I thought "London Bridge had fallen down and moved to Arizona" (Gary P Nunn) a long time ago.
On the terror thing, I wonder how much longer Britain, Germany, and France are gonna put up with this *expletive deleted*it before one of them gets their Crusader on and drive all the brown-skinned people out. It's gonna be ugly when it happens. :(
That is what ISIS ultimately wants. That, and massive Western/non-Muslim/non-ME military invasions/interventions. It was AQ's larger strategy too. That continued terrorist prodding will force the West to go to war with the Muslim ME en-masse, and the Muslim world to unite, perhaps bridging the widest Shia/Sunni sectarian divides even, so they can get the big battle going. And out of that the big Caliphate will form, and the "final victory" for Islam over the world.
It's kind of a weird catch-22. Basic strategy dictates to "
never do what your enemy wants". However, the one caveat to that is "
never do what your enemy wants, except when they are wrong". Because we all know they'd lose the "big war", even if for the sake of argument one agrees such Islamic unity is possible, which of course it is not. The divisions within Islam itself are far more violent in total, and in terms of intensity/hatred than it is between Islam and the West.
The main downsides to it are that the war would be insanely expensive for the West, and that we still care about the massive loss of innocent civilian life and the abject misery it would cause.
Honestly, we could probably reduce the ME's Muslim population to about 5-10% of what it is now within a year or two, (not counting Indonesia, which things going so goat-rope rodeo sideways is just not within any realistic scenario) no nukes, bio, or chemical weapons, or a ground invasion needed. Conventional airstrikes, drones, and missiles that worked to destroy every road, bridge, power plant, power distribution, water plant, canal, pipeline, communications, ports, railways etc. then NO invasion, and NO rebuilding, NO nation-building, NO "hearts and minds" type aid afterward, we'd see mass die-offs pretty quickly. Despite how rudimentary, poor, and dusty it all looks to us, the whole region is way over carrying capacity without modern infrastructure. And by "modern" I mean the basics first half of the 20th century type infrastructure.
ISIS, and AQ before them, seems to be using their religion and ideology to make a leap of magical thinking that they can turn this into a global/theater style war. When they most assuredly can't do. And even if they could, it's clear they'd lose. They only managed to exist because of their situation as non-state actors engaged in asymmetrical warfare, which prevents the West from being able to, or even wanting to use their overwhelming power in Theater War to bear.
