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IS. What is the real, actual, true threat?

The politicians are at it again.   Not that long ago it was Iraq's alleged WMD (a lie!) and not long after that Assad's chemical weapons (questionable), etc. etc.   

Now, the cynics amongst us might suggest that the so-called threat from IS politicians around the world are claiming is timely, given America's upcoming mid-term election in November.    It also suits Britain's and Australia's PMs to assert the threat to democracy and in the case of Australia's Attorney-General to even claim an "existential threat" from IS.  

Paul McGeough is a veteran reporter and journalist and one of the very few who reported from the thick of  (not a cosy hotel room) the Iraq War.    He writes, as Chief Foreign Correspondent for The Canberra Times....

"It was quite weird. When the Washington talking heads assembled on Sunday morning for their weekly agenda-setting TV talk show jamboree, the question hardly asked and barely answered was how real or credible was the security threat posed by the so-called Islamic State to the West?

Outlining his case for war last Wednesday, President Barack Obama was obliged to concede the US "[had] not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland".


But that didn't stop the Bobbsey Twins of US politics, Republican senators, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona.


Graham was demanding Obama dispatch US troops back to Iraq "before we all get killed here at home". McCain, too, was adamant Obama was not doing enough: "That is simply a very narrow and focused approach to a problem which is metastasizing as we speak. … [IS] is attracting extreme elements from all over the world, much less the Arab world. And what have we done?"


Figures become inflated or conflated to suit the argument de jour; McCain was throwing around the number 100. McCain insisted this was the number of Americans fighting with IS but, in correcting him, terrorism expert Peter Bergen said it was the total number of Americans believed to have fought or attempted to have fought with any of many Syrian insurgent groups in the course of the conflict, some of which, even in Washington's book, are deemed to be good-ish guys.


In testing Obama's "no specific plot" line with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, CBS's Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer extracted this response: "What we have said is that we are not aware of any credible threats to the homeland right now.


"But we are concerned about three things in particular. The fact that they now control territory and that gives them place to plot and plan. The fact that they are now getting not only new fighters but increased money and followers and adherents. Third, and perhaps most importantly, we're worried about the number of foreign fighters that are going into Syria to fight.


"Some of them may then become even more extreme and want to return to their home countries, be that in Europe or even in the United States, God forbid, to carry out their terrible acts."


But when that "third and perhaps most important" point is tested in the context of Washington's leadership of the emerging coalition to "degrade and destroy" IS, it doesn't hold a lot of water.
Again it was Bergen who was something of a spoilsport, pulling out figures on the last time people living in the US signed on for holy war. It was in Somalia in 2006, when Washington backed an invasion by Ethiopian forces and more than 40 Americans signed on with the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabbab.


Just as is the case today in Syria, for a good number of the Americans who went to fight in Somalia it was a one-way ticket because 15 of the 40 or so US volunteers died there either as suicide attackers or on the battlefield."

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