> I would like to see some politician formulate a response the involves boosting these Middle Eastern economies and schools and "bombing" them with movies and music from LA.
Exactly. That is how you win an ideological war. Hollywood and rock music were perhaps the most powerful Capitalist weapons in the cold war. Culture and wealth. Thats how you win, not by humiliating and traumatizing entire nations.
There is this awesome party going on in the developed world, if we can just lessen the income inequality problem it's all just going to get better.
And now we even have a decent shot at mitigating climate change with the age of cheap solar pv.
But what are we offering the mideast? Bombs, drone strikes, hellscapes, failed states.
When the Khmer Rouge first got started, they only had 5,000 followers. It was only after Kissinger's massive bombing of Cambodia ("anything that flies on anything that moves") that they were able to attract 200,000 followers and take over.
That's what trauma does. When people feel violated they get angry and they want to take their power back. That is the engine that ISIS feeds on.
We had a small, isolated enemy in the form of Al Qaeda, and in response we managed to alienate and humiliate a huge swath of the world. Now we have too many enemies to deal with militarily.
That's what Obama is admitting when he says sending 50,000 troops to Syria won't work. Because what happens when ISIS starts up in Yemen, or somewhere else. All of this war is an expensive drain on the west, we will get spread too thin. The occupations don't even work.
And make no mistake, this soft target terror is going to be a huge economic drain on the west. The fear, the security spending. It's our economies that are really vulnerable to this kind of thing.
So far the war on terror has this perverse viral coefficient. We create more terrorists than we kill. We kill more terrorists, we make the problem even bigger.
It's time to develop a new strategy.