The president was on the tube Wednesday night telling the American people about his plans for the Middle East, explaining how we were going to attack ISIS in Iraq, Syria and wherever else they showed their heads, but also stating firmly that we will not be putting fighting forces on the ground, but will be depending on local forces that we will arm and train. He finished his speech by declaring that it is America that has the will and the capacity to mobilize the world against terrorists wherever they appear. Then he went on to quote a leader of the Yasidi tribe that we rescued from annihilation on a mountain in Iraq. “We owe our lives to our American friends., Our children will always remember that someone made the long journey to help us survive.”
That, as Obama dramatically stated, is the difference we make in the world. If you don’t believe that, you haven’t been paying attention. That is not to say that we are always right. It is our intervention in Ukraine, causing the fall of the legitimate government that precipitated the advance of Russia into that unfortunate country. It was our interference in Iran that caused that country to become our enemy many years ago. We have to learn to stay out of places where we want to acquire natural resources until after we have paid for them. This is an extremely difficult concept for our corporate oligarchy to absorb.
Last week the Right was attacking the President for admitting that the White House had no plan for how to deal with ISIS. Now a week later Obama announces that he has formed a coalition of European countries to assist the US in its goal of eliminating that terrorist threat. Of course the GOP has even more problems with that. Ted Cruz, the empty noise from Texas, is in New England attacking the President’s policy and then saying that we should bomb the hell out of ISIS but that he can’t do it without the approval of congress. Excuse me, isn’t that Obama’s policy too? Doesn’t Cruz know how to read? And doesn’t he understand what a non-functional mess our congress is?
So according to Cruz, it’s imperative that we bomb ISIS but it’s okay to wait until he gets off his ass and with his fellow do-nothings gets back to work.
Marco Rubio, on the other hand seems to think that Obama is on the right road and that he doesn’t
need congress’s approval to do what he’s doing. Neither does John Boehner.
The real problem with Muslims in the Middle East isn’t that they’re Muslim. It’s that they are Arabs. Look, there are Muslims all over the world that aren’t causing problems. Indonesia has more Muslims than all the Arab countries combined and they aren’t blowing up stuff just to start an Indonesian caliphate. India has one hundred and fifty million Muslims but they aren’t causing trouble. The same can be said for Eastern Europe. No, it’s only in the Middle East, where the predominant population is Arab that we are having all this trouble and the problem isn’t religious but political. It hides behind a religious veil but the unrest comes from a people with no hope. That’s where political unrest always comes from.
The reason that the Arab world creates Muslim driven chaos is that it is the home of almost complete political stagnation. Since 1950 most of the rest of the world has seen political and therefore humanitarian progress. Democracy is proceeding, often times, slowly, but inexorably all over the globe- except in the Middle East and parts of Africa. Most Arabs have less freedom now than they did in 1950.
At present the Arab world is made up of secular dictators and religious jihadists trying to free themselves from the yokes of the dictators and using the only weapon that hadn’t been taken from them, religion, around which to rally their supporters.
The more viscous the regime that held them in thrall, the more violent the jihadist retaliation, and since we were backing many of these regimes, we became the foreign image of the local enemy.
Obama made a speech to the country declaring his intentions on the ISIS problem and everyone who can fight their way to a microphone is having something to say about it. The first and dumbest comments, made even before the speech, came from, who else, Mitch McConnell when he babbled, “This is not the time to shirk or pass on the responsibility of the commander and chief, because putting off this threat to his successor would not only be irresponsible, it would increase the threat that ISIS poses to Americans.”
This is a typical example of what a degenerate slob this Obama hater really is. This is the same sleaze that declared upon Obama taking office that his only goal in life was to see Obama lose the next election. He sure was successful in that.
The President is acting, he is doing exactly what McConnell says he wants, putting together a coalition, bombing ISIS, organizing ground forces that were crippled by Bush’s appointee Maliki and all the Republicans, led by the likes of McConnell can do is try to make it look like the President is shirking his duty. Of course they know all about duty shirking. We have seen what they are doing in congress.
Chris Matthews speaks about a reaction to each of our moves in the Middle East and that we have to know what that reaction will be before the President puts any pan into action. What is he talking about? Of course there will be a reaction, there is always a reaction, but we are dealing with crazy people. There is no knowing how they will react. Mathews goes on a particularly cowardly rant in which he whines that ISIS will retaliate. Yes, they will try. It’s the job of our bloated security mechanism to stop them. ISIS will do whatever brutal, sub-human thing they are able to do, but that can’t have any effect on what we are doing. The only way to stop ISIS brutal acts is to destroy them.
We have to stop them now, before they occupy many big cities where we have to dig them out one crumbled house at a time. Now when we bomb ISIS we are killing religious fanatics who would wreak terror all over the civilized world. Once they expand into cites we will be killing civilians and that is where we will make more enemies than we can deal with.
These talking heads who go on about the immediate threat from ISIS to the US may have a point – for some period in the future; but when they talk about how easy it is for these British and American ISIS fighters to get back into the US and cause damage they prove that they have never been through customs.
Right now we are in an ideal position to crush ISIS. For the first time since WWII we are engaged in a confrontation that is tailor made for the kind of war a major power can conduct. The only reason ISIS has made the progress it has, is that we had not yet entered the campaign. This is open warfare, exposed to whoever is stronger. We should, in the words of the war criminal Curtis LaMay, “bomb them back into the stone age.” Of course that dingbat was speaking about a war where you couldn’t do that because you couldn’t find the, them in question. This is different. There they are; out on the highways and positioned in the open desert, sitting ducks for our bombers. Whatever happened to napalm?
All we have to do, is to accompany these bombing raids with the ground forces that we trained and sometimes armed but that Cheney allowed Maliki to degrade with his political/religious appointments.
Of course, nowhere in the world can anyone make a military problem into a political problem faster than here. Congress has been adamant about Obama getting congressional approval but now the Republicans find themselves split on how they want to proceed. There is a large group that has suddenly become peacemakers. Of course this is after they backed Bush/Cheney to the hilt to set up this situation through their war for oil.
The President’s new policies depend on getting the Sunni populations of the area to join with us. If we just attack ISIS alone we risk the danger of alienating all Sunni’s and strengthening ISIS. We need the Kurds, the Iraqi army, the Sunni Tribes and the Free Syrian army to be our troops on the ground and in addition we need Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and any other Arab countries that we can recruit to join us.
We have allowed a fanatic army to exist, a force that not only beheaded two Americans but that has killed untold Iraqi’s, Jordanians, Lebanese. It’s mass graves litter the countryside wherever it has plundered. It has raped and enslaved women and murdered children, all in the name of some mystical Islamic Caliphate. But it’s all a lie. It’s not religion that drives them, but a lust for power and that is why they must be stopped.
Obama’s speech laid out a plan. Now it is up to us and the other sane nations of the world to come together to make that plan work. If it doesn’t we may suffer a little but the nations of the Middle East will all be destroyed.