Our government can't use groups like ISIS one day and bemoan attacks on Westerners the next

[yurbud]

The real scandal is our bipartisan policy of using groups like ISIS, Al Qaeda, and any other religious extremists who dislike the same governments our government does.

ISIS didn't seem to move from our friends to enemies list until they started to bedevil Iraq as well as Syria.

Washington didn't seem to mind the religious extremist in Libya when they were after Khadaffi, but only only noticed they're bad guys when they killed our diplomats.

The same is true of our allies in Afghanistan. Our troops are rightly horrified that some of them practice child sex slavery, but our government doesn't care as long as they are on our side.

We should certainly find and punish (however you want to interpret that) whoever did this Paris attack, but the long term response should be to stop using these guys and telling our Gulf allies like the Saudis to stop funding, training, and directing them as well.

I won't hold my breath for that happening no matter which of the two parties enter the White House.

[MisterP]

1. shush! Operation Cyclone, the Algerian eradicateurs, "good Arab" hit squads, brutal and/or failed

secular dictatorships, the various hollow nationalisms and attempts to increase or coopt Islamism by all sides, the needs of a sinister and oil-glutted Saudi dynasty to keep down its infighting (and the frightful combination of big money and theological purificationism/puritanism), dead-end Afghanistan, unprovoked Iraq, their employment in Libya and Syria, Lagos's perpetual neglect of North Nigeria for its own squabbles, the intelligence underworld's constant need for standalone funding (i.e., arms and heroin)--none of these are supposed to matter