I don't know what the best solution is to eradicate ISIS. I just know that the US has had a stranglehold in the region for decades now and that influence doesn't seem to be going away. Groups like ISIS thrive on exploiting that real narrative and using it for their own gains.
What U.S. "stranglehold"? The Ottomans ruled the Arabs for hundreds of years before we had any presence there at all. The French and British both ruled nations in that region as colonies -- we never did. The U.S. was instrumental in breaking French/British control over Egypt, and Suez in particular.
In fact, we basically had zero military presence there until Iraq invaded Kuwait, and radicalism already had a foothold there. As a matter of fact, I remember people saying that Saddam was keeping the lid on a nascent Sunni/Shi'ite civil war in Iraq. How are those pre-existing tensions
our fault?
And if you want to point to U.S support that enabled the Saudi regime to stay in power, that pales in comparison to how the Soviets were arming/propping up dictators throughout that region for decades. It's no accident that the vast majority of the fighting over there is done with Soviet-supplied weapons.
Wholly apart from singling us out as the bad guy, or blaming "western interference", the truth is there was plenty of western interference in other parts of the world -- Africa, Asia (India in particular), etc.. Yet, we don't see non-Muslim oppressed Africans exploding bombs in London, or Hindus flying planes into the WTC. There was an extended U.S. occupation of Japan, and we still have troops in Korea. Yet, no Koreans flying planes into the WTC either.
And on the flip side, those two brothers who exploded that bomb at the Boston Marathon were Chechens. When the fuck have we ever oppressed
Chechnya? Wouldn't the Russians have objected to that? And those Libyans who just murdered those Coptic Christians -- that's
our fault? What "stranglehold" have we ever had over Libya?
There is a common thread among all those incidents, and it's not U.S. oppression.
Naturally. It's what virtually all Muslims do. Cannot stress enough that Islam wouldn't be popular, have high conversion rates, survive at all (specifically today) if it was a religion of hate and violence. You don't have to like it, but it's pretty ludicrous to think otherwise.
I'd just add that the exact same thing could be said about Christianity/Catholicism during its darkest days as well.