It’s tedious to put a question mark at the end of every
sentence. Think of them as questions.
-Iran can’t win by force against the United States, so to
say that Iran is being provoked by sending more troops to the Middle East is
silly. The U.S. could destroy almost any
country in a few hours and not make a dent in our stockpile of weapons, so
really every negotiation that we have with belligerent regimes who insist that
their day of world rule hasn’t yet dawned simply because the Infinite’s will is
unknowable is a concession that we don’t have to make. Particularly since the dictators of those
countries viciously oppress their populations, their insistence that we or
anyone else with an ostensibly democratic form of government encroach on their sovereignty
by being where they don’t want us to be is more bratty than it is impressive. If they could win by force, they wouldn’t
have to publish manipulative, murderous propaganda and DIY bomb instructions or otherwise tell their ignorant,
Internet-bred bullies to run over civilian targets with cars.
-Yes, it is.
Quote:
“Earlier on Friday, President Trump told reporters outside
the White House that a "relatively small" deployment had been
approved.”
Article:
If the Pentagon suggested a deployment of 5,000 to 10,000 troops,
why only send 1500? If you don’t send
all of the people whom you need to do something, then you endanger those whom
you do send.
-The UK’s Security Minister, Ben Wallace, perhaps didn’t
recognize a public relations opportunity when he said:
Quote:
“I’m not putting at risk British people’s lives
to go looking for terrorists or former terrorists in a failed state,” he told
BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.”
The then-pregnant teenager whom he was talking about had already
had two children who had died; she was saying that all she wanted was to return
home. Her third baby has since been born
and has also died.
He could have done this:
-Brought her back to the UK, humanely detained her and given
her and her child the medical care that they needed.
-Placed her child in safe custody, with foster parents.
-Prosecuted her as needed.
-Published interviews in which she would have repented of
her adolescent mistakes, truthfully emphasized that the penalties imposed on
her by both the natural and orchestrated consequences of her own decisions are very painful, and talked about
how grateful she is that, despite her mistakes, the British government rescued
her baby and gave her due process.
She never could have gotten to those places, and he had to have known
that:
“There are currently no British
diplomats in Syria because of security risks. If Begum wanted to return to
the UK, she would have “to make her way to Turkey or Iraq to consular services
there”, he added.”
What did anyone expect her to say, while she was still there:
Begum, who said she did not
regret her decision and seeing a severed head in a bin “didn’t faze me at all”,
married a Dutch Muslim convert 10 days after her arrival in Syria.
She also said, at the end of the spoken interview, that she
thought the caliphate was corrupt and that it didn’t deserve to win.
This was someone who could have been rehabilitated without
her baby being martyred. If there’s one
thing that’s not foreign to teenagers from every culture, it’s bravado.
There is also the question of why nobody is thinking of
these young women as being sources of intimate and relevant information about
terrorist activities. Why would you fail
to remove someone who has lived with terrorists for years to a safe location
and gently interrogate her about every conversation she ever heard, everyone
whom she ever met, every correspondence that she ever witnessed, and everything
else about what her life was like? People like her are also crucial case studies for the psychology of those who are influenced to do what she did.
