We are if nothing else very organized. Our social systems
are fitted, one into the other, ever-expanding and ever-enlarging as we build a
block, a neighborhood, a city, a state and, ultimately, a nation. We cannot
begin until we have announced a beginning and sometimes we get into trouble for
having a very poorly thought-out sense of what the ending is/should be/has
become.
When I watched The Wall separating the two Germanys come
down in what now feels like another life, the slaughter that was to follow in
the Balkans was unimagined except by those most consumed with their cowardly
hatred of “others.” That same thing was true for Islamic extremism in all the
flavors that it comes in to include the current ISIL Sundae of Killing or attempting to, everyone
who doesn’t worship as you do in exactly the same manner as you do.
I’ve watched news reports of ‘coalition air strikes’
trying to understand how fixed wing aircraft can ever hope to seize and hold territory
since that hasn’t happened in the
history of warfare (but today could be the day I suppose) and how those Iraqis
betrayed by the cowardice of their own armed forces are being helped as they
battle in Anbar Province even as Kurds and other citizens of
Kobane try to slow the murderous onslaught aimed
like a dagger at their homes and hearths.
I’ve been calling this Last World War by a series of
names that would cause my mom to cry were she to hear them, unless, as I
suspect, she has similar ones that she’s spared my ears from learning. I think
many of us here in the West have similar stories.
But now, good news as we can begin in earnest the task of
attempting to stop these Holy-Moly Rollers, because the Joint Chiefs of Staff
of the Armed Forces of the United States (a/k/a The Great Satan and/or The
Crusaders; why not just call us The Great Satanic Crusaders and be done with
it? Get the marketing guys in here and set up a test group) have decided this
struggle is to be called Operation Inherent Resolve.
Remembering Old Testament (I think) and Jonah in the
belly of a whale, I cannot recall if there is somewhere in another Biblical
passage anything about the futility of
negotiating with a shark, which is what I think this all comes down to
now and for the foreseeable future.
It was Churchill, confronting Nazis across the English
Channel, who offered “a fanatic is someone who cannot change his mind and who will
not change the subject.” I believe had he met Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, he’d have amended his aphorism to include a
recommendation to change the direction of the rotary blades and to replow (and then salt) the
area in its entirety. What’s good enough for Hannibal….
Make no mistake; what’s to come will require more than
Inherent Resolve. The world may not actually come to an end in The Levant, but
I have no doubt you’ll be able to see it from there.
-bill kenny
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