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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Taro who wrote (803678)	8/25/2014 10:59:32 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 1579983

Hi Taro; Re: "Now, assuming those guys got a couple of nukes in their control - Pakistan? - that would change your equation quite a lot, right? Delivery? Just ship them close to the US, and..."; Historically, countries with nukes have been immune to attack by the US. And I think having nuclear armed ISIS would definitely reduce the likelihood that the US would go all out against them. However.... (1) Those nuke armed countries have also never been in hot conflict with the US. Pakistan is an ally. India is more or less neutral. North Korea hasn't attacked anyone. Maybe ownership of nukes gives immunity to attack only during peacetime (i.e. absence of real war, as in August 1945 to now). (2) It's really hard to move nuclear weapons during a war because the US will simply halt all ocean transport and inspect carefully. And modern equipment can easily detect nukes. So it would have to be a surprise attack. And they'd have to keep it secret beforehand. But after, for example, Pakistani nukes went missing the US would be on a big time alert about it. (3) Actually killing 30 million people with nukes in ports isn't that easy to do. As far as Pakistan donating those nukes to ISIS, the country is not Arab. I would expect that the attraction of a caliphate would be restricted to the Arab countries. The problem with them adding Pakistan is that there's a bunch of Shia (Iran) between them. To successfully stitch together territory that is not Arab, ISIS would have to morph into a true empire. The only empires that have ever lasted any reasonable length of time all allowed a great deal of latitude among the subject populations. This is the secret of how the US has been so powerful, minority rights. Other large countries are not so good at keeping their minorities "content". Heck, small countries aren't too good at it either. It's the mistake Hitler made, to think that the strongest countries are ones that are homogeneous. Instead, the insistence on homogeneity limits the maximum size of the empire. Hitler thought that because he happened to be born at the right time and place to see the end of the Austrian empire. By the way, the most successful (modern) Caliphate of all was that of the Ottoman empire which was Turkish rather than Arab. What's changed since that empire was established, is nationalism, where countries are organized primarily according to language. So can ISIS turn back the tide of history and put together a multilingual Caliphate? I doubt it. Instead I see it, at best, uniting the Arabs; something that's more or less inevitable one way or another over time (but not very easy to do). In other words, I don't see them as a true Caliphate with extensive territory outside of the Arab regions. Right now the thing to watch is Turkey's border with Syria. If ISIS starts pushing Turkey over, then we have a problem, Houston. But I don't think they'll be able to make progress against Turkey. Turkey has talked about asking for NATO assistance. The earlier caliphates (and other empires all over the world) did not take regions outside their language by insurrection. Instead, foreign speaking regions are always taken by military conquest. So far ISIS has done absolutely no direct conquest. They're a locally supported organization in the regions they control; they do insurrection not invasion. And I could be wrong; the place to watch would be Turkey. -- Carl