France has declared war on jihadist extremists.  The rest of Europe is at war with them too.  And we are at war with these radicals.  Indeed, the modern world should be at war with them.  There’s nothing “modern” about this fanatical thinking, this barbaric insult to true Islam and false ideology.  It’s old thinking, a fanatical vision of how much better it would be to return to the simpler days of the early Middle Ages, of Ayatollahs and warrior chieftans, feudal lords and lowly serfs, a social structure built on the primitive foundations of theologically justified despotism.  Never mind the ironies—terrorists using the internet and high-powered modern weapons to further their cause while spewing their retrograde ideologies eschewed by good people everywhere, including truly devout Muslims.  Terrorist minds are dark, evil minds, living in dark lives and thinking dark, fanatical thoughts.

But France and the rest of the world face a conundrum: how can we preserve the freedoms we enjoy and what many others yearn to enjoy when faced with these practitioners of evil?  What is the right balance between a civilized society and thugs who would tear it down?  Modern living also breeds frustration, especially among poor and exploited immigrants, and France has perhaps ignored that for too long.  Out of frustration and despair with one’s lot in life, some people are bound to lash out—it’s only human nature.  When they become violent, they can use any religion or ideology to justify their actions, a dangerous rationalization, a contagious mental virus that could destroy the rest of humanity.  How many of our freedoms do we surrender to prevent the spread of this contagion?

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Recent history, let’s say 1950s on, hasn’t been kind to our stupid foreign policy mantra that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” especially in the Middle East.  We created the Shah in Iran as a favor to the Brits, toppling a democratically elected regime there, and we’re still paying for it.  We armed al Qaeda to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, and we’re still paying for it.  We “saved” Iraq from Saddam Hussein, who, for all his faults, held all that country’s factions together.  Dubya, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, in their greedy little minds, only saw dollar signs from Iraqi oil.  They really did nothing to contribute to democracy or a stable government there.  And we’re still paying for it!

While my last post on this subject encouraged Obama to bomb the hell out of ISIS everywhere possible, including Syria, and a second beheading only underlines the need to stop these mad dogs, it’s high time we rethink our foreign policy mantra.  Its corollary seems to be “When you choose friends that way, watch out!”  Yes, air strikes are needed against ISIS now.  No doubt about it.  But there are other priorities to worry about.

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I’m not reminiscing about Joe Cocker and his hard rock music.  If you remember those times, you know that music was several dBs above the pain threshold.  So is this post because I’m referring to ISIS and their spokesman who beheaded the American reporter.  (Always a spokesman and never spokeswoman—women are just property in the radical Muslim world, especially for members of ISIS, who simply see them as breeders that give birth and suckle little terrorists who grow up to join the cause.)  They’re the mad dogs (aka rabid dogs without any human qualities at all) and the knife-wielder spoke with a British accent.  Let me analyze these two points.

Ironic, isn’t it, that James Foley had been reporting on the atrocities of the Assad regime in its murderous campaign against Syrian rebels?  We can ask: are there any legitimate rebels left in Syria?  Maybe.  Another journalist was just released by an al Qaeda affiliate (poor al Qaeda: they’re #2 on the brutality list now).  No one seems radical enough for ISIS.  Was Assad prescient, knowing this was coming?  ISIS clearly wants to create a tyrannical, fundamentalist theocracy, the murderous violence of its leaders making Iran’s Ayatollahs look like Mother Teresas.  The only solution that works against these mad dogs is their own medicine—beheadings are medieval, though, so bullets to the head will do.  That’s the only thing that will work.  You put a rabid mad dog down…permanently.

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[Note from Steve: I hope you enjoyed the series of classic posts on writing.  It gave me a welcome respite from my own writing and some much needed R&R via casual reading—I read four novels, finishing the last yesterday (speed reading and touch typing were my most useful courses taken in high school).  So, it seems reasonable to return to my op-ed posts with a highly controversial topic, the Palestinian situation.  I’ve tried to be very fair here because neither side owns the moral high ground.  Moreover, it’s a freakin’ tragedy that it’s happening.  Read on….]

We’ve seen it in Northern Ireland.  We’ve seen it in Yugoslavia.  We’re seeing it in Iraq.  And it seems like we’ve seen it forever in Palestine.  Some pundits say that old hatreds will die when the old timers who do the hating die off.  Maybe…sometimes.  Other times, it’s best to separate the opposing groups (Iraq shows there can be more than two).  That seemed to work in Yugoslavia after much loss of life and bitterness that still remains.  The U.S. government tends to act cautiously in such circumstances (in Rwanda, it never did), even though many times it’s culpable of participating in their creation.

What’s clear is the following: while the parties doing the hating might migrate to certain fanatical ideologies (the adjective isn’t even necessary, of course, because all ideologies are fanatical—some more; some less; and some reducing to brainwashing) and might attract supporters from non-participating groups as a result, ideology isn’t really the issue.  The heat of the hate is, in fact, in direct proportion to how long that hatred has been around.  While ideologies come and go (they are often debunked by rational people who recognize their severe limitations), ethnic and racial hatred hangs around.

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There’s a lot of hype from multiple sources, each source putting its own spin on the problem.  From Moscow and Ukrainian separatists “Who?  Me?” to Ukraine’s “It’s them,” plus the Russian sympathizers limiting access to the crash site and carting off bodies to freeze them in railway cars (why? what are they hiding?), media outlets around the world echo the hype.  What do we know?  What are the facts?

Fact one: A passenger jet packed with 298 people was targeted by a missile; 298 innocents died.  That’s mass murder by anyone’s definition.  Fact two: In a briefing at the Pentagon two weeks earlier, a NATO commander informed publicly that Russians had placed vehicle-mounted SAMs in eastern Ukraine, the part controlled by separatists, most of them ethnic Russians.  Moreover, the Russians were training the separatists how to shoot the deadly weapons that can cover any altitude where jets can fly.

Fact three: On Monday, they shot down a Ukrainian troop transport flying at a “safe altitude,” one far above 10 kft, the altitude range of shoulder-carried missiles, proving effectively that Russian SAMs were in use by the rebels and that no altitude was safe.  Fact four: The Russian separatists in the Ukraine are hindering the investigations at the crash site and putting the victims on ice in boxcars.  Where are the boxcars going?  Probably Moscow.  Family and friends of the victims will never have closure, an obscene gesture by Putin and his thuggish sycophants.

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Much U.S. foreign policy follows this dogma.  Now Obama wants $500 million—that’s point five billion, in American’s crazy accounting—to help out the Syrian rebels.  Not only is this a 180-degree turn in policy with respect to the civil war there, it’s a bad mistake.  Clearly, Obama is trying to appease hawks in Congress who accuse him of dropping the ball in Iraq—oh yes, the old neocon contingent is piping up there too—and maybe trying to do something in a situation where there is no easy solution.  And Kerry, the ketchup lover of Foggy Bottom, is telling Maliki to hold the country together or else.  Or else, what?

First, the $500 million is too little, too late.  The Syrian civil war has led to radicalization of many rebels so bloodthirsty and murderous that even old al Qaeda wise men denounce them.  Shi’ites are slaughtered.  Civilians—men, women, and children—are slaughtered.  If you want a glimpse of want a Sunni-Muslim caliphate would be like, just look to ISIS.  It would be a bloody theocracy that makes Iran’s Islamic Revolution seem tame.  Throwing a few dollars at the “tame rebels” in Syria will accomplish nothing.

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Let me start by stating a wee bit of political taxonomy for those readers who desperately want to pigeonhole me: I’m socially progressive, fiscally conservative, and a hawk about terrorism.  Note that I qualify my hawkishness.  We don’t need more Irans (overthrow of one democratically elected government), Iraqs (neo-conservative world building), or Vietnams and Afghanistans (supporting corrupt regimes in a long war for little gain).  I don’t think we need to kill more young men and women with surges, boots-on-the-ground, and other early 20^th century Pentagon ways of doing business.  Our first priority in national defense right now is counter terrorism, whether the nuclear kind (India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan) or bombing-public-places kind, home grown or otherwise.  Terrorism is a killer disease that must be eliminated.

That said, I have to wonder: what is Obama doing?  The only way I’d send five murdering terrorists back to the Middle East is in body bags.  These people aren’t U.S. citizens; they kill U.S. citizens.  I don’t doubt the family and friends of that Idaho soldier are happy right now, but he wore one set of those boots on the ground.  I’d wager we just traded his life for at least twenty other American or European lives.  That’s the problem with terrorism.  The soldier volunteered to fight.  Innocent men, women, and children, the usual victims of terrorists, don’t volunteer to die.  We pay Obama to make those hard decisions.  He f$%&#ed it up royally!

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Maybe their bad rep is due to the fact that they’re second-rate citizens in the bee hive, but drones are under attack recently.  The more vociferous attacks come from people who decry how deadly they are in attacking terrorists.  They kill all those innocent people, don’t you know?  I’ve rebutted that in these posts, but I can’t refrain from summarizing: (1) Drones and Special Ops are our most effective weapons against terrorists, a battle that must be fought unless you want to return to the Dark Ages of a radical Islamic Caliphate; and (2) drones and Special Ops avoid thousands of battlefield casualties, among our own troops as well as innocent civilians.  Here stats don’t lie.

A recent editorial in the NY Times (5/21) titled “The Limits of Armchair Warfare” basically ignores both points in a Ramboesque plea about returning to a conventional boots-on-the-ground mentality championed by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team of brilliant strategists.  Our troops fought valiantly, but Iraq is still an ethnic battleground.  Wrong in so many things, Biden was right with this one: Iraq should have been divided into at least three countries.  That worked in Yugoslavia and will end up being the right solution in Iraq.  McCain, that vengeful champion of the surge, also favors boots on the ground.  And Mr. Obama’s mistakes in Afghanistan can be summarized succinctly: he listened to that old Pentagon doggerel, although he knew from experimental evidence that drones and Special Ops are the solution.

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[Note to readers: If you notice problems with fonts, spacings, etc, in the next few posts, be assured that it’s neither your eyes nor your computer.  WordPress geeks in their infinite wisdom eliminated the W-button I used to employ to insert post rough drafts from MS Word.  I’ve found a temporary fix, but I’m still exploring work-arounds.  Apparently, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” isn’t a workplace motto at WordPress where they’ve adopted a policy that users are beta-testers, just like Microsoft, the company they hate.  I won’t apologize–they should.]

This question is appropriate when considering Afghanistan.  The good Afghans don’t seem capable of standing up to the Taliban.  The bad Afghans—and these aren’t the Taliban, who are worse than bad—are poppy farmers and the people like Karzai, who, through graft and corruption, exploit everyone and everything.  Karzai bites the hand that feeds him too: he has to know that his life wouldn’t be worth a Russian ruble if the Taliban take over again.  And, let’s face it, the Afghan landscape is more desolate than the moon’s; only Iceland’s is worse.

The recent murders of three doctors is but another instance of why we should write Afghanistan off.  There are good people there.  These doctors were on a mission to help them.  One, I believe, had been doing so for seven years.  The Taliban don’t care.  These doctors were Christians, foreigners, and not supporters of the Taliban’s vicious brand of radical Islam.  The Taliban’s ideology is one of death.  Doctors, a little girl making appeals for the right of women to educate themselves, and many others who dare to work for peace and a better life and naysay Taliban fanaticism, are targets.  They are now claiming they shot down a NATO helicopter (the Pentagon claims this is false—I’m not surprised, because the Taliban would probably take credit if Karzai got a cold).

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Even in this age when “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is our foreign policy mantra (maybe it always was?) and Putin seems hell bent on returning everyone to the Cold War (or World War III?), Pakistan lurks as not a true friend and probably a die-hard enemy.  I’ve said this many times before in these blog posts, but let me list the reasons yet again.  You will see that I’m not just being paranoid.  This country takes our aid and military help and basically uses it against us.  Its duplicitous actions have a long history.

The most obvious and egregious sin of the Pakistani government (being Muslims, they should understand sin, right?) is how they support both al Qaeda and the Taliban.  In an article in the Sunday (March 23) NY Times magazine, adapted from The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (scheduled to be released next month) and titled “What Pakistan Knew About bin Laden,” author and reporter Carlotta Gall presents damning evidence that ISI, the nefarious Pakistani intelligence agency, had a desk whose occupant was bin Laden’s handler.  This confirms suspicions I’ve always had.  No wonder bin Laden felt comfortable living only a few hundred yards from Pakistan’s top military academy.

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