Charles P Pierce- Never Can Say Goodbye
With which long-term moral debt of the extended Bush family would you like to discuss first? The one that Junior locked the country into by kicking over the hornet's nest in order to drain the swamp, or the one Poppy ran up by selling the Kurds down the river in 1991? I know, I know, there's a lot more that went into the president's decision to drop humanitarian aid to the Yazidi people stuck on a mountain in northern Iraq, and into the president's decision to drop a couple of 500-pound bombs on the genocidal barbarians who have surrounded the mountain with the intent of killing everybody on it. But if there's one family that best symbolizes the historic price paid by the people of Iraq by a century of Western bungling in that part of the world, it's the Habsburgs Of Kennebunkport. Or, I guess, you can blame the Treaty Of Versailles and/or the League of Nations for helping to create the country of Iraq in the first place and guaranteeing that, one day, its basic ethnic instability would erupt into savagery. See also: Yugoslavia. The Great Game never was so Great for the people whom expiring empires used as chips. I would be surprised if, in five years, there's even a country called Iraq any more.
(And not for nothing, but whatever happened to the ferocious Kurdish fighters about whom we were told so much down through the years? They seem to have gotten rolled up as easily as the Iraqi army was. Perhaps the real strength of the Peshmerga was as a guerrilla fighting force and not as a standing army.)
What the president announced last night, and what the president did today, strikes me as being beyond reproach. ISIS is a legitimately scarifying group, death-maddened fanatics with a taste for religious insanity and public executions. There is little doubt that they would make bloody shrapnel out of every man, woman, and child on that mountain. Every other alleged power in the region -- including al Qaeda -- are scared witless of these people and of what they are seeking to create.
They may be medievalist in their religious outlook, and in their military tactics, but they're also shrewd hustlers. They seize dams and hold them, realizing that dams are more valuable when you can threaten to blow them up than when you actually do it. They have put to good use the arms they captured from the disintegrating Iraqi army. Their original financing came from extorting businessmen in Syria and Iraq. Now, they're said to be selling bootleg oil through various middlemen in the region. They are paying their own civil servants in the areas they have already conquered. Al Qaeda seeks to create chaos. ISIS seeks to create something resembling a country. It also seems that every other actor in the region, and every other actor who has a stake in the region, is waiting for the United States to bail them out. Sooner or later, every nation has an obligation to self-defense. So, when Andrea Mitchell meeps away on TV that Jordan and Saudi Arabia are reluctant to provide military aid in a crisis right in their own neighborhood because the president won't "lead," she's letting those two countries off a pretty enormous hook. If "our allies" are threatened, as I keep hearing over and over, then "our allies" need to fking do something.
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http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Back_To_Iraq
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Charlie Pierce.
I'd like to buy him a beer for coining "the Habsburgs of Kennebunkport." 
