August 24, 2014

Sunday Morning Essay: The Oligarchy Strikes Back

Now that I have my tin foil hat correctly oriented to pick up elusive frequencies, I'm back in business. We have ousted the despised (although once favored and even celebrated) Nuri al-Maliki from his position as Prime Minister of the "democracy" in Iraq for the grave, although completely understandable, sin of outfoxing our "special" President, George W. Bush.

To recap the clever manipulations of The Ungrateful Nuri:  GWB the Younger, as you'll recall, took us into war in Iraq on false pretenses.  The war was, first, last and always about one thing and one thing only: access to Iraq's huge oil reserves.  We want 'em, Iraq's got 'em.  The Iraqis are a simple, backward, Third World people who don't need that oil like we do.  It's only fair.  Yet as the Iraq war turned into an utter disaster, even GWB started feeling remorseful about what he'd done, and in an impulsive moment he agreed with Maliki, whom we had installed as our preferred Piece of Shiite, to withdraw ALL American combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. As the Great Schnozz would say, what a revoltin' development that was.  Nuri stuck to his guns, and pulled his hole card on Obama when negotiations over a new SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) broke down because Nuri refused to grant the customary immunity from local prosecution to American GI's, who are in turn accustomed to running wild when stationed abroad (just ask the local Japanese in Okinawa).

This was tantamount to admitting that we'd brought about the deaths of one million Iraqis for nothing, not to mention our own casualties and one trillion bucks down the drain. The ruling Oligarchs must have wondered: what's the use of controlling politics in America if this is the kind of thing they're going to pull?  And where's my fricking oil?

Fortunately, history smiled upon us.  Thanks to our feckless meddling in Syria where, for a while at least, we talked as if we wanted that numbnuts Bashir al-Assad (I do not understand why all these Arabs have the middle name "Al") out of power, we supplied, in the style of the great Milo Minderbinder, 1st Lieutenant and Chief Mess Officer, Catch-22, money and war materiel to our mortal enemies, al-Qaeda, which in due course found its way to the "folks" (Obama's, as with Bush, favorite group descriptor) at ISIS, the New Caliphate people who are anxious to take the Arab world all the way back to the 7th century, instead of mucking about in the 12th century, or however far they've gotten.

God, who watches over fools and drunks, then sent ISIS on a rampage across the Sykes-Picot Imaginary Boundary between Syria and Iraq, where the ISIS folks began a program of crucifying, beheading, raping and in general causing great mayhem wherever their travels took them.  It also spooked the "democratic" leadership of Iraq in Baghdad, including the Ungrateful Nuri, who began to wonder whether that clever ploy where he refused American GI's immunity from the mullahs was such a brainy idea after all, especially when the Ungrateful One, on awakening in the increasingly heavily fortified Green Zone every morning, would first check to see whether his head was still attached to his body.  ISIS, meanwhile, would take a break from crucifying and decapitating to seize oil fields and Iraq's largest dam and reservoir.  Finally, they were preparing to storm Baghdad itself.

The Oligarchy's front man, President Obama, kept his cool during these developments and let ISIS have its way, promising American military assistance so long as certain "modifications" were made in Iraq's democratically-elected government (the one Obama had bragged about in Brussels not too long ago, you'll recall, when he pointed out the difference between the American incursion into Iraq, where we brought Jeffersonian ideals to our Arab friends, and the evil Putin, who instigated a completely illegal plebiscite in Crimea).  But I digress.  Obama maintained his disinteresed aplomb just long enough for Nuri to see the better part of wisdom and step down, as democratically-elected American puppets are supposed to do.  We then began bombing the shiite out of ISIS and talk resumed about returning "some" ground troops to Iraq, where the monster military bases we've already built there are waiting to fill up again with oil field security guards.  We could bomb ISIS back to the Stone Age, but, of course, they never really left.

So there you have it.  The U.S. will defeat ISIS, a ragtag group of barbarians completely dependent on our weapons and fighting vehicles, with one hand of Obama's wrapped around a 5-iron at Martha's Vineyard.  We may have to join forces with Assad, whom we hated last year and were about to bomb till Putin got in the way, in bombing the enemies of Assad, namely, ISIS and the al-Qaeda affiliates we were arming and assisting in their anti-Assad revolution.

As Milo Minderbinder would say, it's all for the Syndicate and everyone gets a share.


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