[Bobboau]

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/20/chattanooga-wesley-clark-calls-internment-camps-disloyal-americans/

 

I..eh... well that just happened. he actually referenced the WW2 internment camps as an example of what we need to do. wow. Isn't he supposed to be progressive?

[Mars]

I guess I kind of assume he's getting crazy in his old age. He seemed pretty sane in the 2004 elections.

[karajorma]

“We have got to identify the people who are most likely to be radicalized. We’ve got to cut this off at the beginning,” Clark said.

And carting them off and throwing them in an internment camp is not going to radicalise them? And it's not also going to radicalise everyone who knows them too?

[Hellstryker]

Wow what the **** did I just read/watch?

[Luis Dias]

Interesting. I was wondering when it came to this.

e: a bonus, something Reagan said in the reparations bill of 1988

[NGTM-1R]

FEMA Concentration Camps and Black Helicopters have come full circle.

[Luis Dias]

Oh I'm sure INFOWARS is having a field day with all this stuff. "WE TOLD YA IT'S HAPPENING"

[General Battuta]

I read this amazing, amazing interview with a high-ranking ISIS member. The best part was that they all met in American internment. They traded contact info, waited to be released, and got to work.

“But as time went on, every time there was a problem in the camp, he was at the centre of it,” Abu Ahmed recalled. “He wanted to be the head of the prison – and when I look back now, he was using a policy of conquer and divide to get what he wanted, which was status. And it worked.” By December 2004, Baghdadi was deemed by his jailers to pose no further risk and his release was authorised.

“He was respected very much by the US army,” Abu Ahmed said. “If he wanted to visit people in another camp he could, but we couldn’t. And all the while, a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.”

[Luis Dias]

They missed an opportunity there to bug the hell out of every square meter of that facility. Learn their plans. Tactics. Have them freed and when they stroke, bam, perfect take down.

As it reads, almost looks like a perfect textbook case on how liberalism and its respect for human rights is indeed self-defeating against a ruthless ideology. At least in the short / middle term (let's never forget that Hitler also thougth the same).

[Bobboau]

yeah, except the reason they were in an american camp instead of an Iraqi prison was not a result of liberalism.

[Luis Dias]

I'm with the notion that had Saddam run the place, everyone in there would be probably either dead or extremely "damaged". I don't think he would have commited the "mistake" of letting these people leisurely conversing with each other, scheming and so on.

Mind you, I'm not judging here.

[Bobboau]

even assuming the first three months of 2003 happened exactly the same way, it wasn't liberalism that operated the US military prisons in Iraq.

[General Battuta]

He's using liberalism in the political philosophy sense, not the American left wing sense.

[Bobboau]

it doesn't matter which sense of the word you use, neither meaning of liberalism was running the prison camps.

[Dragon]

As it reads, almost looks like a perfect textbook case on how liberalism and its respect for human rights is indeed self-defeating against a ruthless ideology. At least in the short / middle term (let's never forget that Hitler also thougth the same).

It has its problems in long term as well. Stalin also wasn't big on liberalism and fared a lot better. Insisting on liberalism, human rights and "progressiveness" is the big reason why the US hasn't really won a war since Korea. Against a ruthless ideology, especially one centered on a religious cause, the US is simply incapable of fighting properly. It's treating every enemy in kid gloves, while the other side fights with everything they've got. TBH, those problems prevail through the entire NATO and The West in general. It's why they're not winning against ISIS, the Russians (who manage to be pretty ruthless without being complete monsters, BTW), Somali pirates, etc.

About the internment camps, I find this wouldn't be a bad idea, but the US isn't capable of implementing it the way it'd make a difference. It would need to be done right. People were released from Iraqi prisons far too early. From camps like that, they would have to be released "when the war (or Terror) is over". Which likely means that they'll all die behind the bars, because this is looking like one long war. They certainly wouldn't endear people around the Middle East to the US, but that's not the point, either.

TBH, the US isn't really fighting this war any more. The local militaries, with much less qualms about human rights and public opinion, seem to be the primary combatants. They can and likely will win this, hopefully slaughtering enough ISIS combatants that the movement will die. The best thing the US can do now is not give people any more reasons to radicalize (and perhaps support those militaries logistically). The Middle East doesn't have a high opinion of the US, so if it isn't going to fight, it should concentrate on not making it even lower.

[General Battuta]

You are about 170 degrees off in your analysis, as any good counterinsurgency doctrine would tell you.

[Dragon]

good counterinsurgency doctrine

As in, one that worked, or one that US analysts say should work? Since I've had trouble finding examples of the former in the past... Or at least in the recent past, anyway. I don't suppose you mean methods used in a more distant past.

[General Battuta]

Calling Stalin 'a success' or treating Russia's entire post-WW2 military history as anything but a comically identical mirror of American adventurism is really silly. Afghanistan did not go well for the Soviets at all. And they have a long history of botched responses to insurrection, counteroccupation, and terrorism.

[Luis Dias]

It's a problem without solution, and given humanity's propensity to create really dark dystopian hegemons, and given how frequently local dystopian hegemons are created, it's probably for the better that it has no solution.

[Dragon]

Local dystopian hegemons are what happens when you give power to those who want it for the power itself. And that's the kind of people that leads coups and uses violence to gain power. People who want power to do something in particular (like in most established democracies, or exceptional cases like George Washington) or who just get it without trying (most hereditary systems) tend to fare better. Large dystopies simply happen when this occurs in a sufficiently powerful country, or when "something in particular" I mentioned is, for some reason, a particularly unsavory goal (and people are desperate enough to vote for such a person).

Calling Stalin 'a success' or treating Russia's entire post-WW2 military history as anything but a comically identical mirror of American adventurism is really silly. Afghanistan did not go well for the Soviets at all. And they have a long history of botched responses to insurrection, counteroccupation, and terrorism.

This is why I'm saying that Stalin "fared better" than Hitler, not that he was a success (his regime survived him, for one). Soviet Union was a bit of a joke militarily, but for different reasons. I wouldn't say that it was the ideology that failed there. Corruption, lack of common sense (killing a leader that supported them in Afghanistan) and whims of politicians mostly seem to have done them in. Russian Federation under Putin seems to have fixed most of that. Note, when I mentioned Russians, I meant their current exploits in Ukraine and elsewhere, not anything Soviets did. Those guys seem to be winning, including against islamists in North Caucasus.