We have worked hard to extricate ourselves from the Muslim black hole that has sapped our nation’s strength and resolve which we mistakenly got lured into eleven years ago. We were just about to put our nation’s hand on the edge to lift ourselves out and back into the light of freedom and peace when its pull sucked us back down into its darkness.
We’re up to 3,000 American troops back into Iraq. It’s reported: “White House budget officials said they would ask Congress for $5 billion for military operations in the Middle East against the Islamic State, including $1.6 billion to train and equip Iraqi troops. At its height in 2006 and 2007, the Iraq war was costing the United States more than $60 billion a year.” Our plan is that we “would establish training sites across Iraq” and “to help Iraqis and Kurds as they plan a major offensive expected next spring against Islamic State fighters who have poured into Iraq from Syria.”
Yogi Berra would say if he were with us: “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Rick Blaine would say: “Play it again Sam.” My friend Llyonnoc when he heard this said: “We’re going to hell in a handbag.”
After spending the $60 billion a year we see that we accomplished little more than bringing into existence the most barbaric group of people who ever banded together in the history of mankind, ISIS, or at least one of them. We can’t forget the Killing Fields of Cambodia courtesy of the Khmer Rouge, the concentration camps of the Nazis, or the gulags of the Soviets for those lucky enough to live to reach them. Here is an inside look at the members of the group; we’ve already seen their self-published videos of the beheadings of two Americans and others as well as the many where they line up captured soldiers, civilians, both men, women and children, and murder them in cold blood.
It’s enough to turn our blood cold with horror but must we be the ones who respond to it while the rest of the world passes by? I’ve said no, we tried our best and the results have been horrible. There is no reason to think they will improve by doing again what has been shown to be ill advised and plainly wrong headed.
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, other Arab states, and Iran have much more to lose than we do from the ISIS threat. They are happy, very happy, to have us sit back and do what they should be doing. They are adding nothing on the ground to the fight – their troops remain safely at home in nearby barracks while ours travel half way around the world to fight their war.
Keep in mind the guy sending them back won the Nobel Peace Prize. Everything in his body makes him prefer not to do it. He knows the mission is doomed. We are dropping back into the black hole. That why he took our troops out of there in the first place. Why he lost his courage to hold fast just as he was reaching his goal I can only attribute to his lack of interest in his job. He’s tired. His corner has tossed in the towel. The golf course and cocktail parties beckon. He’ll pass on the mess to someone else.
He had recognized that this is not our fight. He put the Muslim nations on notice that they had better put on their fighting gear to save themselves. ISIS has as its stated goal: “to form an Islamic state, or caliphate, over the entire region, stretching from Turkey through Syria to Egypt and including the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Lebanon.”
When we started bombing ISIS we got some symbolic assistance from five Arab states: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. The reason is: “these states see ISIS as a threat to their own domestic security. ISIS’s ideology doesn’t only condemn the “infidel West;” like al Qaeda, it is also dead set against the existing regimes in the Arab states, and wants the states themselves to fall and be replaced by a caliphate”
But these countries won’t defend themselves with ground forces. They want us to do it for them. What a mess we’ve got ourselves in not to realize this. We should tell those countries who are most threatened to pick up the cudgel of war themselves. It’s their fight.
Obama was cowered by the outcries of the generals and war hawks at home. You know it won’t stop at 3,000 troops. (It’s actually around 10,000 when you add in the air craft carriers and supporting air elements.) It won’t stop at $5 billion. It may never stop.
You know what we will lose in butting in on the Muslim wars. For one, if we destroy ISIS we’ll have revived al Qaeda. As noted, al Qaeda is a direct threat to us and not those Muslim nations. We’ll further empower Assad who we want to remove from power in Syris.
We must let the Muslim families work through their own hatreds in their own lands. We went in there in error; we’re going back in error. In the end, which may never come, all we will have gained through all these misconceived efforts will be the alienation of new generations of Muslims.
As I’m sure you, as a former prosecutor, know, the vast majority of illegal drugs produced in Latin America are consumed in the United States.. It’s difficult to see us guiltless for the situation in Mexico.
One other thing, regarding IS, it’s senior leadership is Iraqi. Most of them are graduates of the interrogation/torture mills run by the CIA, and, the military intelligence outfits that were responsible for facilities like Abu Graib. The IS mujahideen have a extra special hatred for Americans. In a number of articles, Dibaq writers often make mention of the attack dogs used to terrify the prisoners, and, other indignities, like water-boarding The real father of IS is George W. Bush. Had he not created the conditions for IS to be born, it would never have existed.
Khalid:
I’m at a loss to get your point. Are you suggesting because there may be other evil in the world we do nothing about the evil of ISIS until we address those other evils; or are you suggesting we do nothing about ISIS because in some convoluted theory we (the United States) are responsible for creating the evil.
Matt:
In a very real sense, we created the conditions from which IS was born. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. Removing Saddam Hussein from power left a vacuum that some individual, and/or, group, was going to fill. One might say, what does that have to do with a group spawned in Syria? The IS, whose leadership is Iraqi, built the organization in Syria, but, had always considered Iraq their primary target. IS used Syria as their staging area for their offensive in Iraq. While Raqaa is the Syrian HQ of IS, Mosul is considered the capital of the Khalipha.
Baghdad is the ultimate prize for IS. Taking Baghdad would allow them to claim they were the modern inheritors of the historical Abbassi hegemony that ruled Mesopotamia (as-Sawad/the black lands) from the time of it’s ascendancy in the 8th centrury, until, they were extinguished by the Mongols in the early thirteenth century. In Dibaq magazine, the IS claims that it’s aim is to restore ar-Rashidun, the era of the rightly guided Khalipha. I don’t believe it, I think they want to restore the court of Haroun ar-Rashid. The mujahideen of IS are empire builders. Their movement is structured like a modern corporation.If the US doesn’t commit three divisions to quelling them, they will take their place among the nations of the Middle-East, and, conduct business as usual. Considering that IS is an existential threat to Iran, IS can be seen to, potentially, serve US policy regarding the Islamic Republic. Iran is committing more, and, more, resources, both human, and, material, to the struggle against IS. eventually, the strain will tell. The Iranian mullahs have put repression of domestic dissent into high gear. They are imprisoning, and, hanging, more internal opponents than they ever have, short of the death toll racked-up during the Khomeini Revolution. Something is going to crack. That’s what US policy toward Iran is after. Hezbollah is stretched thin with commitments to both the Syrian, and, Iraqi, struggles. They cannot take up the slack. Over, and, above, the Quds Force (Iranian SF), regular Iranian troops will soon be required.
Defeating IS is a waste of money, and, perhaps, lives. We’ve had worse groups do our bidding. In a previous post, you mentioned the killing of Mike Devine down in Guatemala. I don’t know how one measures savagery, but, I’d say Colonel Alpirez, and, G-2, equaled IS in torturing, bloody-mindedness. IS may be here to stay. We need to find a way to deal with them, if, we aren’t already
Well, actually, Father Zeva, a Christero guerrilla leader, enraged at his brother’s death in battle during a raid against a railroad train, had the train cars doused in gasoline, and, their’ fifty-one passengers, and, crew, burned alive. It was tit for tat savagery throughout the rebellion. At its conclusion, the Mexican government violated the peace terms, and, extra-judicially executed more than five thousand former Christeros.
As al-Garbi pointed out, if IS lasts, the black-clad mujahideen will exchange their threatening robes for expensive business suits. They are already part of the international energy economy. Bernard Fall theorized that once parallel state institutions, like welfare organizations, utility infrastructures, police, and, justice systems, are in place, and, operating, a counter-insurgency campaign is lost. That is the situation in IS held territories. The monthly issues of Dibaq devote a third of their 52 page length to extolling infrastructure improvements the Kalipha has accomplished in the territories IS has opened: the establishment of local shariah courts, punishment of criminals, social outreach to the impoverished, and, other activities that have little to do with the bloodletting described in the other two thirds of the magazine.
I once had a professor in medical ethics (I was end-running a undergrad hard science credit requirement). He was an academic physician from Germany. The Professor believed that if a hospital were established where patients were allowed to expire from their diseases, it would be far more valuable to science than any number of hospitals that attempted to treat those very same diseases. Herr Professor thought that understanding a disease isn’t always about heroic efforts to fight it. Indeed, those very efforts can obscure a clear objective analysis of the malady.
Maybe it’s necessary to step back from the media uproar to begin to understand the Khalipha, and, its possibilities, both, negative, and, positive.
As far as the narco-trafficante cartels effecting life in this country, check out the national figures for heroin overdose, and, realize that, unlike the DAESH, the Cartels already have an existing infrastructure that reaches into even the remotest rural areas of our country. The only thing that can be said for the narcos, is that they may be social parasites who would not willingly kill their host.
From 1926-1929, Mexican Catholic members of the Cristero Movement engaged in a bloody rebellion against the Mexican Republic. A Christero assassinated Alvaro Obregon, the newly elected President of Mexico. I guess, one could say the Christeros engaged in Catholic terrorism, as opposed to Muslim terrorism. John Ford, a Catholic partisan, if there ever was one. even made an adulatory film about the Christeros, starring Henry Fonda, with Ward Bond in a supporting role.
Battle hymn of the Cristeros
Surviving Cristero, Juan Gutiérrez, recited a hymn sung by the Cristeros, to the tune of the Spanish Marcha Real:
Spanish:
La Virgen María es nuestra protectora y nuestra defensora cuando hay que temer,
Vencerá a los demonios gritando “¡Viva Cristo Rey!”,
Vencerá a los demonios gritando “¡Viva Cristo Rey!”
Soldados de Cristo: ¡Sigamos la bandera que la Cruz enseña el ejército de Dios!
Sigamos la bandera gritando, “¡Viva Cristo Rey!”
English translation:
The Virgin Mary is our protector and defender when there is something to fear,
She will defeat the demons crying “Long live Christ the King!”
She will defeat the demons crying “Long live Christ the King!”
Soldiers of Christ let us follow the flag that the Cross shows the army of God!
Let us follow the flag crying, “Long live Christ the King!”
Let me hear, again, how Islam is more conducive to terrorism than other religions.
Khalid:
Never said Islam is more conductive to terrorism than other religions; only have said the ISIS purports to be following the teachings of their religion and can not be outdone in terror or horror. Nor do I think the Cristero Movement which was fought by Catholics against the anti-clericalism of the Mexican government bore any resemblance to the ISIS. Without knowing very much of it I don’t see that they lined up women and children and excecuted them.
But the bottom line, suppose there were other movements in the distant past that may have been as bad as ISIS, why is it we should not do our best to defeat ISIS which I am sure you will agree is a vicious terrorist outfit that kills anyone who does not agree with its radical beliefs.
Matt:
Have you looked at Dibaq e-Magazine? It’s the official mouthpiece for IS. I pour over each issue. The Arabic language version is written in MSA, but, uses all kinds of archaic terms, and, grammatical constructions. When one read’s the English version the first thing that jumps out at you is the choppy style, and, the strange vocabulary; IS utilizes it’s own lexicon, using words, and, expressions, that haven’t been heard since the Islamic middle-ages.
The staff at Dibaq profess to be Salafies. They recount for their deeds in each monthly issue by hooking them to Koran, and, hadith, or, the fatwas of their Shaykhs.
Abu Musab al Zarqawi, and, Abu Hamza al-Misri, both deceased, are the intellectual forbears of the IS ideology. Al-Zarqawi used to run AIQ, Abu Hamza al-Misri, replaced him for a period, until, he, too, was killed. Zarqawi, who left a body of work, is often quoted as an authority in Dibaq. Abu Hamza al-Misri had profound ideas concerning the nature and uses of terror. He wrote an interesting mujahid style treatise on terror’s necessity in social change. Like Nechayev, the Russian Nihilist, Abu Hamza al-Misri felt terror was necessary to promote the disintegration of what they both considered the oppressive socio-politcal structures in the human situation.
Not only does Dibaq Magazine have a nihlistic tone, it ratchets up its prose to the apocalyptic. . The name Dibaq, itself, refers to a geographic location north-west of Aleppo( In Dibaq, the city of Aleppo is referred to by it’s name from the Middle-ages, Hallab). It is foretold in hadith, that, on the field of Dibaq, the Crusaders, “under eighty banners, will be defeated in pitched battle by the Muslims.”
The ideas expressed in Dibaq frighten, and, anger, most Muslims. IS adherents practice a form of Islam that the mainstream of Islam rejects.
Khalid:
I haven’t read that magazine and really have no interest in doing it. I am fully aware ISIS represents only its own narrow band of Muslim belief and it is rejected by the great majority of Muslims. As far as I can see its ideology is a perversion of Islam and reading what it says seems to me would be similar to reading the monthly newspaper put out by some poor folk confined to a mental institution. But thanks for the other information on its leadership.
Matt:
Read Musa al-Garbi’s opinion piece “There are groups more depraved than ISIL” in today’s on-line al Jazeera issue. It puts current terror events into the proper perspective. Problems south of the border threaten the interests of the USA far more than anything going on in the Mid-East. Bestial savagery is the order of the day for narco-trafficante cartelistas. IS does not even compare with them.
Terror is not a specifically Muslim problem. Most Mexican narco-terrorists grew up Roman Catholic.
Khalid:
Disagree. No one is more depraved that ISIS. Mexican gangs don’t threaten America. Suggesting ISIS is less savage doen’t work. Haven’t seen any videos of the Mexican gangs marching people off into the desert in their underwear to be executed or of beheadings. There’s a huge difference between growing up Catholic and becoming a murderous gangster and growing up Muslim and becoming a murderous gangster. The former does in knowing that those actions are against the teachings of his religion; the latter does it because he believes he is following the teaching of his religions.
Matt:
IS has not as yet taken its savagery to the mass scale of butchery practiced by the Cartelistas. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have been “disappeared.” Many have been dissolved in barrels of acid, or, buried in unmarked mass graves.. People are beheaded a dozen at a time, and, their bodies hung from expressway overpasses. Almost three hundred American have been murdered since Mexico’s war on drugs began.
The narco-trafficantes have their own religious beliefs derived from Catholicism. Google Jesus Malverde, and, Hermana Muerta. They are the patron saints/deities of the drug traffickers. The narcos worship death in their ceremonies.
While IS publicizes its executions on the INTERNET, the Cartelistas track down, and, murder, anyone using the INTERNET to expose their crimes. Hundreds of journalists and private citizens have lost their lives trying to put light on the situation.
The Mexican government has been found to be in league with the narcos. They are part of the system in Mexico, and, are used by the Casa Rosada to eliminate political enemies who demand a fair shake for the people of Mexico. As I write, Mexico is in tumult. The people are rising up angry against the US puppets who rule their society. The recent deaths of the Iguala Tech College students have sparked what may become the biggest social conflagration in Mexico since the Revolution of 1910. Why doesn’t the US media cover this story with the same intensity it devotes to events in the Mid-East?
All over Mexico, people have repudiated the American dominated economy, and, its bloody-handed protectors. They have rejected global capitalism. Ordinary Mexican folks are taking to the streets. What budding revolutionary will become the new Emiliano Zapata? Who will walk the path of Doroteo Arango (Pancho Villa)? When Mexico explodes, it will put the IS problem in the shade. The fuse is lit. You can hear it sizzle.
Khalid:
Agree Mexico is a mess; don’t understand why the U.S. is taking the rap for it. As for whatever they believe it certainly has no relationship to any religion that I know about and I’ve never read anything that suggests they are a radical branch of Catholicism. I tend to doubt there will be any revolution in Mexico; but aside from that, if the narcos in Mexico are very bad that doesn’t mean ISIS is not as bad or worse.
Interesting Msfreeh, but nothing to do with Matt and John’s posts. Try to spare us the digressions henceforth, please.
DOES MSFREEH WRITE SOMETHING EACH MORNING ADN POST IT ON EVERYONE’S BLOGS, REGARDLESS OF ITS RELEVANCE?
Interesting Msfreeh, but nothing to do with Matt and John’s posts. Try to spare us the digressions henceforth, please.
what would Senator McCarthy do?
http://politickernj.com/2014/11/from-the-politickernj-bookshelf-the-mystery-of-eugene-mccarthy/
One of the most enigmatic and exasperating people in American presidential politics, the late Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota confounded and infuriated his anti-Vietnam War supporters when he refused to show passion as a presidential candidate in the 1968 Democratic Primary.
The erudite and eminently quotable McCarthy left behind a traveling encyclopedia of gems from 1960s politics. This, for example, was how he reacted to Bobby Kennedy’s entrance into the presidential race: “He plays touch football; I play football. He plays softball; I play baseball. He skates in Rockefeller Center; I play hockey… If these are the bases on which you are going to make a decision… it’ll become abrasive, I suppose.”
When Kennedy entered the race after McCarthy’s stunning moral victory in the New Hampshire Primary, the senator from New York and younger brother of the slain JFK insisted that his efforts would not be directed at McCarthy.
The senator from Minnesota responded with the following: “An Irishman who announces the day before St. Patrick’s Day that he’s going to run against another Irishman shouldn’t say it’s going to be a peaceful relationship.”
All of it remains very entertaining political invective – but it doesn’t answer the enduring question of why.
Why did McCarthy stand up to President Lyndon Johnson in the teeth of the conflict in Southeast Asia, the only man to oppose the president, only to run a shockingly moribund campaign that broke the hearts of impassioned young followers seemingly more committed to the cause than the candidate, and ended with McCarthy’s anti-climatic fumbling of the nomination to Johnson’s Vice President, Vietnam apologist Hubert Humphrey?
Two great books for politics junkies, Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, and 1968 in America by Charles Kaiser, hint (in the case of Kaiser’s study) and outright state (according to Mailer) that McCarthy’s political objective in challenging Johnson might have included a desire to gain sufficient political leverage – not to become president – but to oust FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to win the job for himself.
Opposed to the war after initially supporting the Gulf of Tonkin resolution broadening the president’s war powers, McCarthy also detested Hoover and what he saw as his infringement on personal liberties and his “personalization of power” as the director of the FBI since 1924.
“Dad felt very strongly about the danger of having the head of the FBI so unaccountable, so permanent,” McCarthy’s daughter, Ellen McCarthy, told USA Today in 2007. “In the late ’60s and early ’70s, we had a wonderful family dog, Eric the Red. He who would go crazy at the mention of J. Edgar’s name — growling and carrying on. It was one of Eric’s tricks most appreciated by Dad.”
Although leaders of the anti-war movement tried to prevail on both men, neither Martin Luther King, Jr. nor Bobby Kennedy would run against the redoubtable Johnson in the lead-up to 1968. When McCarthy finally made his announcement, he did so in his own peculiar, dispassionate way, maddening those who wanted a real anti-war crusader. McCarthy refused to attack Johnson, refused to show emotion, and remained aloof heading into the snows of New Hampshire where his college-aged backers – up against the foreign policy challenge of their generation – saw an opportunity to make a statement against the Johnson Administration.
jpegAs Vietnam intensified with the Tet Offensive, the anti-Johnson movement became that much more urgent. When, days before the New Hampshire Primary, the New York Times first reported General William Westmoreland’s request for another 200,000-plus American troops in Vietnam, McCarthy’s forces had the momentum they needed and, despite their candidate’s persistent dispassion, vaulted their candidate to within 200 votes (when all votes were tallied) of icing Johnson in N.H.
The event prompted Kennedy – convinced that McCarthy was not a serious candidate – into the presidential race. And that decision forced Johnson – haunted by the specter of his predecessor – out.
While his supporters reacted like revolutionaries who had just toppled the dictator’s statue in the plaza, McCarthy – on learning the news of Johnson’s retreat from the Democratic Primary – said in his inimitable, detached way, “It’s a surprise to me. Things have gotten rather complicated.”
Rather complicated?
Of course it’s an unfortunate comparison for a variety of reasons, but imagine Chris Christie unhorsing, say, Jeb Bush from the presidential contest and suddenly announcing, “Things have gotten rather complicated.”
In their separate studies, Kaiser and Mailer both try to dissect McCarthy’s confounding reluctance to seize on an advantage.
They pinpoint a variety of reasons for the Minnesotan’s behavior: the candidate’s Benedictine mysticism and natural aversion to the City of Man; his preference of poetry to politics; his horror and final surrender to paranoia in the aftermath of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination; his intellectual hyperactivity; his innate laziness and years of mouldering in the U.S. Senate; his jealousy of the Kennedys; his essential conservatism as a stark – and finally irreconcilable – contrast to the radical pressures of the anti-war movement; his extraordinary originality and refusal to be an instrument for the masses.
Maybe it had had to do with the fact that the Hoover-led FBI kept a 500-page file on McCarthy, obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act.
All of these in some measure are plausible for why McCarthy made such an aloof and unsatisfying effort.
But as a specific political target to be obtained by running directly at Johnson, conceived “far from the madding crowd” in the halls of D.C. power, the FBI job makes some political sense.
Kaiser teases the reader on the subject while Mailer outright gets McCarthy to admit as much in an impromptu dinner interview following the Democrats’ selection of Humphrey as the party’s nominee for president.
From Kaiser’s book: “In 1968 McCarthy promised to fire Hoover if he became president. To many of his supporters, that pledge was more radical than anything he ever said about the war.”
In a debate with Humphrey and George McGovern (who entered the contest after the killing of Kennedy) at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, McCarthy reinforced the argument against Hoover. “They say I was impersonal, I want you to know I am the only candidate who said he would get rid of J. Edgar Hoover and that is a person,” the candidate cracked.
After Humphrey beats him with a combination of establishment muscle and McCarthy’s own somnolence, A1Bi1aTmWVL._SL1500_
Mailer, in his book, describes an incredible encounter with the once and future presidential candidate in a restaurant.
From Miami and the Siege of Chicago: “‘You see, sir,’ he said. ‘The tragedy of the whole business is that you never should have had to run for President,’” Mailer writes of his meeting with McCarthy. ‘You would have been perfect for the Cabinet.’ A keen look back from McCarthy’s eye gave the sanction to continue. ‘Yessir,’ said the reporter, ‘you’d have made a perfect chief fo
Read more at From the PolitickerNJ Bookshelf: The Mystery of Eugene McCarthy | New Jersey News, Politics, Opinion, and Analysis
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You are right. We should stay out. Happy Marine Corps birthday and happy Veterans day.
NC
Thanks. Once we load up in Iraq again we will go on to Iran.
NC:
Didn’t finish prior. I say that because Obama seems to have turned the ship over to those who want war. We’ll all but said our troops are going to go into combat in Iraq because the Arabs won’t fight so we have to do it for them. Read a report the air attacks are almost 100% by us and are costing 5 million a day. My fear is Obama might be looking to what is going to happen to him after he gets out of office and will see that his speaking fees will be very high if he can please all the billionaires who want him to attack Iran.
* destroying ISIS … etc.
Such a welter of sectarian groups : Shia, Sunnis, predominantly Sunni ex-Baathists in Iraq, many of whom were in Saddam’s military hierarchy, were disenfranchised by David Bremmer’s disastrous and shortsighted de- Baathafication order when he was Regent, and faded into the Insurgency then and ascended into ISIS leadership now : All the disparate ” rebel ” factions in Syria that change allegiances as quickly as we declare that we understand their allegiances : Those nutty Taliban in Afghanistan. Matt, it is an amorphous shifting and barely decipherable mess of squabbling homicidal family members in these Muslims to the ” Muslim wars ” you describe. Now, ISIS, a despicable agglomeration of many elements, but with a cohesive ” Man with a Caliphate Plan , ” agenda, is center stage . To state that ignoring ISIS puts Al Qaeda back in the saddle, or words to that effect, demonstrates just what a muddy track we are on. Our goggles are thick with the mud of sectarian Muslim strife. We cannot clearly see the other horses in the race. We are in fact so off track that we cannot see that several jockeys wear the same colors . PR and Spin aside, there is no credible difference between the aims of ISIS and Al Qaeda. It’s just a name game. And we realize that we do not at all speak the same language.