Back to the main point. States start declaring IS members to be noncitizens, maybe even go as far to try them in non-standard court on return. You leave your country on vacation and come back to immediate arrest and claims you went to Syria instead of Australia. Citizenship suspended and probably in special holding with reduced rights, how do you rate your chances of fighting these charges?
Well, you'd have a stamp in your passport, won't you? If you went to Australia, you had to cross the border, get your passport stamped... There is a paper trail for those things. If you did indeed go to Syria... well, there's a good reason for a through investigation, at least, especially if you claimed you're going to Australia. Now, I don't know how hard is to get to Syria from it's saner neighbors, but something tells me that given the current situation, the border is going to be guarded.
Also, loss of citizenship would only ensue if you joined the IS, which is different than just being in Syria. Joining IS anywhere, identifying with them and submitting to their command, should be punished, and harshly.
Terrorists should be categorized with pirates. Hostis humani generi. They cannot be fought with normal means, if you apply normal rules to them, you'll find yourself overwhelmed.
Really? Why is that? What makes a terrorist organization any different from organized crime?
I'm not arguing legitimizing them, quite the contrary. It's just that your usual criminals are generally confined to a single jurisdiction and incapable of fielding such manpower as terrorist groups.
The Italians would like a word with you. I hear they're always interested in better ways to deal with the Mafia problem.
Of course, Mafia would also fall under the "terrorist" classification. Terrorists are different from organized crime by their equipment, reach and manpower they can field. Mafia methods are more subdued than those of terrorists, but they boil down to the same. Yes, the Italians are overwhelmed. I don't think they'd be ready to accept what it takes to uproot the Mafia, though. If they did, they could have gotten rid of them. Also, they don't have the comfort of having a foreign force do what needs to be done. Italy would need to use it's own military within it's own borders, impose martial law, and people won't like it. Which means no re-election for whoever tries that. So it's unlikely to happen, even if long-term effects would be good for everyone.
Also, Mafia operates much more stealthly, meaning that measures against it could get rather orwellian. I wouldn't trust any current Italian politician with doing something like this. This would need to be enacted, Mafia purged and then all the extreme measures and emergency laws quickly removed. All too often, governments get too fond of extra control and find it hard to give up. A person capable of responsibly purging a civilized country like Italy is bloody hard to find. In case of Iraq and Syria, it's really hard to make it much worse, IS is bolder and much more overt, but less "experienced" than Italian Mafia. This would make them much easier to hunt down.
There are other organizations (such as drug cartels) that also need special, often military, response. This is what I mean. We do need different rules for dealing with such large scale, well equipped organizations.
No, we really do not. We do not need rules that bypass due process. We do not need rules allowing the use of torture. We do not need to put expediency before justice.
At this point, "justice" to the terrorists is kind of moot point. The point is to protect everyone else from them. IS, as well as other terrorist organizations, are long past the point where
they deserve any rights. What matter is protecting people from their actions. As such, I find it a fair game to apply somewhat different rules to them, ones oriented less towards justice and more towards neutralizing the threat. At any cost necessary. This would most likely actually cut down on the total bodycount.
Yeah, sure, let's fight inequality, poverty and human rights abuses by installing and supporting the kinds of regimes most likely to produce such in short order. Marvellous idea, that.
We can do that, or support regimes prone to producing, in short order, huge levels of corruption and/or turning into dictatorships anyway, in an uncontrolled and violent fashion. Democracy doesn't work in the Middle East, there are only two good, stable ones in the region. Israel and Yemen. The former is an anomaly, the latter is very far away from any flashpoints, separated from them by Saudi Arabia and a swatch of desert. Therefore, it might be better to have an intelligent dictator or even a legitimate king. See Kuwait, UAE, even Saudi Arabia. Saudi king is a bigoted old goat who's lived too long already, but even with that dolt at the helm, the country is at relative peace. Kuwait and UAE are downright nice by Middle Eastern standards, and Quatar is almost like a western country at times. Somehow, monarchy just seems to work in the region. Even the Iraq's first president was from the House of Yawer, which is (IIRC) the closest Iraq has to royalty. He did pretty good for a president, all things considered. This is what I call "experimental evidence". Perhaps if the US let him assume the title Shah or something, the country wouldn't have been a bloody mess it is now.
What we know is that Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Egypt (as of recently) and Lebanon all call themselves republics. They range from "problematic" (Turkey, Lebanon) to "war-torn" (Syria, Iraq). Somehow, neither Kuwait, nor UAE, nor Quatar have those issues in such magnitude. They have some serious gender equality issues, but if I had a choice of being a woman in Iraq "republic" and in Quatar, I'd go with the latter without any doubts. This might be the only chance, with a harsh, uncompromising leader stepping (or being installed by foreign forces) in order to purge, along with allied militaries, any terrorists within the borders. A strong king capable of uniting the country and throwing out/killing everyone who is a threat to his people. We might then (or later, when the country becomes socially advanced enough) talk about turning the place into a constitutional monarchy, or maybe even a fully fledged democracy. "Common" Middle Eastern people, as-is, are not fit to have so much power handed to them.
