Tag Archives: ISIS

Hey, Lets’ Give ISIS What They Want!

    Well, at least that seems to be everyone’s current plan—from the Republicans to the liberals to just about everybody else in the world. How’s that? Doesn’t ISIS want the US government to be replaced by a Caliphate (I mean a Muslim one, not the Christian one that Ted Cruz and all the Republicans except Trump want)? Well, maybe ultimately. But for right now, both sides want the exact same thing, FOR US TO BLOW UP A BUNCH OF MUSLIMS.
    You’re thinking, “Right, they want US to blow THEM up.” You bet they do, buckaroo. Here’s the deal. In Terror 101, the first thing the class is taught (after knife sharpening) is that the two main goals are to get people to pay attention to you and to recruit more gullible schmucks to your side. If ISIS wasn’t cutting off heads and blowing shit up, they’d have the same international visibility and ability to attract people to their cause as Lindsay Graham, which is none whatsoever. Now, there’s always a few hard core numbnuts who’ll come join the revolution—any revolution—but did you ever try to get people to, say, drop leaflets door to door for a political campaign? Right. Everybody’s got something else to do, you know, soccer practice, pick up the dry cleaning, rake the yard. So how hard is it to get people to forget about soccer practice, quit their jobs and RUN OUT AND BLOW THEMSELVES UP IN A FUCKING SHOPPING CENTER? How the hell do you talk people into that? Good luck. Talking doesn’t work. PREACHING doesn’t work. The only thing that works is to get people really, really pissed off. And how do you piss people off? I mean besides snoring really loud or saving 5 seats at the movies with one coat. Well, you get someone to attack them and their loved ones, that’s how. THEN they’ll drop everything and flock to defend their God/Homeland/Way of Life, trigger fingers itching, souls aching to go to heaven and to send the enemy’s to hell. So that’s what Terror 101 teaches. You provoke your opponent into dramatic repression, the bloodier the better. The more your own people suffer, the more of them flock to your cause. If you sit quietly in your basement and write clearly reasoned, impassioned tracts and blog posts—crickets (Lindsay Graham, Rob Porter). But get someone to set off a few explosions in your town, machine gun a crowd, and voila, people come out of the woodwork ready to kill. That’s what ISIS just did in France, they KNOW the response it will provoke, and THEY CAN’T WAIT. They’re praying 5 times a day for “Crusader” troops to return to the Middle East.
    In football, if somebody gives you an opening, you run through it as fast as you can. In chess, if somebody gives you an opening, you figure out where the trap is—and don’t step in it. So we’re playing football and ISIS is playing chess.
    If I were a presidential candidate, I’d stop here, and not spell out what I think we SHOULD do. But I’m not running for anything, so I’m perfectly happy to put my money where my mouth is and tell you the best chess response. In the short term, people do have to die. We need to send a bunch of their higher-ups on a free trip to see if that afterlife they’ve been dreaming about is all it’s cracked up to be. We’ll lose our own recruiting match if something like this doesn’t happen. The trick is that it has to be done in a way that doesn’t make good jihad TV. No obliterated homes with sad eyed old men standing in front of the rubble, no children’s bodies arranged in a photogenic line on the sidewalk surrounded by crying women, no American (or French, German or Guatemalan) planes roaring overhead. And absolutely no tanks rumbling through Arab neighborhoods. Let the bastards do their own recruiting.
    In the long term, we attack their resources, not their people and towns. Last I heard, there weren’t any factories making machine guns and high explosives and tanks and shit in ISIS lands. All their stuff comes from elsewhere, paid for with money from selling oil or simple looting. So the people who run the companies that sell them weapons, the people who run the banks that handle the money, and the people in charge of the companies that buy their oil? All those people need to go to jail. And if there’s no way to make charges stick, maybe they just have a little visit from SEAL Team 6. And you thought I was a softie.