"To be America's enemy is dangerous, but to be her friend is fatal."
--Old saying in the Middle East
One brisk winter day in 2011, the president of the United States gave a speech at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Things seemed to be going well abroad, but only seemed to be. As anyone not as innocent as The Hon. Barack Obama would have known. As many did. For they had seen it all before: First the calm, then the storm.
But in the meantime, the president told us, it was time to celebrate. After telling the enemy exactly when the Americans would quit Iraq, sure enough, we did, and the president looked over the Iraq he was abandoning and declared it good:
"Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people. We're building a new partnership between our nations."--Barack Obama, December 14, 2011
Some of us didn't celebrate. We understood. This was the sound of retreat, and when America retreats, evil advances. Happens every time.
Remember the fireworks, handshakes all around, and general jubilation when it was announced that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had achieved "peace" in Vietnam? Its republic would disappear a year later.
But at that moment, the unthinking cheered. The way the crowd at a London aerodrome cheered Neville Chamberlain when he returned from Munich with Peace In Our Time, which soon enough meant war for the longest time--and the bloodiest one in the world's history at that.
Only a stubborn backbencher or two in Commons--like the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill--foresaw the disaster that had been invited by a gullible prime minister in 1938. Alas, Mr. Chamberlain has since had many a successor on that road to retreat.
Now an outfit styled ISIS or ISIL (what either set of initials stands for tends to change from report to report) advances somewhere in the no-man's land where Iraq, Kurdistan and Syria overlap. An offshoot of al-Qaida, and a worthy spawn of that bloody gang, this latest crew of terrorists claims to be establishing an Islamic caliphate all across the Middle East. What it's establishing is a moving reign of terror as panicky populations flee their ancestral homelands in search of a refuge, any refuge. They're fighting panic and trying to keep their heads--literally.
Tens of thousands of these innocents are camping out on mountainsides in what used to be Kurdish territory--exposed to the elements, deprived of food and water, their children dying before their eyes.
Dispatches say any Christians left in places that ISIS has overrun are given a choice: Convert to Islam or die. One report last week said ISIS is forcing conversions, then killing the converts/captives/victims. The worst of both worlds. That's the Middle East.
By mid-July, once prosperous Mosul had no more Christians, or at least people who would admit they were. The Independent in the United Kingdom reports that ISIS types went neighborhood to neighborhood in Mosul last month marking Christian houses with the letter "N"--short for Nasare, which an English speaker will recognize as related to the Nazarene. Now the houses sit empty, waiting to be confiscated. Like shops with their broken windows daubed with Stars of David after Kristallnacht in 1930s Germany.
The refugees in Iraq tell of bracelets and rings being taken from fleeing women, or just cut off their fingers. At last report, ISIS had reached northern Iraq and was moving out the Kurds--a people who long ago made the mistake of being America's friend, and therefore have been abandoned time and again by our Henry Kissingers and Chuck Hagels.
No trace of any other creed must remain when this latest wave of fanatics sweeps over a country. The legendary Tomb of Jonah, another biblical figure, was blown to smithereens the other day. The way the Taliban blew up those giant images of the Buddha that had stood for sand-swept centuries. ISIS claims to be Muslim, but their true faith remains Destruction, their holy trinity Conquest, Spoliation, Despair.
"Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people. We're building a new partnership between our nations."--Barack Obama, December 14, 2011
Ri-i-ight.
Late last week, reports began trickling into American newsrooms that ISIS had surrounded groups of Yazidi in Iraq and begun another slaughter. One of the many ethnic minorities scattered all around what used to be Iraq, the Yazidi are now marked for extinction. They may be Persian or Kurdish ethnically, but they practice their own religion, and have practiced it for centuries. Naturally they're ISIS' next target. ISIS calls them devil worshippers.
It's one of Satan's favorite tactics. Claim some group worships Him and any evil done to them is permitted. For, yes, He still goes to and fro in the land, up and down in it, seeing what evil he can stir up. Job knew all about it. Now it's the Yazidis' turn to die of thirst and starvation. If ISIS doesn't get to them first.
And the world's reaction? The UN's Security Council, which has little if any real interest in protecting anybody's security, now has drafted at least two resolutions/declarations/pronunciamentos on the subject of the Yazidi. Their wordy essence: This calls for immediate discussion!
"Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people. We're building a new partnership between our nations."--Barack Obama, December 14, 2011
Tell us, Mr. President, if this is a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, what would a subservient, unstable, and dependent Iraq look like?
One observer of the passing scene who's always candid--and all too perceptive--is John Bolton, who used to be this country's ambassador to the United Nations before he was caught telling the truth one too many times, and had to resign. Who succeeded him, we forget, and does it matter?
The only thing that can be known for sure is that when America retreats, evil advances. It might as well be a law of physics. And it's operating again in Iraq, or at least what used to be Iraq and is now only a vivisected specimen of what happens when America turns its back on the world.
This week, in a television interview, John Bolton was left to look around at the wreckage of whatever is left of Iraq, and conclude:
"Whatever minimal order and stability there is in the world, and there's not much, is because of the United States and its structure of alliances--our projection of our influence. And over the past several years, the fact is we have withdrawn, turned inward. We've reduced our influence. And what's happening is that chaos is spreading, bit by bit by bit."
We're not claiming Mr. Bolton is always right. For chaos really isn't spreading bit by bit in this administration's wake. No, it's spreading by leaps and bounds.
There is a momentum in these matters, an almost natural sequence of cause and effect. First appeasement, then disaster.
Editorial on 08/09/2014