It's all war, if guns are being shot and bombs dropped, it's war. It's not Russia vs USA where 90% of soldiers on both sides will be dead inside of 2 weeks, it's not throwing nukes around and destroying the planet. But it's still war, just smaller! They haven't even pulled off a terrorist attack in Saudi yet, no way they can invade a well developed, well equiped and stable country, hell holes yes, Saudi NO chance. The Pres is just after permission to keep dropping bombs nothing more at this stage I believe, not looking like ground troops are even required at this stage, ISIS are just about broken.
Agree. Semantics aside if you are in Syria or Iraq, or northern Saudi Arabia, you are in a war zone. ISIS is surely trying to expand that zone to include attacks in the West. And if not by official Wikipedia definition, the US is going back knee-deep into the Iraq conflict with a new AUMF from Congress. As it looks tonight. Yes, small wars are still wars. But, are you serious about Saudi Arabia? Did you read the first post that I wrote to start this thread? That is exactly what ISIS did. They pulled off a major attack on Saudi soil in January. Think of what that means. That is like terrorists in Canada attacking the US and killing the General-in-Charge of the United States Northern Command. You would have to believe they had inside information.
Missed the General, just checked, he was in charge of tbe border and on the border when it got attacked, they didnt go into Saudi and hunt him down, they likey knew he would be there, a big difference from attacking a border out post to invading the entire country. No its like a canadian or 5 driving upto a border crossing and blowing up themselves. No ground deployment still, just continued maybe increased air strikes, i hear Seals and Delta's are spotting and playing hide and seek already. Expect APaches aswell to be used, better close support, likely Spectra gunships aswell. I hear morale for iSIS is low, mass giving up, limited new recruitment, Jordan air strikes caused most of this. Imho its over, just rubber dingy rapiding for the remaining nutters, which want that.
The question is whether ISIS will conquer Saudi Arabia. I realize this is confusing so I'll repeat. ISIS has never conquered a state. They hold territory only in places where failed states have pulled back. Saudi Arabia is not even close to a failed state. And if ISIS consolidates its territory so that it is a state and can compete militarily with another state, they will be easily beaten most easily because they cannot satisfy the first requirement of a state; that is, a state has to protect the majority of its citizens from other states. (And not protect them all, the vast majority is enough.) Calling something a war when it isn't a war doesn't make it a war. But this doesn't matter. Despite the "authorization of force" there is still no war. You will know if there is a war against ISIS (and that could happen someday) because the first thing the US will do is begin a blockade and the people unfortunate to be inside ISIS territory will starve to death.
My position is that ISIS has no new strategies or tactics. If you want to argue otherwise, you need to actually name the new strategy or the tactic. I will then reply by giving examples of humans doing this over and over. This is a whole new can of worms you're opening. Weapons changed substantially between WW1 and WW2. For example, WW1 was fought with bolt action rifles, WW2 saw the introduction of semi-autos and the assault rifle. But since we're talking about ISIS, try comparing the industrial power of Germany in 1938 with the (lack of) industrial power of ISIS in 2015. Or the lack of military technology among the ISIS region. ISIS is pitiful compared to Germany. And Germany didn't succeed. Betting on ISIS success = bad idea. The Germans hit the Maginot line in WW2 (not WW1) with an army of 3.3 million. The CIA says ISIS has about 67,000 soldiers only a fraction of which are available for sending to Saudi Arabia. That's a size difference of about a factor of > 50 maybe 100. And the Germans had arguably better (ground) weapons than the French and British while for ISIS and Saudi Arabia, the quality factor is vastly in favor of Saudi Arabia. Second, if you want to talk about ISIS efforts at causing terror in Saudi Arabia, then please name for me any state which has ever been conquered by terror. No. States fall due to civil war and military actions and ISIS doesn't seem to be doing very well at either of these. To use threat of violence to get humans to change their state you must apply the violence at an extremely high level. ISIS has never done this to any external state. The only examples I can think of ISIS successes recently were so tiny that the victims were named in the newspaper. That's not enough. You need to kill so many people that everyone personally knows a victim. The allies got the Germans to quit Nazism by bombing them for years. The number of civilians killed was in the millions. Nuclear weapons were used against Japan and firebombings were used against both. Sorry, but as far as changing hearts and minds, drones and attached explosives just isn't going to do it. All that does is piss off the civilians. They're more willing to fight until it becomes obvious that they're losing and that they might be next. Again, if you have an example of a state that fell due to outside application of terror, please name it. The world has a couple hundred states and there are hundreds of years of history for those states. Terror has been around for thousands of years. So name the state that fell due to terror alone. The closest I can come to this is that there have been leaders killed by assassins but I doubt that killing a couple of Saudi monarchs will change their system. Instead they'll do the same thing that Egypt and Jordan did recently; they'll begin using modern military force against ISIS. And that, taken to its extreme, *will* kill enough civilians that the survivors will reject ISIS. There are plenty of examples of this in history and no examples of terror working. Now I can think of examples of terror that caused a foreign country to withdraw its troops from another (generally distant) foreign country, but that's not what you're talking about with Saudi Arabia. What you're claiming is the destruction of a state by terror, not the influence of state actions by terror. And despite all the above, ISIS still hasn't knocked over a single government. North Vietnam won the Vietnam war. South Vietnam lost it. At the end of the war, the army of North Vietnam marched through the South Vietnamese capital. This is how you can tell a country has won a war. US aims were not achieved but the US did not "lose". The army of North Vietnam did not march through Washington DC. The US government was not brought down. US civilians were not raped by invading armies. US homes were not set on fire. The US did not lose that war, our ally did. There were no significant US interests at stake and pulling support for South Vietnam caused no significant problems for US foreign policy. It was a stupid war and a stupid example to show that modern countries do not win wars quickly. The idiots who planned it were apparently fighting to show the world that the US liked to fight. I suggest that this is not in our significant national interests. Iraq and Afghanistan are similar. No US interests. To find a counterexample to the concept that modern countries win (real) wars quickly (especially in the context of a primitive ISIS attacking a relatively advanced Saudi Arabia), you need to find a war where a modern military country is destroyed by a primitive country. Sorry, but no such example exists. The modern countries repeatedly beat the living daylights out of primitive countries and they often do it even when there are no real national interests involved. There are few examples of primitive countries attacking the more advanced ones because humans are not stupid and the leaders of primitive countries understand what will happen to them. ISIS might make the mistake of starting a real war with Saudi Arabia but they've done absolutely nothing so far in it. It's just a propaganda war. The only recent examples of relatively primitive military countries attacking a more advanced military are the Arab state attacks against Israel. And the difference in technology between those countries is small compared to the present differences between Saudi Arabia and ISIS. Real wars take a lot of preparation. Your hypothetical is years or more likely never away. ISIS generates the worst propaganda of any new state since the French cut the heads off their previous rulers. (And France was beaten despite, unlike ISIS, being a continental power with the world's most modern military ground forces.) If there's any bet I'd put now, it would be that ISIS doesn't last another 2 years. What's going on is that ISIS is doing small terror attacks against neighbors and then the neighbors beat the crap out of ISIS. No neighbor of ISIS has acted like they're going to fall. I think the Saudis (with US assistance) drove oil prices low in order to punish Russia and Iran. But for this to work, they can't drive prices so low that fracking and ocean drilling companies are permanently injured. So I would expect them to arrange prices so that Russia and Iran are unable to maintain their spending but high enough that the drillers mostly keep drilling. That would be oil prices staying about where they are. I'm looking forward to the return of the oil price / supply / storage discussion over at the Contango thread. If I were listening to them a few weeks ago, I'd be short oil now and would be hurting.
Recent activity would suggest desperation, they know they've lost, but there going to go down fighting, well the nutters I'm sure many have given up on the cause thankfully. I agree on Oil price being dropped to hurt russia and stop ISIS selling oil on the black market to, or much less income if they do.
Since I don't think ISIS is important, I haven't been following it much. Where did you see that they're getting desperate? The other day the right-wing radio I listen to said that there was a nice new article in The Atlantic on ISIS. Let me dig it up. Well, here the author replies to the "letters to the editor" about his article: http://www.theatlantic.com/internat...really-wants-reader-response-atlantic/385710/ Ah, here's the complete article: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
This article,"What ISIS Really Wants", by Graeme Wood includes detailed research with Muslim Islamic scholars, university researchers, and foreign policy experts. Wood's article has been well regarded internationally, especially by the Muslim community. I would urge people to read it.
Just a wave of increased attacks, tried to get into the US training area, tried to take over a city, sounds like a last ditched attempt at winning or maybe to get there virgins. When we started bombing and hunting them, they became a lot less important, this time next year they'll be another failed Terrorist organisation, although a major 1.
A couple of paragraphs from the article: ... Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.) ... One way to un-cast the Islamic State’s spell over its adherents would be to overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq now under caliphate rule. Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate and serve it. If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be routed, it might never recover. ... Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like. ...