Laser Focus 2-3-15 - ISIS, some fellow Liberals and War

Hear this as delivered on my radio show on Feb 3 2015 by clicking http://podcasts.kcaastreaming.com/podcast-bin/stream.cgi?show=leser&datecode=20150203 

Some of the things that help human beings and other intelligent organisms to understand the world and survive are the ability we have to categorize individual events and correlate multiple events to ascertain causality.

Why am I talking about this? Bear with me and it will become clear. From the moment we are born, we humans build our knowledge of the world. We have the ability to go to school and to read and learn without having to experience something, but we also learn from our own experiences about events and what they mean and what other events they cause.

We also learned eventually that our ability to observe and determine causality and relationships are potentially flawed. The scientific method was developed to go beyond casual observation and ensure that proper experimentation and analysis providing repeatable results was what governed human understanding of the world around us. These kinds of experiments and rigorous analysis led us to understand things like, the sun does not revolve around the earth like casual observation might lead one to believe.

There is a segment of fellow folks on the left that do not seem to understand the idea of rigorous analysis when it comes to analyzing whether intervention in a situation overseas is warranted.

I think about this a lot and started thinking about this when ISIS executed the Japanese prisoners they had been holding over the weekend. You see, since the Iraq war, and Rude one you and I have talked about this, many fellow Liberals and Progressives have been superficially analyzing events where the US was considering intervening.

The prevailing opinion among this small group of fellow Liberals and progressives, and its far from all of us, just this group, is that every potential military use is like Iraq and illegitimate automatically.

Let me respond directly to this group of fellow Liberals and Progressives. No everything is not like Iraq. 

In Iraq, the Bush administration made a big deal about WMD, made a big show for a year about Iraq not allowing the UN weapons inspectors back into the country, then when they got them in they ignored their results. In hindsight (and actually I called it before the Iraq war in several articles) it was clearly a lie from the getgo. Iraq was not threatening anyone. Their troops were not massing on the border of any of their neighbors. Nothing was going on there.

This is a completely different situation from ISIS who are attempting to take over two countries and have explicitly stated their intent to take over many more. I want to go back to the Japanese Nationals. Their execution is a watershed event. The Japanese have it in their constitution that their military cannot be used overseas. So the idea of executing one of their journalists who you capture is completely despicable. Japan represented no threat at all to ISIS and they killed two of their citizens anyway. This is extremely important for everyone to think about. Because there is an opinion among this group on the left that I’ve been talking about that if the US simply leaves people alone, stops being involved in other countries that everyone will leave us alone too. In some cases that is true, but it is not true of ISIS.

This subgroup of fellow Liberals and Progressives believes that if we will leave ISIS alone, they will leave us alone. Well, by default, and by their Constitution, the Japanese leave everyone alone. But ISIS did not leave THEM alone. So there is your answer. With certain groups and certain countries, leaving them alone is not the right answer. How can you tell which is which? Well, ISIS doesn’t exactly make it hard to figure out to which group they belong.

Today, ISIS executed a Jordanian prisoner by putting them in a cage and burning them alive.

ISIS has demonstrated that they are one of the most ruthlessly violent and cruel groups in human history.

This nonsense with ISIS has gone far enough. Here’s what we need. We haven’t seen it in 60 years since the Korean War, but we need a fully global effort led by the UN to fight ISIS. If the UN won’t do it, anyone willing to do it should. The UN Security Council has already passed resolutions denouncing ISIS and target funding for ISIS and similar measures. It’s time for a resolution for the use of force against ISIS and all countries responding should be reflagged under the UN banner. ISIS should be degraded at least to the point where they cannot hold territory. And all fellow Liberals and Progressives should be supportive of that effort.