Leave ISIS To The Homies

There was a great cry throughout the land. Non-stop propaganda from a monolithic media-military- congressional complex had convinced a petrified people of the need for a military offensive in Iraq and Syria, in pursuit of a pack of wild dogs: the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or ISIL). A plurality of Americans canvassed has indicated that it is in the United States’ interest to take military action against ISIS.

The people wailed and railed. The Leader, they complained, lacked a plan to combat this force, which, they had been told, posed a grave existential threat to them. The war network led in jingoism. What precisely did President Barack Obama say that had Chucky Krauthammer and the chicken hawks in the Fox News coop so exercised? He told reporters that he didn’t have a strategy yet for confronting ISIS “on a regional level.” Anchor Megyn Kelly—her show has degenerated into a rah-rah, flag-waving, hour-long session, bemoaning diminished US world hegemony—poured scorn on one wag’s non-combative suggestion: Let the Arab League deal with ISIS.

Throughout, ISIS’s neighbors, Israel included, didn’t seem particularly concerned about the barbarians at the gate. The promise of eternal American intervention had, likely, enabled inertia and apathy among regional players.

Despotism and populism finally coalesced. Driven by polls and craving plaudits from the pundits, the president cobbled together a strategy. Within hours, love was in the air again. Members of a lovelorn liberal media scurried about like teens on prom night. It had been a long time since they felt the same rush about Obama. In his televised address to the nation, the president committed to increasing the ongoing airstrikes in Iraq; said he would take the fight to ISIL in Syria, too. The hormonal monitors at CNN spiked with each paternal promise of protection. “If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,” roared Big Daddy.

Gullible Americans did not seem to compute that King Hussein’s commitment to take care of them was preposterous. Consider: “The FBI’s most recent national threat assessment for domestic terrorism” did not even mention the threat of Islamist terror. Like his predecessor, this president and his malevolent minions consider the signal danger to the homeland (i.e. to their reign) to emanate from local yokels: “anti-government militia groups,” “white supremacy extremists,” “sovereign citizen nationalists,” and, naturally, “Puerto Rican nationalists.” And, while He has thrown a bone to the ISIS-obsessed boneheads at home, the homeland’s southern border remains, by His decree, open to all.

Easily the most ludicrous aspect of Dr. Feelgood’s “plan” is the promise of “military assistance to the Syrian opposition”: “I again call on Congress, again, to give us additional authorities and resources to train and equip these fighters.”

There is no telling the good Syrian opposition from the bad. If anything, there is a “growing preponderance of radical Islamists in the Syrian rebel force fighting Assad’s army,” seconds the outstanding intelligence provider DEBKAfile. Currently fighting ISIS is Bashar Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s embattled leader, whom Hussein, McCain and Clinton wanted to unseat.

The unseating of yet another extremely effective law-and-order leader, Saddam Hussein, is what unleashed ISIS. Despite what Delphic Oracle Dana Perino says in praise of her “prescient” boss’s “strategizing”; Bush 43 owns ISIS. Iraq has gone from a rogue state to a failed state, where mad dogs thrive. Fidelity to historical fact demands that Bush get Brownie points for that.

Mere weeks back, when Israel and Hamas were locking horns, two organic coalitions emerged in the Middle East. By DEBKAfile’s telling, the one “regional coalition” in the conflict included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi, the UAE ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and … the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas. The rival axis consisted of Hamas, Qatar, Turkey and a turkey named Kerry (John). U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and “a brace of European ministers” joined this last group, known in the neighborhood as the “Save Hamas Squad.”

The first alliance was borne of “Netanyahu’s dilemma: Back Obama’s save Hamas policy, or fight for its downfall with Egypt and Saudis.”

My point? America thinks that it must and can be a force for good in the Middle East. Closer examination suggests that the region’s players march to their own drumbeat. In “Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789-1923,” Efraim and Inari Karsh marshaled prodigious scholarship to show that, “Twentieth-century Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.” The trend obtains.

American efforts notwithstanding, Assad is hanging on for dear life. The Israeli government is already endeavoring to “radically change its tack on Syria, reversing a policy and military strategy that were long geared to opposing Syrian President Bashar Assad.” U.S. meddlers should grow a brain too and quit degrading the Syrian Army. Leave ISIS to Syria, Tehran and Tel Aviv.

Let the locals take out their trash.