4 ms·

I didn't read the article, but my gut instinct would be that the people this man was held captive by were foot soldiers. They are frequently illiterate people w

• jacquesm 11y ago
  > without harming millions of innocent civilians But that little caveat means putting a large number of our own people at risk and this is where we lack fortitude. That is what resulted in the Iraq mess, which in turn led to IS gaining a foothold.
• tremon 11y ago
  > If the West had the means to destroy them (without harming millions of innocent civilians) When the GP speaks of compassion, I think (s)he is referring to the millions of civilians there, not the fighters.
  • DougWebb 11y ago
    Yes, that's exactly what I meant. The cold-hearted decision would be to count those civilians as acceptable losses, and just carpet-bomb the whole area.
• mseebach 11y ago
  > If the West had the means to destroy them (without harming millions of innocent civilians), the compassionate thing to do would be to do it ASAP. That exactly what the west thought they could do in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it turned out that it is a lot more complex than, well, a lot of smart people expected. That said, were western militaries not still smarting from those wars, there would probably have been boots on the ground a long time ago, in the hope of some sort of Balkan-war outcome.