Events moved fast over the last couple months in Iraq and the Middle East. The Israelis are a war again in Gaza; an American journalist is beheaded in Syria, a capstone to their two-year civil war; the same be-headers of the aforementioned journalist have taken over a third of Iraq to compliment their already occupation of a third of Syria; President Obama sends a contingent of troops to Iraq; President Obama orders the fighter jets to rain hell on the bad guys; as, said bad guys kill everybody and anybody.
I was asked to be on the radio the other day; now twice. I was in Iraq in 2006 and again in 2008 as an independent journalist. I never felt safe. A guy like me could be sent right up the kidnap network, sold to one bad-guy group after another. Anyway, 1380 AM out of Monroe and Janesville, Wisconsin, asked me to pontificate on my experience over there. I was interviewed on Thursday the 14 of August and again on Monday the 18th. No one wanted to here my Iraq shtick for six years, until just recently as Iraq goes up in flames. Media is fickle; a subject for another post on another day.
So..., we are back in Iraq for round three. President Obama inherited Iraq and finally got all the American troops out of there at the end of 2011. It was a short-lived hiatus. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) rose out of the ashes of the Syrian Civil War, fragments of Al Qaeda, and marginalized Sunnis from Saddam Hussein's era. They are as bad a rabble of guys as Pol Pot was in the Cambodia Killing Fields in the '70s and '80s in the aftermath of our Vietnam War.
For all ostensive purposes we have been in or near Iraq since 1990 and the first Gulf War. We have never left Kuwait and Turkey. Before that our navy guarded ships in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq-Iraq war of the 1980s. After the first Gulf War we guarded the Kurdish region of Iraq from their own leader Saddam Hussein by allowing no flights over the region. So..., like the American Vietnam War era, we have been in Iraq or its vicinity for 25 years. Trillions and trillions of dollars, thousands of American deaths.
Poetically, I was operating in the same area of Iraq that has caught so much news in the last few weeks. I visited the Yazidi people and their temple in Lalish, Iraq. The temple is in the mountains near Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, and under ISIS control. The Yazidi are an ancient peoples that are pre-Christian and Islam. And like they did with the Christians in Mosul, the ISIS bunch went after the Yazidi with a vengeance tagging them, "heathens." The Yazidi are a peaceful ethnic group within the Kurdish people, a persecuted ethic group in their own right. I always new I was safe in Iraq when I saw the conical roofs which are a signature of Yazidi architecture.
It looks like we intervened at the very last minute to stop some of the destruction going on in northern Iraq. The autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq has its own army, the tough Pesmerga. They kept me safe in Iraq. They are basically a uniformed army in pickup trucks. They have had to fight ISIS forces who stole our old military equipment from the failed Iraqi Army they overran with ease.
The Kurds, along with Israel, are our only friends in the Middle East. The former being Sunni Muslim and the later being Jewish. Unlikely bedfellows arrive in war. We are also now in the uncomfortable position of having to ally with Iran and Syria, two countries we have been at quasi war with for decades, to fight ISIS. This ISIS bunch is so violent they sour Al Qaeda, Syria, and Iran and ISIS has no compunction about destroying any one of them.
We are going to need a lot of luck. Nowadays we fund our country with taxes from a population of beleaguered workers whose incomes and futures are far bleaker then the generation prior. As my neighbors in Janesville, Wisconsin, move out of their houses due to unemployment and the misery that comes with it,
America is mired in a non-benefit, part-time job economy inspired in some part by spending trillions of dollars on two perennial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Coupled with jobs hemorrhaging to China and and corporate offices fleeing to the third world for two decades, draining tax coffers...,, is American "even" capable of funding the fighting of a third war in Iraq?
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