Everyone's freaking out about the fact that an American named Douglas McAuthur McCain died fighting for ISIS in Syria, but this (from Michael Schmidt's story in The New York Times) makes perfect sense to me:
Mr. McCain's death ... is a sign that ISIS, at least in this case, is willing to use Americans on the battlefield in the Middle East rather than sending them back to the United States to launch attacks, as Western officials have feared.Our fear merchants always flip out imagining that Americans will learn terrorist skills overseas and then return to the U.S. to put what they've learned into practice. But why is that the ultimate fear? The people who've actually launched successful stateside terrorist attacks since 9/11 -- the Tsarnaevs, Major Hasan at Fort Hood -- were longtime U.S. residents with no battlefield experience who got the majority of their inspiration by going online right here in America. And the alleged threat that has Senator Inhofe's hair on fire -- that ISIS is "rapidly developing a method of blowing up a major U.S. city" -- has nothing to do with combat skills or overseas experience. I think the special fear that we'll face combat-hardened returnees on U.S. soil comes from war movies, post-apocalypse video games -- and, maybe, the crypto-rape mental narratives that lead gun-rights activists and anti-immigrant zealots to imagine "urban thugs" and child immigrants invading the Real America in marauding waves.
"His death is further evidence that Americans are going there to fight for ISIS rather than to train as terrorists to attack at home," said Richard Barrett, a former British intelligence officer who is now a vice president at the Soufan Group, security consultants in New York. "Nor does it appear that ISIS regards Americans as assets that are too valuable to risk on the front line rather than to keep in reserve for terrorist attacks or propaganda purposes."
Obviously, we need to make sure the choke points are working -- Schmidt, in the Times, says the government knew about McCain and would have prevented him from returning:
The federal authorities learned only after he arrived in the country that Mr. McCain had traveled to Syria, according to senior American officials. In response, the American authorities included him on a watch list of potential terrorism suspects maintained by the federal government. Had Mr. McCain tried to re-enter the country, he would have almost certainly faced an extra level of scrutiny before boarding any commercial airliner bound for the United States, the officials said.Well, I hope so. But I'm not going to believe that ISIS in on the verge of sending a battalion to America just because ISIS wants me to believe that. I'm reminded of this from Jon Lee Anderson's recent New Yorker piece about the killing of James Foley:
Last week, I met with Faisal Ali Waraabe, a politician in the Justice and Welfare Party, from Somaliland. He is a candidate in next year's Presidential elections.... Last year, he lost his twenty-two-year-old son Sayid, who was born and raised in Finland, to the dark enticements of ISIS. His son had also persuaded his young, new wife to join him, and the two now live, according to his father, near the town of Raqqa, ISIS's main urban stronghold in Syria. Faisal showed me a recent video of his son, posted on an ISIS Web site, on his smartphone; it shows a black-turbaned young man mounted on a horse, talking in heavily accented Finnish, and smiling into the camera. Calling himself Abu Shuaib al Somali, Sayid says, "The rule of Sharia will even come to Finland, and if you get called then, alhamdulillah, you'll enter Jannah" -- paradise -- "inshallah and Allah will take care of the ones you've left behind."With fierce fighting still going on in ISIS's sphere of influence, how likely do you think it is that ISIS will launch an assault on Finland? How likely is it that ISIS believes the road to the global caliphate runs through Helsinki? And if a terrorist attack on Finland is planned, why telegraph it, alerting Finnish and global authorities to the identity of this Finnish national? Sorry, this is just a recruitment tactic built on trash talk. ISIS has its hands full. It's using foreign fighters to fight for the territory it's fighting in now. Be wary, but don't assume the ISIS hordes are coming soon just because they're boasting.
When I saw that some guy named McCain had died in battle, the one I immediately eliminated as a possibility, was John Stacy McCain.
ReplyDeleteThat conservative chickenshit punTWIT and Keyboard Kommando would gladly send other people's kids to die in battle, while he fans the flames of war on his laptop from safety, thousands of miles away from the nearest battlefront.
And yeah, ISIS ain't comin' here. They're kind of busy over there.
Osama bin Laden waited until his families pal, that lazy and incompetent bozo, Incurious George W. Bush, and his psychopathic puppet-master, Dick Cheney, were in office, before he pulled his surprise.
Which those two clowns turned into 'we have to go to war over there, or else we'll have to go to war over here.'
I tried to laugh at the sheer stupidity, but I was too busy crying, as daily, some new atrocity by W and Dick, was disclosed.
I am sick and tired of the "They
ReplyDeleteare coming here" Cabal, led by McCain, Graham, and Lieberman( oops, I MEANT Ayotte currently), and their Acolytes who love to cry Wolf. There might be an incident, ut NO way they come here, and STAY here to fight their war against America!
However, and I am proud to be a right( negotiating) over Might( War) guy, this ISIS group is really, really scary, with their rush to show the worst of humanity by their taped actions towards others.
ISIS has to be taken out, but it is time for the Sunnis to start putting their Military where their mouths are, and put some skin in the game. This goes for all the Arab nations that rightly should be afraid, and I MEAN Very afraid of ISIS.
Coming to America takes time. How long was bin Laden planning his crap? What ISIS has in spades is MONEY, hard Money to buy the weapons and mercenaries it desires.
I think of ISIS as modern day Pirates, Openly hostile to all of those who won't go to the bottom of
the food chain. As Pirates, that really love Pillaging, Raping, and KILLING the enemy, the age of You-tube and such make recruiting, World Wide, easier than finding the
local "Jewish" Deli.
The U.S. needs to lead with hardware, but it should be the Arab Nations that provide the Soldiers for this Important
CRUSADE( just kidding, I aint King
George)!
If he had not been killed he would eventually have come home.
ReplyDeleteYou know, that story about Faisal Ali Waraabe's son has one little thing that makes me suspicious. Maybe I'm just too cynical, but they're saying the kid was born and raised in Finland, so why is the video of someone who is speaking "heavily accented Finnish"? I know Thais who were born and raised in America until they were nine or ten years old. They don't speak heavily accented English (or American, if you're a language purist). To me "raised" implies he lived there and went to school there and had playmates there. Kids are language learning machines. Our brains are hard-wired to learn languages -- perfectly -- until we're sixteen of eighteen years old, and then it just slowly gets harder. I'm still getting better at speaking Thai. I speak "heavily accented Thai" because I didn't start learning it until I was over thirty. So a kid who was "born and raised" in Finland shouldn't be speaking "heavily accented Finnish."
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