This comments section is going to be a no man's land in a few hours, so I'll try to keep any judgement completely out of this text field. I'm not going to go o

This comments section is going to be a no man's land in a few hours, so I'll try to keep any judgement completely out of this text field. I'm not going to go over the last hundred or so years of stroke/counterstroke/countercounterstroke in the western Med - you can look that up yourselves. Hopefully you will use reputable scholarship to do so, and realize - like with Russia-Ukraine - that nothing happens for no reason . . or because the devil . . or because literally Hitler. A lot of what I say would have applied to 9/11 as well; it would behoove anyone speaking heatedly to perhaps review the aftereffects of decisions[1] in those days. So you're fighting this bunch of guys. They injected some yahoos into your country. They killed a bunch of your people, but are not trying nor able to hold territory. They are unable to expand their borders in your direction at any point in the future, because you have nuclear weapons, and conventional superiority besides. Now, why do you think they went around doing their killing so very splashingly? OK, good. Are you going to do the thing they want you to do? I think the current answer is, "yes", and that's fascinating to me. Both fundamentalist and new reactionaries of our current era share a goal: the reduction of the post-Enlightenment secular state, in favor of either a theocracy or a neo-feudal plutocracy, with lots of technological spice. Although these two forces are sometimes deadly enemies, they - like Fascism and Stalinism before them - work together to create a much more dangerous environment than either could accomplish alone. Serious People remaining in power should probably acknowledge this, and either throw in with the techno-feudalists, or re-energize the secular social powers that created and maintains the Modern world. I suppose Option C, "Make Your Own Ethnonatalist Blood God", is also an option, but I like nice things and don't decorate my carpet with skulls. [1] We took the option of thinking the rest of the world wanted to live on the set of the latest season of MILF Manor, but we also started shooting before the sewer line was put in. Another option is treating it like an international law enforcement problem - which it very much was, but the American resistance to international law obstructed that path. The final path was to go down hot: every nationality represented on the attacks to be regarded as hostile, and each hostile power will put forth an unconditional surrender, WW2-style. As a nuclear power, America would have had to only make one or two ghastly examples before everyone else took the knee. This is horrifying, probably would have damaged our reputation even more than the real reaction did, and - most importantly - brutalizes our populace to mass death. However, the net bloodshed would have probably been less. Virtually everyone I know reminds me of this fact fairly regularly, and I need to remind them of how hard it is to fill up your truck on radioactive gasoline.