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from the it's-"talk-softly-and-CARRY-a-big-stick" dept.
Oder Aderet reports at Haaretz that the United States considered using nuclear weapons against Afghanistan in response to the September 11 attack according to Michael Steiner, who served as a political advisor to then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, as reported in Der Spiegel. "The papers were written," Steiner said when asked whether the U.S. had considered using nuclear weapons in response to the attacks orchestrated by Al-Qaida's Osama bin Laden, in which almost 3,000 people were killed. "They had really played through all possibilities." Steiner added that Schröder feared that the US, which was in a state of shock following the attacks, would overreact. "After Sept. 11, the entire administration positively dug in. We no longer had access to Rice, much less to the president. It wasn't just our experience, but also that of the French and British as well. Of course that made us enormously worried."
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:38PM
Today, ISIS owes its success, and perhaps its very existence to the US.
Indeed. But don't forget the rest of the anti-Iranian block - Saudi Arabia and the rest sending arms to "moderate Syrian opposition". Syria is a proxy war with Iran and everyone involved can thank those involved for ISIS. Somehow politicians still think that "war will be over by Christmas" (or Ramadan or whatever yearly even you want to pick).
Libya and Syria and Iraq wars are now causing refugee problems in Europe. I guess you reap what you sow? But hey, why call them what they are - refugees - while you can just label these people with more derogatory terms like "migrants". Hello BBC? People don't leave war zones because they want a better job - they leave war zones because they don't want to die.
And then we have the Internet to thank for allowing all the nutters to talk to each other. If there is 1 ISIS-thinking-nut in a population of 10,000, that's not much of a problem because they are isolated. But today, 1 out of 10,000 can be 1,000,000 total, which is a sizable problem. Even if only 10% will actually go into war for ISIS, that's still quite a large army. And no, I'm not advocating people start censoring the Internet or shutting things down - that will NOT help but make things worse. The solution is NOT TO DESTABILIZE A NATION WITH PROXY WARS in the first place. Looking at you, Russia and US - why can't you be a little bit more like China instead when it comes to foreign relations? Less army more politik.
As to nutters - it's not a movement if you need Twitter or Facebook to "communicate". If more than half of your *neighbors* and their neighbors and so on are not willing to join in your movement to overthrow some government, then you are not part of a movement. You are part of a crazy Twitter/Facebook group.