Stop Making Sense

My wife woke up worrying about Isis. Not the Egyptian patroness of nature and magic, though if you know my wife that could make perfect sense. Nor was she fretting about the Isis of CBS TV from the mid-1970s. Like so many of us in the western world, she was waking up to the reality of the ISIS that takes its name from their goal: the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. These are the guys who are so brutal and extreme that even al Qaeda says are too vicious. Currently, my wife and a good portion of the rest of the globe seem to have the same worry: Where will this all end?
Do you remember the relief we all felt when American troops left Iraq? I do. We left with the mild assurance of democracy blooming from the seeds of Starbucks and ten years worth of casualties both military and civilian. We never found weapons of mass destruction, but I like to think that what we missed out on in mass we made up for in time. We left with the notion of stabilization in mind. What we didn't remember was Newton's third law which states that for every force in the universe there is an equal and opposite. This is especially true in the Middle East. Here comes the push back.
This is not in any way unprecedented. This is a history of that region. What gets the United States in trouble is when we find ourselves in the middle of things. It would be nice to imagine ourselves as "liberators," but not everyone still holds to that dream. Instead, it is much more likely that we have set ourselves up for yet another round of conflict and American involvement in a region that predates our nation's existence by a few thousand years. This has created a number of interesting scenarios, one of which has the United States looking to Iran for help in hopes of calming the situation. I'll just let that one sit with you for a while.
Unlikely comrades is what this crisis has wrought. Rand Paul recently said, "And what’s going on now, I don’t blame on President Obama. Has he really got the solution? Maybe there is no solution. But I do blame the Iraq War on the chaos that is in the Middle East. I also blame those who are for the Iraq War for emboldening Iran. These are the same people now who are petrified of what Iran may become, and I understand some of their worry." If you need a moment to unscramble your brain from this seemingly contradictory message, you're not alone. Dick Cheney is confused. But this should not come as a surprise. That may be the only thing that makes any real sense about ISIS.