Notes on the Middle East Mess

What the hell is going on with Iraq and Syria. The President says there will be no American boots on the ground despite the fact that we have well over one thousand advisers over there. You can say they are not combat troops but it would be foolish and suicidal not to arm men working in a combat zone, especially when one considers the treatment prisoners get from the ISIS barbarians, so we must assume that they are armed and ready for a fight.

 

Then General Dempsey comes out and says that if ISIS threatened the United States he would go to the president and ask him to provide combat troops. Really? And what the hell does that mean? Is Dempsey expecting LST’s full of armed Arabs to be pulling up on Jones Beach?

 

Everybody talks about how long this will take. Why? Why will it take five months to set up training camps and why will it take until May to train 5000 Iraqi troops. We did it in six weeks in WWII. Have we become that incompetent in the last 70 tears? Have we regressed to the point where we are on the level of your average third world nation? Is our vaunted military power so degraded?

 

The President speaks to destroying ISIS. That doesn’t really seem possible in today’s world. We haven’t destroyed al Qaeda in 13 years. It’s a big world and there are plenty of places for small cells of terrorist groups to hide. But we can certainly destroy the military capability of that organization. We can turn them into an underground group like al-Qaeda. Over and over, we are shown film of columns of the ISIS army, powering down desert roads with hundreds of vehicles and god knows how many troops. Could there possibly be a more inviting target for our planes? So the question comes down to, why are we attacking in such a half assed manner?   You want to get rid of these guys, do it. We should have every plane within striking distance in the air and attacking these troops before they imbed themselves into cities where they will be much more difficult to dig out.

 

 

********

 

 

 

Britain, Belgium and Denmark have signed on to our attacks on ISIS. The Brits will send planes to bomb Iraq, Denmark will be supplying breakfast pastries to those in need of food but in the matter of what to supply to the alliance, Belgium is still waffling.

 

 

*****

 

We have to realize that Obama hasn’t changed his tune in this whole Middle Eastern mess. Go all the way back to when he was a senator and making a speech against Bush’s war in Iraq. He stated firmly that he wasn’t against war per se, but that he was against terrorism and that he was against Bush’s phony war.

 

He didn’t send troops into Syria because that was a civil war and we had no stake or any business in it, The situation has changed now, It’s no longer just a civil war, it is now a question of an army of terrorists who make the worst offenses of Saddam Hussein and Abbas look like kids games in the park. We are currently engaged in a fight against terrorists who have declared war on us. It would be silly and dangerous to just ignore them so we are responding very much in kind to their viscous acts.

 

But Obama understands that we are not the ones with the biggest stake in this war and he is demanding that those who have the biggest stake, the other Arab nations, must be the ones who take the hit on the ground. This is the way it should be

 

 

*******

 

 

 

Bill O’Reilly, the madman who occasionally thinks, has come up with two new ideas that all but prove my description of him.

 

He has come up with what may be the most far-fetched conspiracy theory of the last hundred years in his idea that despite all the accepted evidence, Stalin had George S. Patten killed. This is farce. But he has also come up with an idea, or at least supported one that appears to have more than a little merit. The idea of forming an international mercenary force, under the command of NATO to deal with military problems around the world.

 

This group would be something like the French Foreign Legion or the mercenary forces that were led by the infamous Mad Mike Hoare who led mercenary groups in Africa in the 1970s. Yes, there is already a kind of inept police force that wears blue helmets and is run by the UN but that group is so slow to move and so bound up in the bureaucratic nonsense of the UN that it is all but useless.

 

It needs a NATO or an even more constricted command group that will be able to act quickly and forcefully to protect civilized interests all across the globe and also to act as a buffer between conflicting national interests. The biggest argument against such a group would be it’s problems in judgment when faced with conflicting interests but the basic rule of its existence would be to stop armed conflict regardless of which party is at fault and command the peace until other, more judicial forums were able to examine the facts of any given situation and come to some, less violent, and hopefully more balanced decision as to how the conflict should be resolved.

 

It would seem that there would be far less armed conflict in the world if the inevitably of a fast moving, well equipped police force were available to quickly overrun any aggressor. Again, such a group would not have the capacity to decide guilt or innocence in any conflict but would respond to the use of violence regardless of causality. Its only function would be to enforce the cessation of hostility. Once the peace in any conflict had been restored it would either withdraw or maintain a peacekeeping presence until some judicial body could resolve the conflict.

 

This group would have one command structure but would by its nature be made up of forces from all over the world, paid for by all the countries that have the capacity to contribute and would deal worldwide with all the problems that are currently making the world a madhouse to exist in.