Mess O' Potamia

Very good internet research Beagles.  That Santa Anna, I believe at some point he lost his leg and it got mummified or something and went on to have a little bit of a career itself.  I'm not exactly sure of this and I should do some internet research, but not this morning.

I think oil was the reason we got involved in the mideast in the first place, well and Israel too of course.  But maybe they overplayed their hand because then people started drilling all over, and then we discovered fracking and anymore we seem to have more oil and gas than we know what to do with.  Remember when energy independence was a big campaign issue?  As for foreign aid if we gave the Palestinians as much as we give Israel there would be no Israel.

You know it's kind of hard to figure out how we got where we are in the mideast right now, well how to figure out where we are.  Well mostly we are not there, we are this shadowy presence with drones and advisors and shipping weapons here and there.

I've read a lot of articles about how to deal with what is going on over there like that Lyons article.  When you read the political guys they always seem to have some plan, but when you get down to people who seem to be more expert (they cite more historical stuff, they seem to be taking many more factors into account), they are like, well we could go in full bore with boots galore on the ground and surely we could defeat ISIS and Al Qaeda and whoever, but then we would have to stay there and rule with an iron fist, while taking potshots from them, until hell, and the mideast freezes over.

I think this is our goal, Obama's goal, to just play that shadowy presence, assassinate some guy here, sell some weapons there, keep the whole thing at a low boil, keep it cheap with no big risks.  And then up pops ISIS, and these guys are really bad dudes and not only that but they are holding land.  Even so we stuck to our plan amped up the rhetoric a bit, maybe gave more weapons to the Kurds.  (The Kurds are great, but they are not going to fight for an inch of land that won't later become Kurdistan, and all the international coalition plans count on Turkey who hates the Kurds.)

And then Paris.  What the fuck?  Well it's not us, and we are a lot harder to infiltrate then France, although how hard can it be to do a terror attack?  Look at Timothy McVeigh.  So we amp up the rhetoric and the drones and whatever.  And certainly if France wants at them let them do it, but if we couldn't do it what can France do?  I don't think I have heard any talk about French boots on the ground.

Boots on the ground are the real issue, though the number depends on who you talk to and when you talk to them.  We have an election going on right now, so all the candidates have a plan.  Anybody that is not boots on the ground has the same plan as Obama, only more of it, whatever that means.  Then you have the guys who say they'll listen to the generals, but the generals are all military politicians or else they wouldn't be generals, and they know that the path to greater success is figuring out what the prez wants them to say.

I think we will have to watch the Russkies.  I don't think we can make the Ukraine deal because they want both and they are not giving up either one, but that doesn't mean they will succeed.

And ISIS is no threat to the United States although the politicians will tell you otherwise.  They are an irritant and they certainly piss us off, but we really should know now to stay out of the briar patch.

The best thing I've heard, and I believe, is to understand you enemy, and these ISIS guys, I have a hard time understanding this, but I'll give it a stab in the next post.