The ISIS threat to Europe

[omariqy]

Question - what's the plan for the day after the bombings finish?

Do we bomb them away and hope for the best or do we deal with the problem properly and go back to the root of the problem?

Edited November 27, 2015 by omariqy

[ROTTERDAM1982]

So leave ISIS alone then?

 

[gharperr]

not educated on this subject what so ever but....

Saudi are the ones who keep funding the teaching of this "extreme islam" right? Wahhabism or something
Saw in a video other day that in 2006 AlQ tried to over throw the saudi regime, it was pretty deadly but it failed
is IsIs part of the wahhabism movement? the video also said saudi crown prince and baghdadi are enemies

So why do saudi keep funding extreme islam (wahhabism?) when it keeps coming back to attack them? I know its hard to generalise all saudi royal family when its so large but yeh...

hmm, i imagine the answer is just "because  they think its the right type of islam so they fund it" i guess

Edited November 27, 2015 by gharperr

[Davkaus]

1 hour ago, ROTTERDAM1982 said:

So leave ISIS alone then?

 

Yeah? Let someone else try and sort it out. We're facing huge cuts to public services, but we can afford to be in the top 4 or 5 in the world for spending on "defence"?

Decades of bombing people in the middle east so far appears to be unsuccessful at discouraging them from wanting to bomb us back. How many years are we going to continue? We should never have got involved in the first place. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, you want to keep going?!

[maqroll]

1 hour ago, ROTTERDAM1982 said:

So leave ISIS alone then?

 

No, but we have to recognize (sorry Tony) that by attacking them, we are giving them what they want. They WANT a fight, it justifies their entire raison d'être. So fighting only gets you so far, especially if a residual effect is creating more resentment and anger, and more physical devastation of infrastructure and general quality of life on the ground. When your better chance of a paycheck lies with ISIS, you'll join ISIS, and the cycle continues. 

We also have to accept the ugly truth about why the Jihadi movement is so focused on the developed West and not on places like Japan or South Korea. It's a direct result of our meddling in their business for the last 100+ years. We are reaping what we've sown.

 

[ROTTERDAM1982]

Thing is Dav, they won't leave us alone.ISIS need to be destroyed, whether its by us or Arab nations is another question.

[blandy]

11 minutes ago, ROTTERDAM1982 said:

Thing is Dav, they won't leave us alone.ISIS need to be destroyed, whether its by us or Arab nations is another question.

And it's a good question. There's a whole width of actions between "leave them alone" and "Bomb them". There's been no discussion by the politicians of anything though. It's just been "bomb them" and anyone saying "hold on a minute" is portrayed as cowards, weak and all the rest. It's idiotic. Why not discuss the range of options, with their pros and cons, and work out the best course of action, recognising that they all have potential pitfalls or potential upsides?

We're being so badly let down it's criminal.

[Wainy316]

1 hour ago, ROTTERDAM1982 said: So leave ISIS alone then?

 

No, but we have to recognize (sorry Tony) that by attacking them, we are giving them what they want. They WANT a fight, it justifies their entire raison d'être. So fighting only gets you so far, especially if a residual effect is creating more resentment and anger, and more physical devastation of infrastructure and general quality of life on the ground. When your better chance of a paycheck lies with ISIS, you'll join ISIS, and the cycle continues. 

We also have to accept the ugly truth about why the Jihadi movement is so focused on the developed West and not on places like Japan or South Korea. It's a direct result of our meddling in their business for the last 100+ years. We are reaping what we've sown.

 

They did kill two Japanese hostages not that long back.

[chrisp65]

3 hours ago, ROTTERDAM1982 said:

So leave ISIS alone then?

 

So do you believe a little bit of extra bombing from another 4 planes will fix this?

I know, of course you don't. Just like nobody believes leaving them alone will fix it.

So perhaps the plan needs to be developed a little bit?

Payload for a Tornado is usually 4 pathway missiles and 2 brimstone missiles, combined cost just under £300,000. Tornados fly in pairs, so that's £600,000 in missiles per mission. Oh yeah, fuel and running costs for a Tornado are £35,000 per hour. The average mission takes 6 hours, that's £210,000. But there are two of them remember, so that's £420,000. So with the missiles, that's just nudged over a million pound per mission. So far, the coalition have launched over 5,500 missions across Iraq and Syria.

How many missions are their likely to be? Do we know? Is there an estimate? What's the size of land area we are attacking, what number of ISIS fighters are there? How many civilians do they control? Nah, detail, detail, detail. Detail is for pussies. Bomb 'em.

What plan have we got to rehabilitate our wounded? Our ground forces? Our medics and cooks and refuelers? I guess once they come home we can skimp on support and let them live in shit and piss under bridges? Better we do that than spend, er, well spend say £800,000 on rehab and housing. After all, every time we waste £800,000 on our returning military, that's another single Storm Shadow missile we can't buy. 

How long do we plan on bombing?

It better not be too long, after all, these awe inspiring politicians are reducing the number of Tornados by a third by 2020.

I wouldn't trust these people to plan and budget a birthday party. Yet lots of people are happy to let them just go and play war without even explaining what they would consider winning to mean.

Even if they just said this is containment and retribution until we have a plan! That would at least be honest.

 

[villakram]

7 hours ago, sharkyvilla said:

It seems to me that the terrorist attacks are becoming far more 'professional' and it's due to proper training and organisation by ISIS in their homeland, even if they are largely carried out by homegrown terrorists, so logically it will make us safer if we take them out in Syria.  You won't be able to stop an individual terrorist all the time, but the Paris attacks with so many different people involved in different places with precision timing and impact makes the likely death toll much higher.  We have foiled seven attempts this year, the idea that they will ignore us because we aren't bombing them is ridiculous, especially as we are bombing them in Iraq anyway.  Our missiles are supposed to be the most accurate in the world, as well as our surveillance equipment, we need to add our expertise to the fight to get the best results.  We also need UN troops on the ground IMO and it will just be a matter of time.

Sir, may i politely suggest that you ease off on the kool-aid! Where is the proof that anything has been foiled... anonymous propaganda sources? Please remember, that one of the main results the Snowden aftermath was that we learned quite explicitly how pointless the current programs are. Pretty much all of the Paris guys were known to our mythical "Intelligence" services. Properly resourced police work is what is required not throwing money at blowing things up in the middle east.

Regarding your "logically it will.." statement. "Bomb them over there and for god sake don't show me the grisly aftermath on the evening news, I'm trying to eat!" Perhaps, they might think that bombing London/Manchester/Paris etc. is a logical way to attack us?

The orientalism appears to be very strong in you or at least the opinion you have written. We are not needed at all, in fact one could quite validly make the case that it is our involvement that has led us to the current situation.

[El Zen]

5 hours ago, YLN said:

In case anyone hasn't seen it. This is a very tough watch. As an aside from the current discussion. I saw EODM four days previously in Dublin. I think it was the best gig I've ever been to in terms of fun and dancing and good times. Not sure how they can come back and play their songs again. Certainly looks very far away now. 

Thanks for sharing. Very tough watch indeed. 

[Chindie]

It would be interesting to see a proposal that actually set about intending on doing something more than kicking the can down the road. You might be able to turn the massed ranks of IS into small mounds of glass with enough bombs, though you're not going to get them all even if high explosives can act like some kind of Daesh Dettol some will always slip away. But it won't solve the problem. You've got a particularly dangerous philosophy, and a stream of people happy to take up it's path. You need to solve that or you simply delay the next iteration.

Bombs don't destroy thought, and they probably encourage a significant number of people to take up those thoughts. It's a more difficult problem to tackle though and has a less obvious metric of success than x tonnes of bombs dropped to kill x number of people. You can't sell it on telly. You can't easily have people understand how successful you're being. Same issue the Yanks had in Vietnam. They couldn't really define success so just started reeling off how many bombs had been dropped and how much territory they'd gained control of without those figures really meaning anything in the grand scheme of things.

The bombs need to be a part of the means to a defined end as well. What's the plan? What's the long term goal? Is everyone involved agreed on that? Bombing IS to oblivion and giving ourselves a pat on the back as we leave a lawless crater behind just exacerbates the potential of the latest rabid Islamist fools to rise up. Equally if we start pissing about too much you'll piss off others and have them turn to the Islamist cause as well...

It's all a little too difficult.

I'm not against bombing at all. I think it's something we need to do. In truth I think we certainly need to do more than that, as you can't win a conflict from air alone. But combat needs to be part of a wider, smarter, more developed plan than what we seem to have currently, which appears to be 'fuel up the Tornadoes and **** the words removed up'.

[tinker]

 

For every bomb we drop another home grown sympathiser is created, thats where the threat to our national security comes from.

If any UK city, outside of London, has a Paris style attack then the carnage would include nearly all the first police officers who attend and far more of the public.

Let's have more police on our streets protecting us and less bombs in other countries creating potential matars in ours

Edited November 28, 2015 by tinker

[blandy]

12 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

Payload for a Tornado is usually 4 pathway missiles and 2 brimstone missiles, combined cost just under £300,000. Tornados fly in pairs, so that's £600,000 in missiles per mission. Oh yeah, fuel and running costs for a Tornado are £35,000 per hour. The average mission takes 6 hours, that's £210,000. But there are two of them remember, so that's £420,000. So with the missiles, that's just nudged over a million pound per mission. So far, the coalition have launched over 5,500 missions across Iraq and Syria.

Your overall point is good, and I'm being pedantic perhaps but that part quoted doesn't stand up well to scrutiny. Where did you get it from?

paveway, not pathway. Laser (and gps) guided bomb, not missile. Payload cost probably not far off, maybe on the high side though, [ edit paveway are 22k each and brimstone 105k, so that's £193k, not 300k] but they wouldn't release all of those stores on every mission. Far from it. It's been around one in 10 missions so far in Iraq, I think, for the RAF where they've dropped anything, and it wouldn't be everything on the aircraft, just one store, two at most. Fuel and running costs, would have to include the entire cost of the Operating base, all the crew training, ground crew training, all the wages, all the other people who do the admin and clean and cook and so on, all kind of averaged out over the number of aircraft, and the average number of hours flown, plus the actual fuel cost, to come to the figure you say. And even then, the tax on those wages, and on other costs goes back into the treasury. And all of that stuff is already paid for, whether the aircraft bomb Syria or not. Syria is closer to akrotiri than is Iraq. Less fuel to get there. 6 hours per sortie is wildly high. So the actual cost of each mission in terms of fuel, payload released, servicing on return to base, repairs etc. will be a fraction of your "1 million pounds per mission". It still won't be cheap, but hyperbole doesn't help people understand.

[Awol]

The longer IS controls enough territory to credibly talk of its Caliphate, the further and more credibly its message is spread.

Make no mistake IS is operational in Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Libya, is subverting AQIM in the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa, the Sinai, growing strongly in Saudi Arabia, gaining ground in Afghanistan... and on it goes.  These are facts, not alarmism.

Reducing IS from a proto-state in Iraq and Syria to a mere terrorist organisation is essential in countering their information operations and halting their current progress. Left unchecked the Middle East, North Africa and beyond will fall into multiple state failures and many more simultaneous Syria type scenarios.

If you think the refugee problem in Syria is bad now then we ain't seen nothing compared to what will hit Europe unless IS is stopped. That's before we go into the security implications on European soil and the likelihood of growing political extremism on the continent. 

Set against that very likely trajectory, the cost of a few 100 sorties by the RAF is vanishingly small compared to the price of allowing these psychopaths to continue with their project - and the inevitable full scale military confrontation it will entail.

Can or rather will the UK contribute enough capability to make our participation a game changer? No we are clearly not ready to do that, but every country that joins in has an aggregating effect on capability that makes a difference when taken together.

Is simply bombing IS sufficient to do the job? No, as the PM has already admitted, but it will certainly have more effect than doing nothing. 

It's all well and good talking about a political solution first, but the reality is there are so many opposing regional and international agendas at play that 'herding cats' doesn't even begin to describe the challenge of achieving it. That will have to come, but in the meantime we should (IMO) be doing as much as Parliament will allow to degrade the threat that exists now in the interests of our own national security, working with whoever will help us to achieve that aim.

 

[Awol]

2 hours ago, tinker said:

 

For every bomb we drop another home grown sympathiser is created, thats where the threat to our national security comes from.

If we really have citizens who would happily murder their countrymen because the government wishes to stop a bunch of murderous, raping, enslaving medieval savages from continuing their barbarity, then really how British are they?

Would it be better to have them out in the 'open', detectable by the security services and removed from society? I think so - a controversial opinion on VT but I'd wager entirely mainstream in the country at large.

The sad fact is we have a very small fifth column of people in the UK who hate everything the country stands for. Unfortunately there are still enough of them to do completely disproportionate harm in terms of physical damage to individuals, and perhaps more significantly to societal harmony in general.

Any democratic government worthy of the name cannot base its decision making process on appeasing such people, who in any case can never be appeased.

 

[tinker]

When was the last time dropping bombs brought us peace? It what we have done for years and it does not work. Hate feeds hate , we need to stand back and really look at what we could do to remove the motivation for these people , bombs are not the answer.

The USA foreign policy is the fertilizer for all this shit,  why else would they be doing it? There are plenty of problem areas around the world they could stick their peaks in but they dont , why? They have a selfish,  financial and imperialistic motivation for all this, just like in Iraqi. 

If we really wanted to stop it all then just stop the gun manufacturing or the explosive factories or stop the financing of it all........

[limpid]

2 hours ago, blandy said:

Payload cost probably not far off, maybe on the high side though, [ edit paveway are 22k each and brimstone 105k, so that's £193k, not 300k]

Black Friday bargain pricing.

[chrisp65]

Blandy,

Yeah I don't want to get too bogged down in the exact costs, but at £22k each for paveway and £105 each for brimstone, that 4x22 is 88 plus 2 x 105 is 210 comes to £298,000. So I'm sticking to my 'just under £300k'.

But I wouldn't want to bet my house on those numbers, it was basic figures grabbed from a few quick google sources such as wikipedia / sky / mod. 

 

[Brumerican]

Why spunk a load of cash on missiles when we have Derren Brown.

 

"When you wake up you will be a pacifist....and gay ....and Jewish"

That'll learn 'em.