BLOODY IRAQ: Where's A Saladin When You Need One?

“You break it, you own it,” it has been said. Besides The Pottery Barn, a retired four-star general had expressed that warning. The remark purportedly came from Colin Powell just prior to the invasion of Iraq. At the time of his declaration he was the Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. Who he made that comment to, and exactly when he said it is unclear. Irrespective of that bit of lore, eleven years later, post U.S. invasion and U.S. withdrawal, not to forget 4486 U.S. military killed in action, perhaps 100,000 casualties, Iraq is most certainly broken, however, Secretary Powell’s comment was hardly prophetic.  

In an Op-Ed on June 17, 2014 titled," Ghosts of Religious Wars Past Are Rattling In Iraq for "Foreign Policy" magazine and its’ online publication, retired four-star U.S. Navy Admiral James Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, and current President of Fletcher School of Law at Tufts, states, "As Sunnis and Shi’ites tear their societies societies apart throughout parts of the Arab world, old ghosts are indeed rattling from the eastern Mediterranean and Levant to the northern Arabian Gulf. We watch with horror and near disbelief as radicalized elements on both sides of the Islamic faith take up arms in Iraq and Syria in increasingly vicious ways. But in the West, we have seen this play out before: in the Christian faith, during the wars of the Reformation.” Crafted with wit as the Admiral usually does, the piece is short, and therefore somewhat of an oversimplification of a much muddled reality, however he does go on to postulate that the spreading conflict is not just about religion. Roger that!

The events that have been unfolding in Iraq over the last six months, and rapidly escalating in recent weeks, are incredibly complicated, and cannot be reduced to comparisons of religious fervor gone widespread murderous, which would be akin to attributing the decimation of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, and four murdered Americans, to an overzealous spontaneous protest against an obscure anti-Mohammed YouTube video. The movement of ISIS through Iraq with blitzkrieg speed has been calculated, and alarmingly successful, no doubt especially to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the terrorist group’s leader. It is so complex that if the diagram were to be looked at in the manner the FBI used to put the top mafia families up on an office wall, the convoluted mess of arrows going this way and that would probably take up half of the wall space at the Pentagon. And believe it or not, some of the arrows would originate at the CIA annex and U.S. consulate in Benghazi, before going across the Mediterranean to Turkey and then Syria, and then finally down to Iraq. The money trail is even more complicated, but here's a hint: Wahhabi Sunni - the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Remember, Nouri al-Malaki and his government are Shi'ites, and so is Iran. So there are many conflicts of interest for the United States, but if you're a CIA guy looking for the assignment of a career, this is gourmet Italian bistro to a lover of pasta.

Once a ragtag, and relatively small band of radical Sunni fundamentalists aligned with Osama bi Laden and al Qaeda, ISIS is rapidly growing in numbers, newly equipped with billions of dollars of U.S. military hardware and weapons, perhaps even stinger missiles, freshly financed from plundered banks throughout Northern Iraq as well as from other sources in the Middle East, and emboldened as never before. For these particular radical Islamists, a group only ten years in the making, as all insurrectionists who have gone down in history before them, bin Laden’s al Qaeda included, success tends to breed success, and at the risk of being cliché, to ISIS, the ends justify the means.

As Iraq implodes into chaos, as never before seen in modern times, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s tactics have been seen as ruthless and barbaric, the atrocities being well covered by the media. And ISIS is not hiding anything, quite the contrary. The insurgents themselves are supplying video of the butchery, footage that includes summary executions of thousands of captured Iraqi army regulars, beheadings, crucifixions, and other various atrocities, which are mostly being committed against Shi’ites, the highest percentage of the Iraqi army’s compliment, or against those in opposition to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. There have also been reported cases of the random, intentional murder of untold numbers of unarmed civilians, which would be par for the course for any insurgent operation in that area of the world.

History over the last 1400 years has proven that such brutal tactics being employed by these new radical Islamists are nothing new to the region, or to Islam in general. What is new, and very effective is the use of YouTube, Facebook, and other forms of social media to publish the brutality in near real-time across the expanse of planet earth. The result, and a very calculated one, has been mass desertions of Iraqi army who don’t want to go the way of their previously captured fellow soldiers, comrades that they have watched being massacred on the screens of their mobile phones. The deserters are simply putting their weapons down on the ground, abandoning tanks, trucks, and HUMVs, and fleeing for their lives in fear, even before the greatly outnumbered ISIS has even engaged them, or attacked the objective. Now the ISIS victories across northern Iraq are a rallying cry for jihadists or wannabe jihadists everywhere. Their numbers will surely rapidly increase. Think Spartacus on steroids, building an army to fight Rome, and al-Baghdadi has more going for him than Spartacus did.  

ISIS may want to continue to strike while they have the momentum, however their numbers are still relatively small compared to the forces of any counter attack planned by Nouri al-Maliki in the defense of Baghdad. Seasoned ISIS commanders will want to wait. Ramadan which occurs in one week aside, the summers in Iraq are brutally hot and now al-Baghdadi can well afford to wait out 40 degree plus Celsius heat as his insurgent forces regroup, recruit, and train for a fall offensive of Baghdad and the oil refineries in the south. His new recruits will be made up of fanatics, disenchanted youth, unemployed and socially rejected, Americans included, who will all have a beacon, something to be a member of, a cause. The ISIS numbers will begin to swell suddenly, and as predictably as the illegal children immigrants flood into the United States across the southern borders was, a flood that continues unabated by the way, and that's here on our own soil. What will President Obama do about something half a world away? He doesn't think globally, at least not since he's been the president of the United States. In addition, calls for immediate drone attacks by politicians, political pundits, and media commentators are ridiculous. Use of UAVs, such as the Predator, or other airstrikes launched from the USS George Bush, would not only be ineffective ground-based spotters, but counterproductive due to civilian collateral casualties. The human shield defensive strategy is very popular and easily done by a fighting force willing to die for their cause and not having one relational connection to the indigent population. Even more of a bad idea than airstrikes is the notion of coordinating with Iran to squelch the hostilities, which would only result in the United States aiding Khamenei in seizing control of the entire Middle East. Has anyone at the State Department or in the Obama Administration thought to ask what Israel thinks about that?

With the absence of a modern day version of Saladin, the Kurdish Sunni from Syria, barbaric and ruthless in war, but merciful in surrender and peace, ISIS will not stop after Iraq. Their mission is the establishment of a new Islamic Caliphate with a greater reach than that of Saladin in the 12th century, or the Ottoman Empire at its zenith.  Since the United States cannot undo the past, the arguments for what should or should not have been done, and who’s fault is, etc., being irrelevant and inconsequential, we must focus on viable solutions, unfortunate as they may be, and all with consequences.

1.     Nouri al-Maliki is essentially ineffective and impotent at this point. There should be concentrated, covert efforts made to have him and his government ousted and replaced before some very radical element even more closely associated with Iran, or even worse, ISIS, does it for us. Jawad al-Bulani, an engineer in Saddam Hussein’s Air Force and former head of the Unity Alliance of Iraq is a logical choice to replace al-Maliki, as he is more sympathetic of the Sunni minority, as well as less myopically power hungry than the corrupt al-Maliki has proven to be.

2.      ISIS must be defeated in a conventional sense of the word, with whatever fire power and U.S. presence that it takes to do that.  By no means should such action be unilateral. There must be leadership on the part of the United States, as clear and unequivocal as the coalition that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. The cancer must be stopped before Baghdad, and other Arabic states of Sunni majorities, particularly those that are Wahhabi, must not only be supportive, but must also aid in the defeat of the ISIS insurgency. For balance in the region it must not be an Iranian led effort. In fact, Iran should be left completely out of the equation.

3.     Once ISIS is destroyed, and those ISIS leaders and commanders, and insurgents responsible for the war crimes, which also include the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Mosul, Tikrit, and other Iraqi villages and cities, are tried and executed under Iraq law, then and only then, the United States must have the “Status of Forces” Agreement that currently is not in place. At the end of the day however, the United States must keep a substantial presence, we must remain there, in order to protect our interests and preserve our way of life, freedom, and the safety of our nation and our people.

Although extremely doubtful that the Obama administration would actually do something before Baghdad becomes the next Saigon or falls into the hands of Iran for protection and control, the plan laid out is the wisest course of action for the United States to take, the best idea in a list of alternative choices that are all exceedingly bad.  The consequences of the above are numerous however, and include a divided Iraq, with the Kurds finally having a place to call home, as well as a Kurdish stake in Iraqi oil production. Relations with Russia might be further impacted negatively, but one must ask, “How much worse can it get from where we are now after the Clinton Reset?” Perhaps our relations with Putin might actually improve due to a demonstrated resolve on the part of the United States to finally lead. There are other consequences too numerous to discuss here, however the consequences of not doing what has been set forth above, or dithering further, as the president so often does, are perhaps, much worse, and include putting Israel into such a corner that they have no choice but to use the Samson option for the entire region. Samson of course killed all of the Philistines when pulled down the pillars, but unfortunately caused his very own death in the process; the "Samson Option" - Israel's hypothetical option of massive nuclear retaliation leaving the all of the Middle East a nuclear wasteland. That is not the place that we want to go. 

Finally, reiterating the point that Mr. Stavridis had made, the final chapter written about the events occurring in Iraq will be about power and not religion. Who ends up in power will be decided by the actions of the United States. It has always been predicted that World War III will be sparked by a series of events that have their genesis in the Middle East. Let’s see what happens.

The Jericho Trigger - Prologue

    IN THE MORNING, when first tickled with light purified by opaque cathedral glass, the vision she had painted was eerie, a cryptic accent highlighting a dire resolution. But then, when illuminated by the great candle chandelier hanging from the pyramidal ceiling of stone, light necessary at a minimum to really begin seeing detail, the work stirred to life, becoming mesmerizing and increasingly complex, as well as impossible to understand. That’s exactly what she wanted. 
   Shades of gray pigment rendered in surrealism, her easy, untethered brush strokes had assembled numerous geometric rows of long, cylindrical objects, bold, silver-gray and crisp on one side of the mural-size canvas, muted, charcoal-gray blurred and distorted, similarly echeloned in opposition on the other. Woven in between the objects was a massive steel-gray chain, an unseen force dramatically pulling on it, violently uprooting the cylinders against their structural will towards the center, meshing them together, while sequentially destroying them.

They were pointed shapes with fins, set against a chaotic pale taupe background of thick crumbling walls and collapsing buildings, burning with giant ash-gray flames of fire, and drenched in dark, arsenic-gray rain. In as many shades of gray, the artist had also painted numbers; binary code that fluttered from an inky sky, initially as single digit ones and zeros, before morphing into random numerals of multiple digits, that then transformed into summations and equations, with fractions, Greek letters and symbols in brackets and parenthesis, and in various sizes and forms. Some of these formulations were wavy block, some vague cube, some sharp flat, overlaying the work, floating arbitrarily in space before taking on a unique perspective of their very own. And lastly, at the linear vanishing point of the bleak scene was one large eye, with the pupil dilated and fixed, leaving a thin iris rim of glaucous and blue-gray.

Watched by five unlit klieg lights perfectly positioned on a spotlessly swept stone floor, spaced exactly three and a half feet apart, the swirling painting, six by fourteen feet, was mounted on wooden stands against the granite wall of a large, four-sided room. The room was reinforced with dark mahogany throughout, and decorated with four large windows of multicolored, antique cathedral glass designed to catch most of the day’s sun. Once a chapel, but empty of ornaments as a result of looting from previous centuries, the drafty space, which had a distinct amplified echo, was at the center of a medieval Christian Monastery perched high on the western face of a craggy Turkish cliff.

The timeworn sanctum had become the artist's studio, a refuge to paint, as well as her place to study and learn. A plain wooden desk, two wooden chairs, and the tools of an artist were all that now furnished the room. And there, created amid the bouquet of the artist’s solvents, mixed with humid currents of cool air meandering through dark corridors with vaulted ceilings, the large painting was just one representation, a single chapter in an expanding volume of the artist’s impressions of the struggles of the human race, the totality that is the essence of not only the evolution of mankind, but the discovery of the rules of the universe itself.

It was a layered postulation of murky oils made with grizzled paintbrushes and pallet knife, and with the floating numbers and formulas, the essence of a theorem, perhaps verifying something, but solving nothing. And with those complexities and likely conundrums, the composition had managed to produce substance and achieve analytic life. Yet, could her analysis be fearful, a gloomy, surreal projection in mural form?

From the start, as geniuses before her, she was a cerebral vacuum, and painting was her resulting quasar. Through art she’d discovered a cathartic outlet, her artistic creations being a veritable spinoff for a voracious, super black hole of intellectual appetite. An apt juxtaposition with inflation of the universe at the jumpstart of the Big Bang, a favorite subject of hers’, the expansion of her grasp rapidly inflating, her mind was dissecting accepted theories, often uprooting the basis of their foundations with original and revolutionary proofs of her own, the state of being versus what will become. In her own scale of Planck Time, she was devouring all that was discoverable or ever dreamt possible to imagine, and finding not only the known unknown, but also that never before imagined – the unknown unrevealed secrets of the universe.  

Her curiosities ranged widely from language and art, to philosophy, math, and especially physics; lately on studies most would consider to be obscure, certainly very small. The deep inquisitive interest she developed for things was aroused by the magical, or what appeared to be supernatural, that is until truly investigated, and explained scientifically. The compass, magnates, fireflies at dusk, had all captured her curiosity at one time or another. 
     She’d recently become preoccupied with the silvery-gray metal known as uranium, at first for its shiny color, which reminded her of mercury, quickly becoming even more interested because of its unique behavior.  From her studies she’d learned that contained deep within uranium were dormant forces, at rest since the birth of the universe, and that when sparked and unleashed, those forces were exceptional to behold. Inside this gray metal, where things are a billion times smaller than she, was an isotope, another form of uranium able to sustain a fission chain reaction unleashing enormous, mind-boggling energies similar, she knew, to that of the sun. She also knew that the power released from that dormant energy could be used for good, or for bad.

On one hand it could be used as an energy source with unlimited potential, such as powering an entire city of millions of people, and on the other hand for weapons with terrible destructive power, "Weapons of mass destruction," many called them, capable of instantly vaporizing that very same city along with all of those people. She had also discovered that nowadays the use of fission from uranium alone was considered primitive, and weapons had long ago evolved to thermonuclear, a type of bomb the world’s superpowers each had tens of thousands of. But it started with uranium, and when enriched with enough quantity, an equalizer for those who weren’t superpowers, and without question, a means of terror.

Therefore because of those particular truths, many conventionally powerful regimes, some frightening and bellicose, were just as obsessed as she was with uranium, the radioactive element that made it all possible. She just looked at it differently than they did. A sweep with the paintbrush here, and a stroke with the paintbrush there, represented a myriad of her original feelings, analysis, and predictions. That’s how she worked.

Climbing down from a wooden stool on which she’d stood for those final sweeps and strokes, the artist looked at her mother, who while admiring the work steadied the stool. With her brush, she pointed at the forbidding cylindrical shapes. “They're missiles,” she said with a gaping smile revealing a missing tooth, a lateral incisor.

“I can see that,” her mother answered with a smile in return, placing an elegant hand on her daughter’s ponytailed head, the hair satin coffee just as hers’.

Gliding her hand softly down the fair face, squaring it to her own, produced a gleam from the girl’s luminous hazel eyes. The mother gently held the tiny chin, lifting it to examine the still fixed beam closely. “Hmm, well look at that. You have another new one coming in, don’t you?”

The girl nodded silently, probing the space with the slide of her tongue. “Est-il à votre gout – is it to your liking?” she asked turning her head to eye the painting.

“Yes – yes it is,” the mother answered, her undeterred doting gaze coming from unusually wide orbits, a Bouvier-esque mild ocular hypertelorism and downturned eyes just far enough apart to make her appearance uncommon, yet uniquely alluring and beautiful. The condition was hereditary and the daughter just the same.

“S'il vous plait Karen. You’re just saying that, aren’t you?” The daughter liked to playfully tease, often injecting her new favorite language and her mother’s name, accented as well, into the subtle ribbing, especially rolling the r. Oui oui Kareen.

Initiated by the daughter, they’d been on a first name basis for more than a year, something Karen was slightly uncomfortable with in the beginning. Although things were different now, Karen knew that she would always be the mother in the traditional sense, especially for those few things that remained routine and natural. There were motherly things that always remained; certainly nurturing and caring as all loving mothers do, but primarily being the protector, and of that she was devoted, which gave her great comfort.

“Don’t be silly. Of course I’m not. I love all of your paintings,” Karen giggled, shifting her attention to the painting, affirmed by her thumb on chin, forefinger crossing full lips.

“Well you don’t sound very positive. Maybe you need to see it a little better.”

“Alright – I’m trying,” the mother said, her eyes narrowing as they darted across the canvass.

“Pensez positif ma chère Karen. Oui - think positive please, you need to really see it. Here, I can help you,” the girl said, continuing her French intonation and nodding at a black button a step or two away on the floor. A black electrical cord was attached to the button, and the cord connected to a transformer, and in turn to a wire whorl that led to a generator.

The mother did as instructed, and upon lifting her foot off the button, she could feel a sudden vibration in her core. A low hum simultaneously increased in pitch as the five klieg lights began to flicker and turned on, and within moments the cold room was very warm, and awash in reflected colors from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Eyes opened wide, her tall, thin frame rigid, the mother caught her failed breath, forcing a murmur, “I…” She couldn’t finish, the words of expression had vanished, so instead said nothing and just looked.

“You can see it now, can’t you?”

“Yes,” Karen breathed with the faintest of a whisper, the lack of speech saying more than volumes of encyclopedias.

“Tell me if you like it now.”

“I’m…” Karen continued in a feeble attempt to collate a barrage of thoughts into meaningful words, as if frontal lobe overload was robbing the Broca’s area of the brain its ability to formulate language. 

“I knew you would like it,” the little girl said with a slight one-sided grin.

Her mouth filled with saliva produced by an over stimulated nervous system, Karen swallowed, clearing her throat to ask in a barely audible tone, “What are you going to call it?”

“It doesn’t have a name yet.”

“Is it finished?”

Taking a few steps back and folding her arms, brush gripped in her small hand, the little girl pursed her lips, squinted and studied. “Oh yes,” she finally said after a long silence. “It’s finished.”

“Then sign it untitled,” Karen said, finally snapping the hold of the painting. With a slight tremble she handed her daughter a pallet knife that the child took. “You can decide on a name later,” she added nervously.

     Scraping and scooping from a pallet of oils, using titanium white for petals, cadmium green for filament, she briskly fashioned a flower in the bottom right corner of the painting. Then with a sharp pin and a prick of her finger, she added the stamens. That was her signature, Lily. 

THE FEAR OF THE FISCAL CLIFF

Right after the election twelve years ago, the talk was all about these guys named "CHAD," and how they were hanging around all over South Florida. That made me mad because at the time I was living in South Florida and slacker dudes named CHAD that needed to be counted like inventory were a real pain in the ass for we Floridians. In fact, as I remember, it was a giant problem for everyone, everywhere, and gave Florida an unfortunate bad rap. It was really irritating to me back then, and I felt a genuine pity for anyone named CHAD and wished they'd all just get the hell out of Florida. Period. Move away forever.

In 2000 I was working at a bank, and was interviewing a number of recent college grads to be my underpaid assistant. One interviewee really stood out. He was an Ivy Leaguer, had all the credentials. He had advanced degrees, and appeared on face value to be by far the best candidate out of more than 20 applicants. But unfortunately his name was CHAD, and sadly, I knew the great interview CHAD had just gone through was nothing more than an Academy Award winning performance. There was no doubt in my mind that when the day came that he thought his job was safe, he'd backslide and just start hanging around like all those other CHADs - probably at the Starbucks on the first floor. I told him as much. I said that although he was the best person I'd interviewed, I wasn’t going to hire him, and that I was doing him a favor. I said that with an performance like the one he'd just given me, LA was no doubt his calling.

"Hollywood seems like a great place for you to go," I said, thinking that he, and all the rest of those CHADs lingering in Florida could go, hitchhike if need be, straight there. “Without passing ‘Go’,” I added.
There, they could blend in with all the other California goof-offs, usually named "DUDE," or "LANCE," who were also malingerers, sleeping until noon on a sofa in a sucker friend’s place they usually called their “crash pad,” and then later rollerblading along Venice Beach when everyone else was is an office working, or stuck in traffic. At least however, we didn't fear CHAD. He was simply irritating and that’s about it.

Now, however it’s this fiscal CLIFF, who I’m convinced believe is no laggard of a person, because he's generated huge cash flow, and has done so for 50 years or more. I know that because “Devil Woman,” and “We Don’t Talk Anymore” were big hits in the seventies, and enjoyed by throngs, the same listeners that also swayed and grooved to ABBA on the same AM station. That’s the kind of dough that can really add up. But I guess some of the royalties must also be going over the “pond” to Washington because they use the word “fiscal” a lot when they talk about CLIFF.

            I Googled “fiscal” and by definition it means to be, “of or relating to government revenue,” which if he’s anywhere close to ABBA's numbers, and I think he’s up there in the rankings, favorite of the Royals too, that’s enough money to get pretty excited about. Yet instead of getting excited about the money, like in a fun way, and privately work out whatever they have to work out, deal makers are scaring the shit out everyone, and talk bad about him incessantly. CLIFF’s name has been negatively drummed into my head so much over the past year, and accelerated in the intensity since the election, that it causes knots in my stomach when I hear his name. “CLIFF, CLIFF, CLIFF.” And always prefaced with "FEAR", the "FEAR of the CLIFF."

The word "FEAR" makes people feel extremely uneasy. Obviously those talking about the "FEAR of the CLIFF" didn't know that Roosevelt said along time ago that Americans had "nothing to FEAR but FEAR itself." And things were really crappy back then. Just in the last hour alone, as I write these thoughts, I've heard CHAD's name mentioned negatively on CNBC at least a hundred times. Maria Bartiromo said, “We will not stop talking about the CLIFF,” until they get a deal for him in Washington.

Are you kidding me? Listen up guys in Washington. Give CLIFF whatever kind of deal it takes to stop the public haranguing and all fear mongering surrounding him. Sure he's a little old now, and long past duos with Olivia Newton John (some might have even thought they heard “Fear of the ‘Physical’ CLIFF” rather than “Fiscal CLIFF”), but I'm positive you'd love to hear him at the Kennedy Center. 

So for CLIFF’s sake, take the fear factor away from his name, before Thanksgiving. You see, we all want to have a happy turkey day, and a Merry Christmas too. Besides, I sure love they way CLIFF sings “The Christmas Song” with that pop beat.

Unfortunately, if they don't come up with a deal, I'd suggest to CLIFF that he never step foot in the United States of America ever again. And anyone else named CLIFF should probably catch the first flight they can to Europe as well (Spain, Italy or Greece would be good), where they wallow in the FEAR the FISCAL CLIFF. More advice as well for the people in Washington that screwed up the deal for CLIFF, if that should happen. You are best advised to probably move on too, as no doubt there would be an overwhelming fear of your very dysfunctional existence. Those are my thoughts. Americans don’t like to have things around that we fear. We don't care for that emotion one iota. Just think about zombies for a second. People really fear zombies, and you see what happens to them on TV. It’s not very pretty.