Originally Posted by
Herod
Here we go again. Another Middle-East war.
Suggest you consider the source when you consume information on the internet. Also, a grain of salt should be consumed with each story, many of which are rich with opinion and sparse on fact.
The Guardian piece covers a good bit of ground. It closes with a point that most people don't understand.
In his 2016 book The Field of Fight, Flynn wrote: “We’re in a world war, but very few Americans recognise it, and fewer still have any idea how to win it.”
William Lind wrote, a couple of decades ago, a theoretical framework about a thing called 4th generation warfare. It's a reasonable approximation for political conflicts that include non-state actors. Under that framework, and with some updates based on experiences in the last 20 years, there's been a ideological war for sure underway since about 1998 when the first successful attacks on America by Al Queda came off in Kenya and Tanzania. (whether or not the (failed) truck attack on in 1993 the WTC were of a primordial version of Al Qaeda is debatable, but the perps were in fact Muslims).
If you pull your mind out of the Peace of Westphalia assumptions of wars only being possible between nation states, you find that a strange kind of war has been going on for about 20 years that looks nothing like our grandfather's war. As time has gone on, the number of factions and sides has increased and morphed, not remained static. What Bin Laden and his inner circle hoped to achieve was a call to arms under a broad front (which is sort of what Al Qaeda means) to encourage Muslims of all kinds to fight back against the world order/world structure as they saw it. (In that respect they are in an anarchist model of political movements).
With that perspective in mind, Flynn's not raving. He's reporting on history. When you consider the funding funneled into Syrian groups fighting Assad from Saudi and Qatar, among other places, the "many vs many" nature of this new global reality really hits home. It's not going to stop for a very long time, and any fantasy Mr Trump has about destroying ISIS for once and for all demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of the field of play he's confronted with. It's not a soccer match, its a six team 7-man rugby match played with one, two, or three balls depending on the flip of a coin.