ISIS is the Sauds. The Sauds own ISIS. It's America's cold war gift.

[The Grand Nudger]

Saying that the U.S/The West is solely responsible for the creation of IS is ignorant.

I too dislike the Western involvement in many Middle Eastern countries, but to completely neglect the extremism all the years of dictatorship has fostered and to look at how the Muslim factions have always been killing the crap out of eachother, be it on a tribal level, or be it like the Iran-Iraq conflict.

Though I absolutely despise the "partnership" between the US and Saudi Arabia, it's ridiculous to think that the thought and act of an Islamic Caliphate is anything new and that it was set up by the west.

You're talking to a person who is positively -driven- to absolve islam of blame in any particular.  He doesn't even think that those "other muslims" are Real Muslims™.  The problems of islam, and the middle east, are -always- someone else's doing.  GL to you all the same, though.

But when you look at Afghanistan before the intervention (Which they asked us to), most soldiers didn't volunteer to go and kill "terrorists"... They volunteered to combat the Taleban and to help the civilian population, who were being treated and neglected on the same level as the Islamic State will, if they manage to take more land.

I volunteered beforehand, and I was a peacekeeper beforehand, but I saw myself as a peacekeeper afterwards as well.  I wasn't in the service to kill terrorists, I was in it to help people. That has someting to do with my sub-mos training as an in-theatre trainer more than an assualter of enemy assets (MOUT).....though as part of that I obviously trained alot of people on how to assault enemy buildings in contested streets or cities...the focus was more on clearing buildings with minimal civilian casualties when those civilians were being held or otherwise leveraged by militants..than it was on destroying the building -as- an enemy asset.  I appreciate that you acknowledge motivations like that.

Pursuant to that, and acknowledging my bias...I'm deeply disappointed that we've increasingly leveraged drones to do this for us, and that we've allowed a greater level of acceptable civilian casualties. Yes, a mout team is more costly (both in real and human terms)...but it does the job -better-, and might not make the people whom we're ostensibly looking to help hate us for sending a killer godamned robot to lob a hellfire through their sons nursery in order to hit an ied cell one floor beneath. People would sometimes cry and hug us....gear and all, when we cleared a building properly. I've never seen anyone hug a drone, or a missile. The entire situation is deeply and disturbingly divergent.