GB54;842614192 said:
Paris and San Bernardino were relatively trivial-a few dozen dead. Syria is not trivial. Over 200,000 dead!. The moral outrage of this is staggering-a few people in Paris die and its all hashtags and scented candles; 200,000 muslims are gassed, slaughtered, enslaved and homeless and its a shrug of the shoulders..
This is the most cataclysmic event in recent history, not a local conflict anymore but now a global one. Hundreds of thousands of refugees that will change the course of Europe for decades. A war now extended by ISIS to the heart of Europe, to Afghanistan, to Africa to the borders of Turkey and Jordan that threatens to plunge the whole area into conflict
Hollande realizes the threat. Putin realizes it, Hillary Clinton realizes it but when Obama blithely says things like "Assad must go" or "Isis is contained" (refuted by his own intelligence department*) in the absence of any strategy, he embarrasses his office and essentially says this will be a problem decided by his successor-which may be a good thing
*From the Daily Beast. "A new U.S. intelligence report on ISIS, commissioned by the White House, predicts that the self-proclaimed Islamic State will spread worldwide and grow in numbers, unless it suffers a significant loss of territory on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials told The Daily Beast." http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/06/us-intel-to-obama-isis-is-not-contained.html
See also, Dianne Feinstein, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2015/11/16/feinstein-echoes-clinton-countering-obama-for-saying-isis-is-contained/
For centuries, the primacy of Sunnis over Shia in the Middle East was not in question. Sunnis are still the majority in the Middle East, right? Since WWI essentially ended the Pax Turkicana there, that Sunni over Shia dominance was basically held in place by the structure of the new nation states there; and no one really questioned it. Since the structure of many of those states (especially Iraq) made no political sense, they had to be held together by dictatorship. The American Invasion of Iraq completely destroyed anything resembling a political and social infrastructure of that "country", leaving a political map which was majority Shia, with a heavy admixture of Kurds, whom no one there wants to exist, because they represent essentially a unified nation state whose borders steal territory from, majorly, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. So, the Americans imposed majoritarian rule on Iraq (as if the country made any sense as a political entity); and got a Shia Government, heavily dependent on Iran for its existence, and with no real infrastructure to replace that which the Americans destroyed, needing to suppress the Sunnis, and leaving the Sunnis without a coherent political structure to express the fact that the Sunnis are the dominant cultural group in the area - except (for reasons I have never understood) Syria has been ruled, for a lot of decades now, by a family from an exotic, and very small, Shia sect; and, when that dictatorship began to unravel, the same lack of political organization on the part of the Sunnis created a power vacuum, with power waiting (like Lenin said about pre-revolutionary Russia) to be picked up in the street; and there was a certain "natural" quality about the fact that it has largely been picked up by the most brutal organization there - an organization basically fed, and provided realistic military strength, by the guts of Saddam's army which had been thrown into the desert by the de-Baathification of Iraq. In a certain way, Al Quaeda is a product of the same dynamics. Similarly, the Taliban is a product of the division (by the artificially drawn Durand Line) of the Pushtoon nation, half in Pakistan, half in Afghanistan, leaving it without majoritarian political power in either of those two countries, although they are, naturally, the major nation in that area (or would be were they not split in half. Neither Daesh nor AlQuaeda will succeed as an establishment (let alone actually expand (as the Turkish Empire did to the doors of Western Europe - Vienna to be exact), because there is nothing in their DNA remotely capable of running a modern nation-state. So, he who has this in the proper perspective [of the un-godly political mess things are in the M.E., and how political sense (which would require a culture and structure capable of expressing Sunni majority power, while allowing the population enough stability to make money) won't happen by anything presently on the horizon] is the one who keeps us out of the quicksand there. Peripherally (or maybe not peripherally), one of the only things that could unify these disparate Sunni forces would be opposition to Israel (kind-of like the only unifying thread powerful enough to unify the disparate parts of Germany, which country had not congealed into a non-monarichcal unifying structure, when Hitler saw the glue that could do the trick).
