I have no doubt that sooner or later - when the Evil One sinks his fangs into the topic, this thread will get moved to the Back Alley, but I'm starting it here in hope of getting a wider variety of opinions than usual. For that reason, I am gonna avoid commenting or replying - or try anyway - until there are maybe 8 or 10 posts by hopefully a lot of people.

Yeah, this is a football forum, but I suggest this is a very relevant topic. The last thing any of us wants is a real world "Sum of All Fears" scenario. If I was a decision-maker for the terrorists, few or any targets would be higher on the list than an NFL game - relatively easy to hit, I would think, and it would mess with the minds of more Americans than almost anything else. Several years ago, the Packers were in New York City on I think it was the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I actually was a little bit worried that way.

Anyway, even Obama has chipped in about ISIS - or ISL as he called it. I will at least give the guy credit for not making his speech on a football night. Apparently, even he thinks ISIS is a serious threat - down the road if not right now. There are a LOT of points of view in general, and on this particular issue especially. It's complicated as to exactly what to do, and to what degree. I'm actually a little bit conflicted myself, and I usually have an opinion on everything hahahaha.

So what, if anything, should we do about this ISIS thing and terrorism in general?

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One thing we need to do is stop funding terrorist countries/governments. If your government stones women to death, allows 9 yr old girls to be married off to pedophiles, and executes people just because they're gay...Then we don't do business with you anymore.

And to the "its not than simple" crowd, yes, it is that simple.

Ironman.....that's not "politically correct"!(sarcasm)

These terrorists are scumbags.
I wish there was a way to get rid of them easily. No one wants to take a REAL stand.
To me, the only way to get them is to just go where they are and wipe them out.
You can't reason with them. All they want is to kill all of us, your loved ones, friends, anyone in their way. So you have to be like an exterminator. Go after the rats in their rat holes. And show them the same amount of mercy they show us.

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But, but . . . oil. 🤥

Just a year ago, McCain was all buddy buddy with these ISIS clowns and wanted to arm them to fight Asad. Obama used diplomacy to get rid of those chemical weapons. I guess the worst thing to do would be to go in guns ablazing like Dubya did and put our country into deaper debt. Maybe we should try letting that region fight their own battles for a change.

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Why are we always the ones to be called on? Why are we responsible for what happens in Ukraine, with ISIS, etc? You only have so many fingers you can plug a leaking dam with.

As for the extermination route, I don't see that happening. It takes 2-3 pissed off people to cause a lot of destruction. Correct me if I'm wrong but Oklahoma City involved a handful of people, Boston marathon the same. We can attempt to blow ISIS to the stone ages, but if you don't kill all 50,000 of them as was recently estimated, or if you piss off anyone else in the process, you haven't gotten rid of the threat, you can only hope you deterred or delayed it. I frankly don't know what the answer is, but it's not simply droning and blowing up everything we can.

I wonder if the world would be jumping at our throats if we just minded our own business, took care of our own citizens and kept our nose out of others agendas.

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What we need to do, is quit being correct and proper about the way we fight. We fight like it is a boxing match with rules, they fight like it is a street fight without. If we want someboyd gone, snipe them or simply have them disappeared. There are basically two sides, and neither of them like us so the only side we should be choosing is ours. And to hell with what the UN thinks, without us the UN would be more useless than it is already. Try to please them all, and we end up pleasing nobody.

And remember, there can never be to many parking lots on the world.

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It's an endless cycle. It's an idea, and an idea can't be bombed away, at least without truly annihilating an entire region or people. And even then, it's unlikely. The idea would probably just be strengthened by others. There is no way to truly "win." Perhaps maintain temporary status-quos, but they will be temporary. It would be nice to focus more on the many domestic issues, but it is what it is. It's not likely to change anytime soon.

It ain'tan easy problem for a lot of reasons. I will combine replies to several posts:

Oil? That is getting to be less and less of a reason to cowtow to the "good" Muslims because of their oil. I read that the U.S. is already the world leader in natural gas production, and could be in oil production if a couple of policies were changed, and that doesn't even count Canada, much less Mexico. So we are damn near self-sufficient, certainly if you count all of North America. It's our "friends" in Europe who need that middle eastern and Russian oil.

Dakota, you are factually in error about arming the Syrian rebels. It was the small fragment of "good" guys - those Obama ridiculed just two weeks ago as bankers, farmers, and pharmacists - basically westernized Syrians - that McCain and others wanted to arm to fight Assad. Ironically, now, in his speech on Wednesday, Obama basically pinned his hopes for defeating both Assad AND ISIS in Syrian on those guys.

Z2C, it's incredibly naive to think these people - these BARBAROUS ENEMIES would just leave us alone if we didn't bother them. You just can't ascribe OUR values and attitudes to them. Treating the Taliban and al Qaeda that way during the late 90s is what got us 9/11.

"Maybe we should try letting that region fight their own battles for a change."- Dakota; "Why are we always the ones to be called on?"- musccy; Well, first of all, that would mean turning a blind eye to the horrendous evil these people perpetrate on their own people - you could say that about just about everywhere Muslims run things. However, supposedly, these ISIS types are geometrically worse than Sharia Law pushers in general. That kind of shit bothers a lot of good people in this country; Me, I honesty could put up with that if it was confined to brutalizing their own kind. However, they are already making inroads to Europe and various non-Muslim areas of Africa and Asia. If you believe their words, they are dedicated to destroying US - this al Baghdadi guy who runs the show for ISIS has directly stated they will hit New York City. Sure, it's easy to say we will not let that happen, especially if we get a different kind of president after 2016, but as somebody said, it only takes 2 or 3 people; More to the point, it only takes ONE success if it happens to be nuclear - the fictional "Sum of All Fears" scenario I spoke of becoming reality in some form. So the question becomes NOT "why us?" but "if not us, WHO?"

But none of what I said answers the "how to" question, and realistically, the kick ass and take names/turn it into a parking lot concept of Ironman, Cheesy, and PFWT don't work either. I mean, I'm as sympathetic as anybody to the idea that we are the great force for GOOD in the world, and an enemy is an enemy is an enemy - the end justifies the means when it comes to taking them out. However, the fact is, America just doesn't operate that way. Part of it is because we ARE the great force for good in the world, governed basically by our core Judeo-Christian values, etc., and part of it is the fact that more than a generation of liberal-dominated educational establishment and even longer than that, leftist media domination has made any truly hard core approach to defeating even and obviously evil enemy next to impossible. Oh, maybe if they hit us hard enough - like Pearl Harbor in WWII - a nuclear terrorist hit might do it, but anything short of that? I think we would get obstructed by the nicey nice politically correct types.

I honestly don't have any sure fire answer. I wouldn't mind at all an all out "jihad" - a holy war against Islam - that's what they want; Of course we would win - we could damn near wipe 'em out. But we all know, that ain't gonna happen short of something pretty extreme done to us first. I'm getting more and more tempted to say, their shit ain't worth shedding American blood. If we got somebody in office I could trust - NOT an Obama type, and NOT a Ron/Rand Paul type - neither of which IMO believe strongly enough in the greatness and goodness of America, and that type of interventionist pro-American president said lets just build a damn fence around them and let 'em rot, I think that would be my policy.

Anybody got a better idea?

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