Gathering Storm in the Mideast
As many may now be aware, a radical Islamofascist organization, ISIS, which had been fighting in the Syrian Civil War, has now invaded Iraq. With amazing speed, they have vanquished one Iraqi military formation after another, and are wreaking dreadful atrocities on the helpless civilian population. Mosul and Tikrit have fallen. Advancing ISIS forces have nearly reached the gates of Baghdad. Given the amazing displayed incompetence of the Iraqi military -- amazing even to me, and I never had a very high opinion of them to begin with -- it is far from certain that the Iraqi regime will survive the next month.
I am astonished by the lack of popular appreciation of the seriousness of these events. Whether or not ISIS triumphs -- and they have many weaknesses -- the ease with which they have advanced into Iraq, and the alacrity and desperation with which the Iraqi regime accepted Iranian help -- are both terrifying in their implications for the instability of the region. A mere faction in Syria's civil war was able to defeat whole divisional-strength regular Iraqi Army units. This means that the strength of Iraq must be counted as minimal against any real combatant force. And Iran can operate freely within Iraq now. That means that any hope to contain Iran is now delusional.
General war in the Mideast now seems to me, within a very few years, to be all but inevitable. The crisis will come while the clot of hair and pretty pretty pants calling itself Barack Hussein Obama still clogs the White House, before America will actually have a President capable of executing the functions of his office. Hence, America's influence over events for any good purpose may be assumed null.
"Thereafter mighty forces were adrift, the void was open, and into that void stepped a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast ..." (Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm).
Mighty forces are adrift, the void is open. Who shall step into it? That, alone, remains to be revealed.
I am astonished by the lack of popular appreciation of the seriousness of these events. Whether or not ISIS triumphs -- and they have many weaknesses -- the ease with which they have advanced into Iraq, and the alacrity and desperation with which the Iraqi regime accepted Iranian help -- are both terrifying in their implications for the instability of the region. A mere faction in Syria's civil war was able to defeat whole divisional-strength regular Iraqi Army units. This means that the strength of Iraq must be counted as minimal against any real combatant force. And Iran can operate freely within Iraq now. That means that any hope to contain Iran is now delusional.
General war in the Mideast now seems to me, within a very few years, to be all but inevitable. The crisis will come while the clot of hair and pretty pretty pants calling itself Barack Hussein Obama still clogs the White House, before America will actually have a President capable of executing the functions of his office. Hence, America's influence over events for any good purpose may be assumed null.
"Thereafter mighty forces were adrift, the void was open, and into that void stepped a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast ..." (Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm).
Mighty forces are adrift, the void is open. Who shall step into it? That, alone, remains to be revealed.