Starting A War

"The United States failed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but this time around may be different since the Islamic State is posing a serious danger to close U.S. allies in the region who cannot defend themselves on their own."
The United states will be going in this time with the blessing of regional powers."
Wathiq al-Hashimi, director, al-Nahrein Center for Strategic Studies, Baghdad

"The Cold War took 45 years. It's certainly plausible that this could be the same."
"It's harder to see how this ends."
Elliott Abrams, Middle East adviser to U.S. President G.W. Bush

"Our counterproductive policies have created a political vacuum in which ISIS can flourish. Without massive injustices in the region, they would not exist."
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Washington

"Americans are relatively practical people." If you're doing the right thing and it's working, they'll be with you."
James Jay Carafano, national security expert, Heritage Foundation

"It's clear that the Americans have made up their minds to get involved in what is likely to be an open-ended war."
"The Americans know how to start a war, but not to end one."
Hilal Khashan, political science professor, American University of Beirut

A woman (C) walks amongst US national flags erected by students and staff from Pepperdine University to honor the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks in Malibu, California . The students placed some 3,000 flags in the ground in tribute to the nearly 3,000 victims lost in the attacks almost 13 years ago. (MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images)

Any of these supporters or critics of the current administration's final decision to dip its feet into yet another Middle East cauldron of hateful dysfunction leaving the desert running with blood, who has any better ideas of how to respond to the murderous mayhem, may they raise their hands and state their solutions? Oops, almost forgot: its a reality that the Middle East never makes any positive moves to solve their own problems. They call in the heavy hitter they both detest and rely upon.

Rather than castigate themselves for their inaction even as they're threatened and terrified to act although they call themselves the Arab League, they cast wry aspersion at the best of times on their great Western benefactor, and hurl hate and accusations at it whenever it oversteps the boundaries of what Arabs and Muslims deem is permissible intervention which they invariably, after all, beg the Americans to act on, on their behalf.

So it is that Baghdadian Strategic Studies director al-Hashimi states that entities within the Middle East "cannot defend themselves on their own". Odd thing that; the assembled Arab states never saw any problem in plotting to gather their armies in a combined assault against the State of Israel to destroy its presence in the Middle East. Their comeuppance was always devastating and swift, but no Arab ever admitted that it lost a battle against a Jewish military, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

When America and its allies were finally able in conscience to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan it was to witness both countries falling back in upon themselves through tribal antipathies where warlords returned to their usual raping of the resources of the country to leave it once again in dire straits, where sectarian violence once again reared its medieval snarling head to take its bloody tributes to Islam by striking at the apostates among them.

Hatred of the West always sizzled in the Levant, and resentment against the rise of the West and fall of the Islamic caliphate restoring to Europe what was its own fed the fires of blame and victimhood. And then the Iranian revolution that gave birth to the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 and its triumph in capturing American hostages to hold them for 444 days to demonstrate to the Islamic world that America could be humbled, inspired resentment to be transformed into the power that raging hate could command.

That is history, the rest is the commentary of Islamist terror imposed upon the world that has slaughtered its share of the Muslim community not quite faithful enough to pass muster, and its revenge upon the Infidels through inspired terror attacks which occur not quite often enough to satisfy the blood-lust and anger of a world community of religious faith that feels itself oh so badly done by, but a condition it plans to rectify.

The start was the 1983 fledgling,l Iran-inspired martyrdom-obsessed Hezbollah bombing in Lebanon of the U.S. barracks that killed 241 American servicemen. "For the first time, we understood the threat by armed Islamist extremism. We didn't face up to it -- we tried to ignore it as long as possible. But after 9/11, we couldn't ignore it anymore", explained military historian Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Washington.

The threat continues. It cannot be ignored. Even when spokesmen for CAIR indulge in the freedom within a liberal democracy to cast blame from within for the threats imminent both within and beyond.