Given that the Donald and the other GOP candidates have made the rest of the world and many in the U.S. wonder what’s happening in America, the Land of the Free, it seems appropriate to list the things that we’re doing or might do to let ISIS win and return this world to the Dark Ages.  The GOP candidates own a lot of the hateful rhetoric described below—I refuse to believe all GOP voters do.  Here’s the list:

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Discriminate and persecute Muslims.  Trump and his supporters seem to forget that there’s freedom of religion in this country.  The Founding Fathers thought that this right was so important, it’s the first sentence in the Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”  Trump, of course, is using hate and paranoia to pander to his base, which seems to represent about a third of GOP voters—that in itself is frightening—but he’s also proposing something he could never deliver without amending the U.S. Constitution.

While Islam faces the same problems as Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and their offshoots and alternatives—how to maintain an ancient faith in a world that’s increasing secular and expecting spirituality and beliefs to be more of a private choice, not a public demonstration that infringes on others’ rights—its members, as do all religious members, need to eschew discrimination and violence and convince its members to control and ostracize those members who turn to them.  Every religion has a bloody past.  The world must move on.  Religious strife does NOT belong in the 21^st century.

I could be nice and water this down by saying Trump’s only calling for rigorous vetting, but I won’t be.  This is one time I’ll agree with Sen. Graham, who thinks the answer to gun violence is prayer: he says GOP voters should tell Trump to go to hell.  The GOP in no way wants or dares to own Trump’s hateful proposals or even approve his wild rhetoric.  And there’s no doubt that ISIS will win supporters with this kind of rhetoric.  If all Muslims end up believing the entire West is against them, more and more will buy into the ISIS thug’s propaganda.  ISIS wants to legitimize itself by claiming to represent all Muslims.  So far, the Muslim majority, true to the tenets of their religion, doesn’t buy into that hateful propaganda.  Trump can change that.  The Navy VIP, who organized the raid on Bin Laden’s hideout, says this is exactly what ISIS wants.

Indiscriminate carpet bombing in current Middle Eastern combat zones.  It’s not all Trump.  While Trump is waning in Iowa, probably for his hateful rhetoric, Ted Cruz is surging ahead.  He’s not a better choice!  Ted Cruz, trying to trump Trump, has proposed carpet bombing as his way of combatting ISIS.  Carpet bombing is indiscriminate bombing—no president should ever order that, so Cruz, like Trump, is completely disqualified as a future Commander-in-Chief.  He would end an important distinction between counterterrorism efforts and terrorist attacks: Terrorists purposely go after innocents—innocent men, women, and children.

From Syria to San Bernardino, innocents have suffered tremendously under the terrorist onslaught, and many of these are good, truly devout Muslims who abhor this violence.  Counterterrorism efforts go after terrorists.  Innocents are NEVER targeted on purpose.  If Cruz changes this, he will play into ISIS’ hands.  Again, Cruz is appealing to a base of rabid Republican voters.  It seems candidates will mount any soapbox and spout sewage effluent in their quest for votes.  The electoral process is out of control.

Liberalizing gun laws.  The gun manufacturers are tickled pink.  The NRA is smiling like the Cheshire cat.  Scared suburbanites and macho Rambo types are flocking to the stores to buy weapons to combat the Muslim horde.  I wouldn’t have any problem if these wingnuts started a skirmish and shot each other up—maybe others would come to their senses—but I’m afraid a lot of innocents are going to be harmed, Muslim friends included, the criminals will be happy with their new supply of legally bought firearms they can readily steal, and newly formed right-wing militias are going to start taking law into their own hands.  If these guns are turned on Muslims—threats on social media are prevalent now—ISIS’ evil grin will beam across the world like a lopsided crescent moon.  That will mean the ultimate success of their terrorist plans—strike terror into all the West.

Boots on the ground.  Every GOP candidate with the possible exception of Rand Paul backs this, saying Obama isn’t doing enough.  Even Hillary Clinton has joined the chorus, questioning the President’s policies.  I don’t get it.  Are these people just stupid?  ISIS wants another major ground war in Syria and Iraq.  It would be great for propaganda—foreign invasion brings to the fore old memories of how the West arbitrarily carved up the Middle East and created Israel, not to mention old hatreds of foreign invaders.  Hence it would be great for recruitment.  “Defend your homeland,” ISIS will say.  Volunteers will flock to join the thugs—more so than now.

Not own up to past mistakes.  Think Saddam Hussein would have allowed ISIS to gain a foothold in Iraq?  Think this obsession to depose Hassad is part of the same problem, nation building?  The worst president in U.S. history, George W. Bush, made his worst mistake in invading Iraq, justifying killing Hussein with the WMD scam, and then declaring “mission accomplished” when he was leaving the country in chaos with a leadership vacuum.  There is no real democracy in the region, not even Israel.  They’re all monarchies of one form of the other (an emir and sheik are just other names for monarchs) that maintain a privileged class of elites while ignoring the poor (there’s no middle class), or they’re rigid theocracies like Iran and Israel that trample individual rights and freedoms to appease followers of a state-sanctioned religion.

I thought nation building was debunked by the failures in Iraq.  With these traditions firmly installed in Middle Eastern countries, how can we expect to invade one of them to impose a democracy?  Middle Eastern populations don’t even understand the concept.  (Of course, given the presidential candidates we come up with, I’m not sure we do either.)  Marco Rubio, still in his foreign-policy Huggies, is naïve enough to lay all the blame for ISIS on the Obama administration.  This is political theater when you consider the GOP is directly responsible for everything that has recently gone bad in the Middle East.  Moreover, Bin Laden was killed on Obama’s watch; Dubya had the al Qaeda leader on the run in Afghanistan, but let Cheney and his Halliburton friends convince him to go after the oil in Iraq, allowing Osama and cronies to wreak more havoc.

Under Bush and the neocons led by Cheney and Rumsfeld, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS have found fertile ground for recruiting more thugs and murderers to join their movements.  That’s the responsibility of Rubio’s party, although he’s too naïve to realize it—all of the GOP candidates either express that same naivete or are in denial.  They have to own up to these past mistakes and join the Dems in solving the terrorism problem.  Why should the Dems do all the heavy lifting when the GOP created the messes in the region?  Better said, it would be easier if everyone stepped up to stop the carnage.  Partisan politics isn’t appropriate when our nation’s future is at stake.

Move toward fascism.  Trump’s proposal is only one example.  Both Cruz and Rubio are scary dudes who seem biased toward fascism.  The cover of a NYC paper where Trump has taken a scimitar and sliced off the head of the Statue of Liberty is symbolic of what’s going on here.  Giving up individual freedoms and rights in the West is exactly what right-wing politicos and fascist mentalities want, and terrorism gives them the excuse to make it so.  Le Pen is making inroads in France.  The right is creating major headaches for Merkel in Germany.  And here in the U.S., the fascist right-wing is also having a field day, from the gun debate to more general attacks on individual freedoms, all in the name of counterattacking terrorists.  If we give up our rights—worse, our way of life—to combat this cancer in the world’s body politic, ISIS will have won, because that’s exactly the fascist world they want to achieve.

Letting emotions take over reason and common sense.  These are emotional issues, I’ll admit.  But if we let emotion take over reason and common sense, we are doomed.  We can beat ISIS, but we’re not going to do it by doing the radically emotional things I’ve outlined above.  Of course, ISIS wants us to lose it.  An enemy lost in an emotional response isn’t an effective enemy, and they know it.  These are thugs who have coldly calculated every move they’ve made.  We can only win the battle by outsmarting them.

They finance themselves with illegal oil revenues?  We should destroy that capability.  They finance jihadists in this country like the $28000 deposited in the San Bernardino couple’s back account?  We should prevent that capability.  They go after innocents?  We should decapitate the movement by going after their leaders.  This will take time.  Part of reason and common sense is having patience to map out a strategy and apply it, adapting as needed because the enemy always adapts.  Unfortunately, I don’t see any politico campaigning at the national level capable of reason and common sense right now.  This might mean that ISIS will win this battle too.

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It’s also unfortunate that any one of these items in the list might spell doom for our world as we know it.  I’m not optimistic.  Dystopian fiction can become reality—just consider Brave New World, Darkness at Noon, and 1984.  The horror of a world sinking into the dark abyss planned by ISIS is terrible to contemplate.  But politicians have shown infinite variety in the way they can screw things up.  So do the voters.  I can only hope this doesn’t happen.  You should too.  If you’re religious, maybe it’s time to pray.  But we’ll need a lot more than prayer.

[Terrorism is a common theme in my books—just check out the new edition of The Midas Bomb, now available in all ebook formats and paper.  It’s entertainment, but it will get you thinking.]

And so it goes….

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2015 at 4:00 am and is filed under Politics, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.