Quote:Eric, for the most part politically I agree with most of your posts.  However, this one I must disagree with.  You really should do a bit of research.

 

We did not "create" Al Qaeda or ISIS.  When it comes to Al Qaeda, it was spawned from other factions including the faction that we did fund and help, that being The Taliban.  However, at the time they were not called or referred to as The Taliban.  You have to remember that the rest of the world does not "see" things the way that we do.  The group that we funded to fight against the Soviet Union was in fact a "state" or the countries that we know as Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Some of those fighters broke off and formed their own "union" that became known as "The Taliban".  Part of that group broke off yet again and became known as Al Qaeda.

 

Also remember that this was still during the "Cold War" and the Soviet Union was our biggest enemy and threat.

 

It was all about ideology.  Today the bigger and more powerful factions are gaining more strength and are getting way more lethal.  You can not deal with these people by conventional means (talk) or conventional warfare.  They do not respect the rules of the Geneva Convention, and they conduct warfare in a ruthless and dangerous way.

 

We're arguing semantics here, the United States established the group that later became Al Qaeda to take on the Soviet Union during the cold war, the goal was to make Afghanistan the Soviet Unions Vietnam. Had we not given them training and weapons would they have been much of a problem a few decades later?

 

Same goes for ISIS, they're a direct result of us Arming the "rebels" in Syria to take on Assad. When Assad proved harder then thought they shifted focus to Iraq and started calling themselves ISIS. 

 

It's an age old story, we see a problem, arm a group of rebels to take on the problem and then a few years later that group of rebels turns on us. When will we just learn to stay the hell out of it? 

 

Of course we can't deal with them by conventional war, there's no one to declare war on? We're at war with an ideology, you can't defeat an idea. It's an endless war with endless excuses to expand government power and overreach. 

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