There’s a lot of noise being made over an extremist threat to our malls. Is this a real threat? Probably, but not on any kind of scale like 911 or like the threat that the terrorists present to the nations of the Middle East and that leads to the question; Where the hell are those nations when it is so evident that they need to protect themselves.
Our politicians are now talking seriously about sending our troops into Iraq to fight ISIS. This is madness. First of all, let’s look at those parts of the problem that weren’t thought out when Bush invaded Iraq the first time. I’m speaking of what result do you expect and what result do we actually see. What happens when we beat the living hell out of ISIS army? No one has an answer to that, because there is no answer that doesn’t involve the people of the Middle East and they are so tied up in their little feuds, the grabs for power and their religious nastiness that none of them, except possibly Abdullah II of Jordan, are capable of running the mess we will leave behind.
We already proved this the last time we invaded Iraq and it wasn’t so long ago that people should have forgotten. If you can’t think back a scant four or five years you don’t belong in any office, let alone the U.S. Congress.
Ted Cruz says that you can’t win a battle if you don’t acknowledge who the enemy is. He’s absolutely right, but he is so stupid that he doesn’t realize that he is making Obama’s argument. The enemy isn’t Islam. Yes, it is a group of Muslims that do believe in their 8th century version of the Koran but it isn’t the nation of Islam any more than Nazi Germany’s invasion of Europe was a Christian invasion because almost all the Nazi’s were some kind of Christian, and they almost all hated the Jews. The truth that Cruz has stumbled into is that, yes, almost all the terrorists are Muslim but what he doesn’t get is that all Muslims are not terrorists. Do we have to go back and teach logic to all these Right wing idiots?
You hear someone like retired general Jack Keane charge that ISIS takes its interpretation of the religion directly from the prophet and that it uses original interpretations of the religion. In this he may be right, I am not an Islamic scholar, but we all know how half assed it is to take original texts from ancient documents and try to apply them to modern life without adaptation. Jews from the Old Testament and Christians from the New, make statements and have beliefs that we all see as ludicrous. So maybe ISIS takes its interpretations directly from the original Koran but that just makes it as out of step with modern, moderate Muslims as are Christians who quote scriptures about biblical fathers killing their children or Noah loading two of each animal onto the arc. Those of us who have some capacity to apply logic to ancient, semi-literate texts understand that the basic scriptures of all religions are not literal roadmaps but more quaint fairy tales written to give a completely clueless ancient population an idea of how man could survive in those uncivilized times.
Keane sees the classical interpretations, but fails to see the rest of the picture. Everything Keane quotes as part of the ISIS portfolio, like beheadings, crucifixion and slavery, are also part of the Old and New Testaments. Does that make any war we participate in a Christian war?
Keane does seem to understand that there are causes that have to be addressed if we ever want to be free of the problems that currently exist in the Middle East, problems like social justice, poverty, education and health, but he prefaces his inclusion of those problems with the adamant call for a way to destroy ISIS militarily. This is a natural point of view for an ex-general, but if we destroy them without having some kind of program in place that will fill the leadership void, we will only be facing a repeat of what we saw when we left Iraq a few years ago.
Then you get a war criminal like Donald Rumsfeld sticking in his two cents, telling us that these social complaints are ridiculous because there are lots of people around the world who have these problems and they are not attacking anyone. That’s true but like everything Rumsfeld ever dealt with it is only half true. That’s why we ended up in such a mess in Iraq the first time, because Rumsfeld and the rest of the lazy, ignorant, dishonest, warmongers that surrounded Bush and Cheney wanted war, wanted oil, but never considered the ramifications of anything they did.
So has Rumsfeld or Chaney or any of the rest of that idiotic cabal learned anything from the disaster they perpetrated in Iraq? If they do, they are keeping it to themselves because every suggestion that has leaked out of their porous brains has stunk of more disaster. None of them seem to realize how lucky they are, to be walking around free, instead of joining other war criminals on the gallows.
I know, it’s unfair to blame the idiots that caused the mess for not having a solution to it when no one else has been able to come up with anything even remotely functional as a cure to the woes of the Middle East. But consider that if Bush, Cheney and their cabal of warmongers, hadn’t proceeded on their disastrous way, we wouldn’t need a solution to anything now.
One of the reasons that it so hard to put a logical plan together is that we have pundits like Bill Kristol saying things on TV like; “When George Bush left office Iraq was safe and secure.” This is such a blatant lie from a man who absolutely knows better, that it defies the ability of anyone to ever come to any kind of viable solution to anything. If we can’t even be honest with ourselves about what we have just experienced we might a well forget about ever solving the Middle East and go on to some other problem, like the plastic continents that are forming in the oceans around the world.