Jordan pilot hostage Moaz al-Kasasbeh 'burned alive'

[Blind groper]

True, but there had been colonists there for almost 200 years by 1812.

Most of those colonists were British, under British rule. It was only after independance that white Americans misbehaved so badly that the native people came to hate them.

[piscator]

The Borderers misbehaved in England, Scotland, Ireland, and among the Quakers in Pennsylvania previous to that. They're hillbillies, bikers, TV evangelists, and Republicans to this day...

[Seth]

Actually, Seth, in the 1812 war when the USA attacked Canada, the Native peoples of North America joined the Canadian and British side in the battle. Which kinda suggests that they did not like you guys terribly much.

Depends on which specific "Native peoples" you are referring to. Various tribes fought for various sides in various wars.

They also liked to go to war with one another with great frequency.

[laklak]

No, no Seth, all aboriginals were Noble Savages, living in harmony with nature and at peace with each other. It was the Bad White People, in particular the Nasty Americans, that fucked it all up. It was actually American spies who forced the Belgians to murder a few million Congolese and the British to tie rebellious sepoys across the muzzles of cannon. We even forced Australians to put Abo kiddies into boarding schools. If it weren't for ignorant, vicious, imperialistic Americans we'd all be living in a carbon-neutral paradise of electric cars and nightly Kumbaya sing-alongs.

[Seth]

No, no Seth, all aboriginals were Noble Savages, living in harmony with nature and at peace with each other. It was the Bad White People, in particular the Nasty Americans, that fucked it all up. It was actually American spies who forced the Belgians to murder a few million Congolese and the British to tie rebellious sepoys across the muzzles of cannon. We even forced Australians to put Abo kiddies into boarding schools. If it weren't for ignorant, vicious, imperialistic Americans we'd all be living in a carbon-neutral paradise of electric cars and nightly Kumbaya sing-alongs.

Um...okay...er...you probably want to ask the Crow what the Lakota used to do to them.

It was actually amazingly similar to what happened to Moaz.

[Blind groper]

Let me do something unusual and agree with Seth.

Tribal peoples all over the world fight each other. My Scottish ancestors were very tribal (though they called the different tribes, clans.) and fought each other tooth and claw. The Maori of my country were incessantly fighting each other before Europeans arrived. After Europeans arrived, and until the British took over government, they used muskets in their intertribal wars and just increased the death toll.

African tribes fight each other, as did those of Papua and Pacific Islands. American tribes were no different.

However, in the 1812 war against Britain and Canada, the North American tribes managed to put aside their differences and fight for the Canadian/British side.

Sadly, when that war had ground to a halt, the British betrayed their native allies, signed a treaty with the USA, and trotted off, leaving the white Americans to attack those natives. Not nice!

[piscator]

You forgot the Battle of New Orleans, where Americans, outnumbered almost 3:1, whipped a shitload of Peninsula War veterans backed by a large fleet of Limey warships intent on sailing up the Mississippi and just taking whatever the fuck they wanted, like they did in Spain.

[Blind groper]

To piscator

I did not forget the battle of New Orleans. The British were ensconsed in the war with Napoleon when the USA invaded Canada, and there is little doubt that the USA chose to invade at that time out of cowardice, knowing that the Canadians had a smaller militia than the USA and that Britain was too heavily involved in Europe to render much aid. However, the Canadians were tougher than the yellow bellied USA politicians realised and fought back with courage and ferocity. However, the USA, with bigger forces, still won a number of victories.

Then Britain and its allies kicked Napoleon's butt, and Britain sent forces to the USA and Canada. From that time, it was the turn of the USA forces to get its butt kicked. Even to the point of having Washington occupied and the White House burned down.

The Battle of New Orleans was the only victory of the USA after that point, and was sufficient to persuade Britain to go to the treaty table. Otherwise the USA might have been totally conquered, which in my view would have made the world a better place. However, that is just an opinion.

Britain disgraced itself by forgetting its North American native allies, and walking away, leaving them to the dubious mercy of the barbaric white people of the USA.

[piscator]

Guess again.
The Battle of New Orleans was fought after the Treaty of Ghent was signed and the Brits had already lost America, as the Brits could see the Americans were getting their shit more and more together. The Battle of New Orleans just made it clear that the Brits needed more than a 3:1 numerical advantage to contend with Americans on a level plain, and that sometimes discretion is the better part of statecraft and economics.

And Russia kicked Napolean's butt.

Wellington and his merry band of looters merely mopped up what Russia couldn't quite manage...Napoleon would have crushed Wellington with the 412,000 men he lost the winter before in Russia.

[Blind groper]

Piscator

I already agreed that Britain lost the battle of New Orleans. But Britain was on top until then.

I also said Britain and its allies defeated Napoleon. Russia was one of those allies. Britain, however, made a contribution to Napoleon's defeat that was disproportionate due to its dominance at sea. Napoleon might have defeated Russia if he could have used sea transport. Having to haul soldiers and equipment into the Russian winter using horses, walking, and ox carts, was an enormous problem.

Then there was the second Napoleonic war, in which Britain and Prussia defeated Napoleon's forces near the village of Waterloo in Belgium. Prussia played a vital role there, and so did the British army, but Russia was not central to that battle.

[Hermit]

Yes, Russia basically destroyed Napoleon's army, and the battle of Borodino, in so far as Napoleon thought of it as a victory, (which technically it was, what with the Russians having lost a lot more men than the French and forced to withdraw to the east of Moscow out of sheer exhaustion) was at best a Pyrrhic one. What beat him more than the Russian army, though, was what beat another vainglorious conqueror 120 years later: Logistics and the cold. By the time Napoleon arrived at Borodino, well over half his force had already perished, and over his entire Russian campaign way more of his soldiers died from freezing to death or starvation than in battle. The Russians basically burnt Moscow down when they evacuated. This left Napoleon nothing to feed his army with. Convinced that he had won the war, he sat there for six weeks, waiting for the Tsar to surrender. It never happened, of course. The Russians were biding their time, waiting for the French aggressor to finally come to the realisation that his army was melting away in front of his eyes because of the lack of food and heating.

As for Waterloo, you are right: Napoleon did not have 442,000 soldiers. He had 73,000. But then the coalition did not have 442,000 men either. It had even fewer than Napoleon - 68,000 - and not many more than half the number of cannon the French brought to the field. Nevertheless, Wellington managed to keep the situation finely balanced until the 72 year old Marschall Vorwärts arrived late in the afternoon with 50,000 troops (after an overnight forced march made additionally torturous by a recent downpour that turned the roads into morass) enabling the allies to roll over the enemy from one flank to the other.

To say "Russia kicked Napoleon's butt" is kind of true, but it is also so oversimplified that it makes that statement grossly inaccurate to the point of being bullshit. It is no better than claiming that (pick one of the following options) the Russian winter, Wellington, Blücher, Napoleon's hubris, massive ignorance of logistic requirements... kicked Napoleon's butt.

[Blind groper]

Thank you Hermit.

That is, in fact, a nice accurate summation.

[Warren Dew]

I agree, but how do you DO that? They were creating terrorists long before Iraq I. Yeah Israel yeah infidels on Holy Land yeah yeah. Their reasons for flying airliners into skyscrapers were a bit thin. So kowtowing to them isn't going to stop them. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, after all. Their religious imperative is to forcibly convert or kill everybody else. You cannot negotiate with that sort of lunacy.

It's not a matter of kowtowing to them or exterminating everyone. That's a false dichotomy. Just don't enact policies that will clearly create more terrorists. Best example of that is Iraq.

Now you're going all Neville Chamberlain on us too?

Feel free to go appeal to their humanity and better natures.

Why are conservatives so incapable of thinking outside of false dichotomies?! FFS. Bomb the fuck out of them. I'm no pacifist. I'm concerned about the morality collapse of becoming terrorists ourselves to protect our so-called free and enlightened states, and more directly concerned about not creating MORE terrorists. This is the problem with conservatives and their idiotic morals. You are more than happy to cut your noses off to spite your faces.

Considering how many leftists have explicitly agreed with Seth in this thread, and how Laklak, and as it turns out I, seem to be the ones who agree with you most, I don't think it's a liberal/conservative issue.

[Warren Dew]

IS works in the world of realpolitik. They're not interested in abstract concepts like justice or due process or democracy or peaceful coexistence. They want all the marbles and are willing to do whatever it takes to get them. Plus their leadership is sociopathic (not the worst personality trait for despots, to be sure). We're not going to have much luck placating them with bits and pieces of the Mideast. At some point we're going to have to deal with the jihadis, might as well do it now before it gets worse. Hell, losing a billion or two is probably the Green thing to do.

Realpolitik also means they are far more interested in practical territorial gains than in the abstract benefits of overseas attacks. That makes the Islamic State a much greater threat to Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia than is Al Qaeda - but much less of a threat to the United States.

What we need to do is to drain the emotion and assess the situation in terms of political reality. The reality is that the Islamic State takes people hostage who are in or near their territory, but has little ability to project power anywhere close to us. Thus, they are not a big threat to us - indeed, they are substantially less of a threat than, say, Iran or North Korea, who might be able to drop nuclear weapons on us with a few years of uninterrupted work.

From a realpolitik standpoint, the threat posed by the Islamic State to us is limited to their potential ability to destabilize our allies, like Jordan and Saudi Arabia. That suggests an obvious solution: when Jordan and Saudi Arabia feel threatened enough, let them provide the boots on the ground. We can provide military intelligence, technology, air support, and arms, but they can take the lead. And once the situation becomes a muslim versus muslim fight - indeed, a Sunni versus Sunni fight - the focus will come off the U.S. in the Islamic world, and there will be much less impetus for angry young muslims to target the U.S. with terrorism.

[JimC]

IS works in the world of realpolitik. They're not interested in abstract concepts like justice or due process or democracy or peaceful coexistence. They want all the marbles and are willing to do whatever it takes to get them. Plus their leadership is sociopathic (not the worst personality trait for despots, to be sure). We're not going to have much luck placating them with bits and pieces of the Mideast. At some point we're going to have to deal with the jihadis, might as well do it now before it gets worse. Hell, losing a billion or two is probably the Green thing to do.

Realpolitik also means they are far more interested in practical territorial gains than in the abstract benefits of overseas attacks. That makes the Islamic State a much greater threat to Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia than is Al Qaeda - but much less of a threat to the United States.

What we need to do is to drain the emotion and assess the situation in terms of political reality. The reality is that the Islamic State takes people hostage who are in or near their territory, but has little ability to project power anywhere close to us. Thus, they are not a big threat to us - indeed, they are substantially less of a threat than, say, Iran or North Korea, who might be able to drop nuclear weapons on us with a few years of uninterrupted work.

From a realpolitik standpoint, the threat posed by the Islamic State to us is limited to their potential ability to destabilize our allies, like Jordan and Saudi Arabia. That suggests an obvious solution: when Jordan and Saudi Arabia feel threatened enough, let them provide the boots on the ground. We can provide military intelligence, technology, air support, and arms, but they can take the lead. And once the situation becomes a muslim versus muslim fight - indeed, a Sunni versus Sunni fight - the focus will come off the U.S. in the Islamic world, and there will be much less impetus for angry young muslims to target the U.S. with terrorism.

Makes a lot of sense to me...