The Islamic State wants to be a full-service nation-state. What would ISIS look like if it governed like a legitimate nation-state like the United States? Let’s take a look.
ISIS, Full-Fledged Nation-State
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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I understand they also organise tours with oil tankers to Turkey, sponsored by no less that the leader of one of those upstanding NATO allies, one Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and members of his family. In other words, all the attributes of a state which should be supported by right-thinking governments….
Henri
Yes – It’s carnival-like politics for all the rubes. It’s been like this for most of the USA’s history, and it will probably continue because the average American just wants to get by and protect what he has – Just like the rest of the world. Wait a sec, did I just say “rest of the world”? Yikes! There’s a lot of the rest of the world that doesn’t share our values or even the same interests! Gosh darn! How did that happen? Tune in later next week when Gilligan decides to kill Mary Ann as an honor killing, and some vigilante repubelikans give him the weapons he needs to behead her, while her organs are sold for profit – not handling costs – and the Skipper invades someplace to establish Democracy!
Yeah, that’s the thing – most people just want to get on with their lives. Most people are not monsters, if they were we wouldn’t have made to our current level of civilization in the first place.
If we just kept our cotton pickin’ fingers out of the Muddle East for a few decades, the radicals would settle down & become the new conservatives – opposed to letting some upstart knock them from their places of power. Then they could get down to (re)building their infrastructure, people would become fat, dumb, and happy with no incentive to form radical terrorist organizations.