jones wrote:
You've missed my point, I wasn't talking about attacks carried out by IS militias but NATO bombings and troops in the countries I've listed, it's why I mentioned Yemen as there are no IS people involved there.
And of course the West is also to blame for these attacks happening in Europe. Paris and Brussels were crimes committed by IS, and IS wouldn't even exist if it weren't for the politics of the West.
Clever argument construction, as you denote that "IS wouldn't exist if it weren't... for the West" but taken in conjunction with your previous posts (and furthermore the placing of the blame on "Europe" for the Paris and Brussels bombings) the connotation is that the West is the primary/proximate cause of the IS. I disagree; the rise of IS is overdetermined, and its simply impossible to isolate out the exact reasons for its rise without a suitable comparison case (in this case, counterfactual, and therefore impossible.)
The above is a lot of blather, but basically it boils down to the simple point that Europe isn't really to blame for the Paris/Brussels attacks any more than Sunnism is.
I am in agreement with you that the path-dependent, historical circumstances of "the Middle East" are without doubt the material and formal causes behind the rise of IS and other concurrent developments in the region. But again, Western imperialism and 20th century meddling can't be the proximate cause of extremist ideology ipso facto that the the West was involved in these activities everywhere around the globe.
I'm not really interested in assigning blame or culpability for IS. It's more important that the rest of the world, regional actors and the West, figure out ways to diminish the group's capacity to gain territory and commit large scale acts of violence.
IS will be relegated to history's dust bin in two ways: on ideological grounds (the defeat of the group's raison d'etre on theological/philosophical/historical grounds over time so that the group's collective motivation/rationale becomes untenable) or on material grounds (the group is defeated through modern warfare or the rise in regional prosperity makes IS' living arrangement/ end goal seem undesirable.) Identity politicking over who is ultimately to blame is entirely besides the point.
