Their Muslim Brothers' Keepers

"He does not grasp, apparently, that the Pax Americana, under whose protection we have lived since 1945, has existed because it has always been backed by the credible threat of force. Weakness is provocative to bad actors, and some of the world's worst have now been provoked. This seems to have come as an almost complete surprise to the Obama White House. The Peace President is starting to leave a legacy of war."
"People blame the new horrors in Iraq on the American-led invasion in 2003. But the exact reason why the country is in civil war today is because the Americans are not there. If U.S. troops were still present, the fanatical ISIS [the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham] would not have swept through the north of the country and now be threatening Baghdad."
Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph

Iraqi army troops chant slogans against Isis as they recruit volunteers to join the fight against a major offensive by the jihadist group. Photo: Ali Al-Saadi /AFP/Getty

"There were no advisers left to restrain Mr. Maliki's sectarian tendencies. The U.S. efforts to professionalize the Iraqi army came undone. This slide toward civil war was predicted, not only by senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham and writers like Max Boot [the U.S. military historian], but also within the military. The resurgent sectarian violence gave fuel to fears that the entire region might be engaged in one big war, a sprawling Sunni-Shiite conflict that would cross borders and engulf tens of millions."
David Brooks, The New York Times

Refugees flee the city of Mosul. The delicately balanced relations among the many communities were permanently shattered in 2003. Photograph: Str/AP

Actually, it wasn't all that great an idea to leave Afghanistan for Iraq to begin with. While Afghanistan might have needed to be liberated from the iron grip of the fanatical Islamist Taliban, perhaps it should have been left to the Afghans to accomplish that, though truth to tell, with Pakistan plotting the Taliban's administrative residency and supporting it, Afghans didn't have much of a chance. Liberating Afghanistan from the Taliban was a by-product of routing Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda from the friendly auspices of Taliban haven, though.

And now that the United States under the administration of a leader who views war with the distaste it deserves, but doesn't recognize when diplomacy has failed, requiring military might to reassert a balance, the Taliban will soon re-establish itself. As for Iraq, that mistake too has its resonating failure with the installation of a leader not quite the counterpart of the one he replaced. Saddam Hussein was a psychopathic murderer, but he did keep the peace between the sects, more or less. Under his Shia-majority counterpart, there is increasingly less peace.

And since it was America's intervention to unseat the tyrant who, though supporting terrorism abroad, kept it out of his own country, it could be seen as America's responsibility to see that it does not return. Which it is doing, in spades. But the situation is one that has echoes all over the Muslim world. Where a religion that its majority adherents claim to be one of peace and good fellowship is also a religion that provokes its followers to jihad. Both to become better Muslims themselves, and to proselytize, growing Islam in the world community.

The problem seems to be actually that Muslim prosetylization tends to violence. Jihad for the young and the restless aspiring to martyrdom as proof of their piety and dedication to the global precepts of Islam and its carnivorous need to swallow the religious devotion of the world in one great all-embracing ummah is terror, pure and simple. If, of their own accord, non-Muslims cannot identify the real true one and only religion even while it is confronting them, then they have forfeited their right to life and liberty.

In dedication to Islamic precepts and the absolute requirement to jihad on the part of religiously fervent adherents, the pious must love death more than they love life. And they do, in their numbers. Although nature has engrained its creatures with the most powerful intrinsic urge to survive, this religion unlike all others seeks to intervene, to expunge that primary survival instinct, to subjugate it to the theocratic demand of life-sacrifice.

Because Muslims hate one another to the extent that they consider adherents of another sect to be heretics whose presence in life is reproachful to Islam, they consider it their duty in representation of the only true version of Islam, to defend it by destroying the lives of those who deface Islam with their pathetic usurpation of the right path to travel as pious Muslims. If it is next-to-impossible to infuse Muslims with a sense of democratic proportion because their religion recognizes no division between state and religion, how much more difficult is it to instill in them a respect for human rights?

When the most basic precept of their devotion to the religion that encompasses their every fibre of existence, that defines the manner in which they must live, socialize, comport themselves, dress, eat, and pray, informs them that jihad represents the height of their religious responsibility, causing them to reject other versions of Islamic devotion to the extent that murder is the acceptable response, how can the intervention of non-Muslims be sufficiently persuasive to have them stop their murderous rampages?