This is not an insignificant point. For the cost of roughly 5000 US soldiers killed and a few trillion dollars we went from a few hundred AQ core jihadists in the AF/Pak border area to a half dozen offshoots of AQ around the globe, to ISIS, numbering in the tens of thousands.
We killed a lot of bad people who needed killing, but we can't ignore the relative ineffectiveness in stamping out terrorism as an ideology.
Ideologies have never recognized geopolitical boundaries. They also aren't confined to people who have certain skin colors or hair styles. The American public has a gross misperception about how this "war on terrorism" is going to be fought.
As a people we are outraged by the slaughter in Paris ... but where was the same outcry in 2013 in the Westgate Mall shooting in Kenya which killed 67 people? How about the outcry when genuinely innocent people are killed in errant drone strikes?
If a terrorist sympathizer lived in your neighborhood and the government sanctioned a strike which killed the bad guy and it happened to kill your wife and child, would you passively accept that you deserved it? Would you compassionately understand?
Unfortunately, I hear a ridiculous amount of ignorant crap being spouted as though unmitigated violence will resolve the problem. I was on active duty for 12 years. I've buried at least one friend under the age of 40 every single year since 2002.
Some of the resident internet geniuses might take a moment and ask why our military strategy/foreign policy has completely failed while simultaneously costing us trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. This month well over 100 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan will die by their own hands. War is not a video game. The people on the other side of the map are not inherently evil. Some of them are incredibly bad people. They are assholes.
We didn't condemn the entire Catholic church because a few hundred men in leadership positions decided to use their position to rape young boys. Why not stereotype and label all Catholics?
The Westboro Baptist Church claims to be Baptist. Why not just admit that all Baptists are flaming hate-mongers?
You know why we don't do this? Because we personally know good Catholics and Baptists. We know that a few assholes don't represent everyone under a certain label. I've been deployed to Iraq. I've met hundreds of Iraqi families. By and large, they are great freaking people. Not terribly different from you and I in the areas that matter most.
They want their kids to grow up safe. They want their kids to have a better life than they did. If the only Muslims I'd ever met were the ones trying to blow me up, I'd probably hate them all too. Fortunately, I met hundreds more and found we have a little thing called humanity in common.
I get my disability check from the VA each month. I paid my price in combat. Every Senator and Representative who votes to send our people to war should be required to go with them or volunteer their spouse, son, or daughter to go into combat.
War is a very real and occasionally very necessary thing. However, it isn't real when you don't have any skin in the game. Stop with the anti-Muslim rhetoric. Its nothing more than fear stemming from your ignorant stereotypes. We're Americans. We've done this fear-mongering thing before. We've run Japanese concentration camps on American soil before.
Don't do it. Don't allow assholes (ISIS) to make us assholes. Deal with the problem in a carefully considered rational manner that will produce the desired end results. ISIS clearly knew they would engender a massive emotional reaction. We need to make sure that we don't play right into their hands.
