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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| General Mattis: ISIS Will Resurge If U.S. Doesn't Keep Up the Pressure |
| 2019-10-14 |
| [Free Beacon] Former secretary of defense James Mattis on Sunday said that ISIS will "resurge" if the United States does not keep up the pressure in Syria. "We have got to keep the pressure on ISIS so they don't recover," Mattis said on NBC's Meet the Press. "We may want a war over, we may even declare it over. You can pull your troops out, as President Obama learned the hard way, out of Iraq. But the enemy gets a vote, we say in the military." Mattis said that unless the United States keeps pushing against ISIS, it is "absolutely a given" that the terrorist organization will come back in full force. Mattis resigned as secretary of defense in December 2018 after President Donald Trump announced that all United States troops would be withdrawing from Syria. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #9 Mathis is right. They will. Like fire ants, you can kill a bunch or chase them into the neighbors yard, but they *will* come back. So, a neverending war and hundreds of billions spent is worth preventing a few lone wolves. Understood. Don't put words in other people's mouths. It is a sign of cognitive dissonance. The question is what to do. Ignoring them doesn't work. Hearts and minds, hah! Treating terror as police matter doesn't work. Waging near-peer war against distributed bands of desert hillbillies doesn't work and costs waaay too much. What to do? Given that carpet bombing is off the table, I suspect the answer is smaller, targeted strikes, both drone-zaps in the desert and some up-close wet work. Some people just need killin', as they say. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2019-10-14 21:08 |
| #8 ^ Can't say I disagree. Why can't we be smart and make more use of proxies? Why not let the Russians and Syrians mop up ISIS in Syria? |
| Posted by: Lex 2019-10-14 19:27 |
| #7 So, a neverending war and hundreds of billions spent is worth preventing a few lone wolves. Understood. The rest of us Americans disagree with your neo-con risk/reward calculus. The cure is worse than the disease. |
| Posted by: Herb McCoy 2019-10-14 17:12 |
| #6 ISIS is not our problem. ISIS would very much like to be our problem and, like Al Qaeda, they keep trying. Over and over we discover that lone wolves here in the U.S., as well as Europe and elsewhere, were either seduced by or self-radicalized via ISIS or Al Qaeda internet channels, starting with videos and moving to personal connections. Whether it is time to take the war into the shadows, as it is in certain other parts of the world, is a different question. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2019-10-14 17:04 |
| #5 So what? ISIS is not our problem. Al Qaeda was only our problem because the Soddies bribed our politicians into letting some of their misbegotten sons into our country. All we have to do is keep these people out of our country. They're all nuts and they will always find some reason to fight each other. Let them. They don't come here and we don't go there. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2019-10-14 12:48 |
| #4 Probably true. But since we are condemned for collateral damage or even propaganda claims of such, there is no really practical military way of keeping up the pressure. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2019-10-14 12:47 |
| #3 Exactly what's the difference, except YouTube videos, between ISIS and any other fraction in Syria? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2019-10-14 07:59 |
| #2 And what did you do during your tenure to reduce the number of hostages in Turkey? |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2019-10-14 07:49 |
| #1 He's just angry he doesn't get to have his war any more. I used to have a lot of respect for Mattis, but he revealed himself to be yet another globalist who puts the interests of the American people last. :( |
| Posted by: Herb McCoy 2019-10-14 07:36 |