News & Articles

So far the loss of four heads (as of 9/15/14) may involve us in another war. Two journalists and a British aid worker have been decapitated by a radical Islamic fundamentalist group under the acronym of ISIL. That grisly but very human act was performed thousands of times in our rather checkered past when heads were placed on pikes and staffs on castle walls. Decapitation marvelously concentrates the mind. But it is the fourth beheading I’m really worried about. This is the “class action” beheading of the Obama administration, the Pentagon, the Congress, and the national press. Removing the head is very hard on the brain.
Chapter 47 (Sura) of the Koran contains the following verse: “When you encounter the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads until you have crushed them completely; then bind the prisoners tightly.” Iranian historians in the 9th and 11th Centuries wrote that beheadings are Allah’s sanction on heathens and infidels. As late as 1953 a Koran “translator” (Unlike the Christian Bible, no different renditions of the Koran are allowed) Abdullah Yusuf Ali stated that the line “smite at their necks” had to be taken “literally and figuratively.”
The rash of beheadings started again in 2002 after 9/11 when Wall Street reporter Daniel Pearl was beheaded. Sunnis and Shias have religiously beheaded each other with great fervor since, particularly in Bagdhad. Mohamed said Allah commanded him not to change a word or comma in the Koran which was dictated to him.

First Warning For Journalists Understand The Local Culture And Traditions

What do foreign journalists and aid workers expect when they enter a part of the world populated by thousands of young suicide bombers seeking martyrdom and millions of poor unemployed and uneducated men with all kinds of leisure time to think about 72 virgins-- while idle Arab princes are getting monthly allowances of $270,000 from Big Daddy? But our government should know better.
Retired Army Colonel David Hackworth remains our most decorated serviceman. He earned over 100 medals for gallantry in action during WW II, the Korean War, and three tours in the Vietnam War. Hackworth was so angry about the horrible mess in Vietnam he lived in Australia for 20 years. He observed the Bosnian War between Muslims and Serbs as a reporter for Newsweek during the 1990’s. On one patrol with a Serb unit he watched as they stopped at a cemetery and dug up a grave that had a marker indicating the person died in 1944. When they had uncovered the coffin the patrol ceremoniously lined up, urinated on the coffin–and then blasted it to pieces with machineguns.  Hackworth asked an officer why. He said, “That man was a very, very bad man. He killed many Serbs during WW II. He is being punished.”  We must remember that Muslims have been killing each other for 1,400 years because of religious beliefs.  Hackworth, no genteel type in his own right, described the Muslims and Serbs as “mean junkyard dogs.”

From Flying Palaces To Arab Springs

There are a multitude of reasons for some of the Muslim nations–-Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon in particular-- to explode into the Arab Spring revolts, coups, and civil wars. Saudi Arabia might be next.  I will cite just three reasons. .A Saudi woman was sentenced to 150 lashes and eight months in jail for driving a car.  Muslim women do not have that freedom. A male relative must drive them.
Saudi Prince Abdulaziz Al Saud has spent $485 million  converting a 600-passenger Airbus A380, the largest passenger jet in the world, into a personal flying carpet. This flying palace boasts a concert room with grand piano, a garage with an elevator for the prince’s Rolls Royce, a Turkish steam bath for four, and a business-type boardroom complete with holographic screens. It has five rooms with king-size beds and a “Wellbeing Room” that is equipped with computers and cameras that show what lands the plane is passing over on the plane’s floor.  Very entertaining. I imagine that the system shows all of the pissants working the oil fields that supply the money for the royal family to blow on personal desires.
In the hundreds of thousands of Top Secret memos and documents released by Wikileaks was one sent in 1996 by the US embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia that revealed the method of “wealth distribution” used by Saudi royals to keep the huge family happy. The figures below are based on 1996 figures. (If the same formulas are used in 2014, these figures could probably be doubled.) The Saudis guard this information well. Distant relatives of the royal family, and there are thousands, are paid a monthly allowance of at least $800. The sons and daughters of the king are paid a monthly allowance of $270,000. There are many other financial benefits. A family member may get as much as $3 million when married, and could possibly get another $3 million for building a new palace. The royal family also provides bonuses for procreating children. Osama bin Laden had six wives and up to 26 children but was not a member of the royal family. His Daddy, however, was a billionaire buddy of the king, so he kept those little Muslims coming.

The !,400-Year Battle Between The Sunnis And The Shias

The founder of Islam, Mohamed, died in 632 AD, and was succeeded by his buddy Abu. Some Islamists thought this succession was not legit. They thought that Mohamed’s cousin Ali, his adopted son, should be named caliph (leader). He not only was Mohamed’s first convert, he had also married the man’s daughter. To make a long story short, supporters of Abu became the Sunnis of today and the supporters of Ali became the Shia. They have been killing each other, and lots of other people, for over 1,400 years. About 85% of Muslims are Sunni, so the Shia are outnumbered around the world. Iraq and Iran are Shia nations.
Iraq is having so much trouble because Saddam Hussein was a minority Sunni who  held Iraq together by murder, intimidation, poison gas, torture chambers, fear, and the aid of two sons who raped and murdered their way to Sunni godliness. But Saddam, just one of the many real bastards in the world, still allowed women to become educated, to become teachers, doctors, and other societal leaders. But Muslims, much like Vatican Roman Catholics, have exceedingly long memories. Suicide bombers representing both Sunnis and Shias continue to blow each other up in the streets of Bagdhad and Islamabad, Pakistan.

Was The Iraq War Really About WMD–Or Was It About Oil?

In brief, we should not react too much to the current “threat” of the radical group called ISIL. They are very busy killing other radical Muslims by the thousands. Why interfere with that genocide cleansing? I think we should let them kill each other until they get tired of “jihad.” It won’t do any good, in fact it will be very harmful for our interests, to get involved in the many Sunni-Shia civil wars taking place on our ever shrinking planet. It’s been estimated that there are as many as 1,200 Muslim “militias” in Syria. At the same time they are fighting President Assad, the murderer of an estimated 200,000 of his own people at this juncture, they are also fighting each other! Which dozen Syrian “moderate” militias do you pick to support?  I keep hearing US senators talking about helping the Free Syrian Army with cold cash and hot weapons. The McCain-Graham-Republican warmongering cabal is pushing for war in at least six countries other than Iraq and Syria. We don’t even know what group the Free Syrian Army represents.  Besides, it is neither “Free” or “Army.” I see the CIA claims it has identified most of the “good guys” in Syria.   Don’t we remember what the CIA said about Iraq and Saddam? A pushover. The war would last six weeks. Saddam had loads of Weapons of Mass Destruction. (Was it really about oil?) He had to go.  We even have currently over 1,200 nutcase militias roaming the boondocks of this country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. We can’t even pick supporters among our own religious nuts. We are really nuts to get involved in the Middle East mess at this point.

The Middle East Is Not A Quagmire Now, It Is An Absolute Hellhole

I am not sure we can even count the number of civil wars in progress in the region, let alone the civil wars that will break out in the near future over that great war combination, economics and religion. Are there any real “countries” in the Middle East? Iran dominated by Shias and Israel dominated by Jews are the only ones I can think of. The rest of the “countries” are really made up of dozens of tribes incapable of economic, religious, and political compromise. We have similar tribes in the US.
I see the CIA in just the last two weeks has raised its estimate of ISIL fighters in the area from 10,000 to between 20,000 and 31,500. Well, there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world so I suppose such a fast recruitment is possible, but their predication smells as bad as some of the previous estimates of strengths in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Private military experts and analysts who track such things say that the idea the Free Syrian Army has an effective command structure is an absolute myth.
Aron Lund of the Carnegie Institute of International Peace, assigned to edit the “Syrian in Crisis” blog writes: “It is a very dirty war...” Some remnants of “moderates” are fighting alongside the Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. Former government officials who have served in Iraq and the Middle East are not confident in what Obama and  Congress are doing. Former US ambassador to both Iraq and Syria Ryan Crocker says, “We need to do everything we can to figure out who the non-ISIL opposition is. Frankly, we don’t have a clue.”

What Does The Crazy Uncle From The White House Basement Say?

I see the Republican Congressional caucus asked former Vice-President Dick Cheney to examine the entrails of pheasant roosters and give them some advice on the ISIL problem. Cheney has been right about war only once in the last 20 years. He said he and Bush ‘41 did not finish off Saddam in the Gulf War because it would have destroyed the coalition of Arab and European countries--and Iraq would become a real mess. But when he and Bush ‘43 attacked Iraq in 2003 he said we would be welcomed as liberators, that the war would last only six months, and Iraqi oil would pay for it.
After our defeat he said that the Bush-Cheney administration had put the US in a position to “win” in Iraq. Win what? I have never gotten an answer to that question. Why even ask the guy who really screwed up the Iraq War with dire warnings of WMD, poison gas, SCUD missiles, and mushroom clouds? Actually most of the ISIL leaders today are former Iraqi military officers who had been imprisoned by us–some at Abu Ghraib. We have lost wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan because we didn’t know who to kill and who to serve tea to. All wars against insurgencies and civil wars are losers because no one can recognize the real enemy without a uniform.

“War Is Absolute Hell...”

My last commander in the Marine Corps was Lt. General “Chesty Puller, who rose from private to general fighting in five wars from Nicaragua to World War II to Korea. In his fifties he still volunteered for Vietnam. He often repeated this credo: “War is absolute hell. To win you have to kill everyone in sight, then let the politicians sort it out. You don’t hurt ‘em if you don’t kill ‘em.” We have no idea in the Middle East who we are fighting with and who we are fighting against. The politicians have not sorted anything out yet because these tribal conflicts, civil wars, coups, and proxy wars mixed up in the very hot cauldron of religion are not “sortable.” Let the Middle East Muslims keep killing each other until they “sort” it out.

Raymond is a former Marine officer and school board superintendent and resides in Detroit Lakes.