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people…

This is dumb on so many levels that one hardly knows where to start. First and foremost, Harf simply does not understand what she is fighting. The impetus behind ISIS is not poverty. It is a religious movement that rejects modernity. The same stupid stuff was said by the same stupid people after 9-11 when the upper reaches of al Qaeda are the educated and the privileged. All of the 9-11 hijackers were at least middle class. So long as she, and presumably the administration, see the problem as one of economic opportunity and screwing American taxpayers to provide a nice life style for radical Islamists then we are spinning our wheels.

On the killing side, the near term problem is that we aren’t killing enough. She is quite wrong that “we cannot kill our way out of this war.” The administration is choosing not to try to do so, but every single time it has been tried “killing your way out of a war” has worked. The big brains in the White House are enamored drone attacks and tightly controlled airstrikes. These can kill a small number of people and knock off selected leaders. This is only effective so far as it goes. It means that ISIS command and control facilities are co-mingled with civilian targets and ISIS leaders know where to go to be safe. Our attacks are terrorizing ISIS fighters and aren’t discouraging others from joining them. Far from “killing a lot of them” we are only scratching the surface.

As Erick points out today, Obama’s juvenile attempt to have Congress restrict his ability to fight ISIS is a tacit admission that he has no intention of fighting and that can’t be lost on any allies we might have in the region.


http://youtu.be/Sd0_U87nyoU

 

[rlongnt]

Use bigger bombs!

 

[GUN DOG]

make some glass they have plenty of sand

 

[RickN]

I saw that and was to stunned by the stupidity.

 

[Dale00]

At a minimum we should be giving the Jordanians and Egyptians what they need - a kind of Lend-Lease program like their beloved FDR did.

 

[dennishoddy]

Obama won't be giving Egypt anything. When his pick of the muslim brotherhood lost to Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, he washed his hands of Egypt.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi may be in trouble in the muslim world when he told Imams that violence was not the way they should be going.

I'll put in a link from CNN so the lefty's can't say I used a bias site.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/06/africa/egypt-president-speech/


(CNN)-Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has called for a "religious revolution," asking Muslim leaders to help in the fight against extremism.

In a speech celebrating the birthday of the Prophet Muḥammad, which coincided with New Year's Day, he said they had no time to lose.

"I say and repeat, again, that we are in need of a religious revolution. You imams are responsible before Allah. The entire world is waiting on you. The entire world is waiting for your word ... because the Islamic world is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost. And it is being lost by our own hands," el-Sisi said.

"We need a revolution of the self, a revolution of consciousness and ethics to rebuild the Egyptian person -- a person that our country will need in the near future," the President said.

El-Sisi, himself a pious man, was elected in May after leaving the military to run for the office.

A former defense minister, he led the ouster of Mohamed Morsy -- the Islamist who was Egypt's first democratically elected President -- and has long positioned himself as a more secular option, and defender against extremist views.



"It's inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible that this thinking -- and I am not saying the religion -- I am saying this thinking," el-Sisi said.

He continued: "This is antagonizing the entire world. It's antagonizing the entire world! Does this mean that 1.6 billion people (Muslims) should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants -- that is 7 billion -- so that they themselves may live? Impossible!​"

While el-Sisi's speech included some powerful language, H.A. Hellyer, a nonresident fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and research associate at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said the President has made similar statements in the past.

"There is little to suggest (el-Sisi) is interested in some sort of Lutheran reformation of Islam. By all accounts, he's quite comfortable with the prevailing leadership of the Azhari establishment.

"If anything, he wants to empower it further in order to push forward a counternarrative against radical Islamism. The real question is: How credible can such a state-empowered counternarrative be?" Hellyer said.

On Tuesday, the President visited the main Coptic cathedral in Cairo to attend a Christmas mass and make a short speech. He is the first president to attend such a mass since the revolution.

"We will build our country together. We will accommodate each other. We will love each other," el-Sisi said in that speech.

 

[Glocktogo]

The naivety of this administration is staggeringly epic.

 

[dennishoddy]

Its not going to get any better any time soon.

 

[ignerntbend]

If you read the op carefully, or even casually, the message is that we need to continue to bomb the fukc out of them, even though it won't work, AND continue to send money even though it won't work. Why in God's name you guys need to imagine that this is a departure from The policies of previous administrations is a mystery to me.

 

[Glocktogo]

If you read the op carefully, or even casually, the message is that we need to continue to bomb the fukc out of them, even though it won't work, AND continue to send money even though it won't work. Why in God's name you guys need to imagine that this is a departure from The policies of previous administrations is a mystery to me.

Why in God's name you imagine that it's necessary to invoke previous administrations when Zero does something stupid, is a mystery to us. Let us know when you invent a time machine to go back in history and right those wrongs. Until then...