KILL THEM ALL, THE LORD WILL KNOW HIS OWN

Conveniently clouding the view, Israel's going after the more rabid members of Hamas (and yes, there are saner and considerably more balanced elements there than just the psychopaths) hides the coming storm in Irak from our eyes.

Our own hawks and rabid elements wish us to prop up a conniving tyrant (Nuri Al Maliki) who by deliberately excluding the Sunni voice created the vacuum into which Isis stepped. But if we do so, Sunni frustration can only grow, and our loyal friends the Saudis and Qataris will continue to fund their murderous co-sectarians in the dust-belt.
Conversely, if we insist upon removal of the incompetent and corrupt Maliki, we may weaken the Baghdad regime so badly that civil war and chaos ensue.

Remarkably, we find ourselves on the same side as Iran.
As well as for a change many rational people.

The result will likely be mission-shift, and a quagmire from which extrication may prove difficult.


It won't be the first time that we willingly dive head-first into a cesspool largely of our own making. Our efforts during the cold war cost over one hundred thousand American lives, and we ended up with human wreckage wandering our streets for decades.

That, of course, pales in comparison to the damage caused elsewhere.
More than two million people in Indonesia were slaughtered, often based on lists that we provided the military there when they seized control.
Over a million Vietnamese perished, quite needlessly as it turns out.
The dead in Latin America were, and remain, countless.
Most of our African allies were psychopaths.
As well as ept kleptocrats.

Inaction is not a choice, but the opposite isn't any better.


No, I do not have a solution. I am merely diagnosing the symptoms.
Like a mediaeval surgeon, I note daemons as a possible cause.
Bleeding the patient won't cure the ailment.




Note: the title of this post is what Abbot Amalric said when asked what to do with the people of Béziers, many of whom might be innocent of the heresy of which they were accused; "caedite eos, novit enim dominus qui sunt eius". Consequently, in contradiction to even the very lax laws of war of the times, not only combatants, but dotards, women, and children were slaughtered without mercy, the town was despoiled and laid to waste, and in the subsequent rape of Languedoc such destruction was wreaked by the crusaders that the region took centuries to recover.
The least that can be said of such an approach is that isn't subtle.
Nor effective at winning lasting friends.




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