20 thoughts on “Stand With Brussels (Updated)

  1. Long live Belgium and death to the agents of the Islamic State. My family is from Flanders and thankfully none of them were present at these attacks. My heart goes out to those who did have family there.Report

  2. So, does Obama send a request for authorization to use military forces, including grounds forces, against ISIS? Do we send tanks and troops into Turkey to roll into Syria? As of today, I honestly don’t know what the best course of action is.Report

      1. Yes! That’s precisely what they’re trying to provoke with these attacks. As long as their main activities are killing, terrorizing and oppressing Muslims in the Middle East, they’re going to be largely unpopular with mideastern Muslims. What they want is an attack by Western nations, so that they can say they’re fighting against the infidels.Report

          1. I was thinking more that if ISIL has no support, in the long run they’re largely going to wither away and die. A movement that wants to be revolutionary – that wants to gain political control of a country without access to existing power structures or finances – needs at least some minimum level of public support. If the government of Syria wasn’t already fighting a civil war against various other groups, ISIL would never have had a chance; and if the Syrian government and the non-ISIL rebel groups can come to terms, ISIL won’t last long.

            The Middle East has many problems; “too few guns” is not one of them.Report

    1. You can’t stop terrorist tactics with a conventional military invasion. There have been plenty of terrorist groups that never occupied a territory. The means to conduct terror attacks are simple, mobile and minimal. Taking ISIS’s territory won’t stop them from using terror tactics. It’s great if they ground they occupy is taken and given to better people but not necessarily easy. Well pushing them out is easier then finding better people since Assad is a bastard and we can’t actually just invade Syria w/o starting a larger war.Report

  3. My heart bleeds for Belgium. This is naked barbarism and it’s so frustrating how hard a constructive response is.Report

    1. You know, maybe we wouldn’t have do that sort of thing if only they would have some sort of easily visible identification so that people could know who they were around. Like, say, a patch in the shape of a green crescent moon sewn onto their clothing.Report

  4. In the wake of this, I expect the FBI will soon be prowling Engineering Colleges.

    I suspect Daesh thinks the Europeans can be cowed because they seem to have lost their stomach for war. I expect what they will find is that the reason the Europeans choose to practice war no more is because they had gotten so very, very good at it.Report

  5. Does not detract from the sentiment of this post, but the Turks would point out that the Ankara bombing was actually the work not of Daesh, but TAK (Kurdistan Freedom Falcons), a hardline offshoot of the pro-Kurdish separatist PKK. The PKK have killed over 300 members of the Turkish security forces since last July, the Turks claim to have killed 1000 PKK militants, and over 100 civilians caught up in the fighting have died. The latest cycle of violence in an almost forty year war which has killed tens of thousands.Report

    1. It’s tragic and very frustrating that the Syrian civil war has re-inflamed conflict between the Turkish government and Kurds. There was genuine, significant progress on a peace deal between the PKK and the Turkish government (a deal supported by the ex-leader of the PKK) before things in Syria spilled over into Turkey. Given that the AKP was the only major Turkish political party willing to negotiate, and that the AKP is in a downward spiral, it’s a very sad missed opportunity.Report

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