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Old 22nd November 2015, 04:13
Richard T. Eger Richard T. Eger is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Seaford, DE, U.S.A.
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Re: Just how would you defeat ISIS?

Dear All,

Tonight on TV they ran a repeat of Fareed Zakaria's CNN program on how ISIS came into being and, of particular interest, the population's attitude in Mosul about being occupied. A German reporter named Jurgen Totenhofer was granted permission to film life in Mosul, survived the experience, and was quite disturbed about how accepting the population was to being occupied and to accepting the radicalizing of its youth.

The positive thing that ISIS brought to Mosul was a sense of stability. Being Sunni, the population had a grudge against its second class citizen status from the Shiite government in Baghdad, obviously fostered by the U.S.' complete bungling of the postwar era and the alienation caused by the Nouri al-Maliki government.

What is happening with ISIS is brainwashing. When I was in AFROTC, we were presented with an intriguing situation of an alien invasion. The question was what to do about it. All sorts of hints were dropped as to the suggestability of the aliens and I was the only one that got the correct solution - they needed to be brainwashed. (No, I didn't enter the Air Force because I flunked flight training offered in my senior year and the Air Force was gracious enough to let me out of my contract. I went onto NASA instead.)

So, here we have Mosul under the direct influence of ISIS, a radical Sunni organization. In WW II, we dropped a lot of propaganda leaflets on Europe. How successful were these and should leaflets be used to counter the brainwashing of populations under ISIS control and, in specific, Mosul, which is a large city rather undeserving of a large bombing campaign?

Regards,
Richard
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