Geektastic:

Fred99:

SJB: ISIS will eventually fail without any intervention from the West.

All brutal regimes have from Stalin's Russia to Pol Pot's Cambodia although they sometimes last a long time. ISIS have established a de-facto state in parts of Iraq and Syria but when villages or towns are taken back from them they are empty, the original population having either fled or been killed.

You can't build a functioning state without having a large number of willing participants and apart from a few thousand fanatics they have no willing participants. The vast majority of them will lack the skills or intelligence to construct or run any form of society anyway.

Distressing though the attack in Paris and others have been they need to be kept in perspective. You are more likely to be hit by lightning than killed or injured by a terrorist attack even if you live in Afghanistan or Iraq.

The press, politicians and social media have a lot to answer for when these sorts of incidents occur by sensationalising them. President Hollande calling it a war against ISIS will only help in gaining them recruits. He's hopelessly incompetent.

I don't agree with much of this.  As I understand it, there's some local support from (persecuted) Sunni minorities.  When the villages are "taken back", then by western-assisted forces with drones / fighter jets, air support for ground forces etc - but fighting an ISIS "blended in" with the local community, then who could blame those civilian locals for fleeing? From some reports I've read, life for those locals is better under ISIS than before, they actually did get infrastructure working and their form of law and order installed, which was better than the previous chaos.

As for Hollande's "war on ISIS", well he's a politician - he has to do something.  Unfortunately, it's what they want and expect.  Drop large bombs from aircraft on ISIS occupied towns, and there will be civilian casualties.  These incidents will be played for all they're worth.  There will be a counter and hard-line view that those locals are "harbouring" or "sympathetic to" terrorists.  The reality is that they've probably got no choice. 

It's a huge festering mess - and a "big" problem.  Western support for stable government will always be misinterpreted by persecuted minorities.  Western support has been fickle and subject to changing self-interest, human rights abuse widespread, but western tolerance to it depends who's doing the killing.

Our problem is being unable to keep our noses out. If we had simply sealed the border where we are affected and ignored the messes the occupants of the Middle East are making all would be well.

Certain people can't help but decide it's our "duty" to butt in when they don't run things the way the West thinks they should.