After only 100 hours, literally, President George H.W. Bush called them off and dictated terms to Saddam Hussein, allowing him to remain as Iraq's dictator. Ever wonder why that was?
It was because the King of Saudi Arabia counseled Bush 41 to stop pursuing Saddam, telling him he might stir up (an even bigger) hornet's nest if he wasn't careful.
And these Boy Scouts should know
Truth is, as I've stated before, the people in that part of the world have a different value system, a different way of thinking. Our Western ideas of "logic" and "decency" just don't translate. They are simply an uncivilized society.
No, of course I don't mean every single one of them. But enough that it makes my statement valid. While we in the US have our Westboro Baptist Church types, they are just tiny little cells of crazies scattered here and there.
In Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, on and on....their extremists are a huge percentage (a majority?) of their population. Say something unkind about their religion or publish an offensive cartoon and they issue a fatwah on your ass.
My point is, they always have and always will fight and kill each other. That's all they know how to do. At times they might subscribe to "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and work together, but it's a fleeting arrangement. Blink twice and they're right back at each others throats.
Now the Sunni Muslim minority in Iraq are on a roll and are vowing to take over the entire country by brute force. Our concern is that if they do it will open the door for more extremists to train there and eventually threaten us here in America.
The truth is, even if the Sunni militants (the ISIS) DON'T take over all of Iraq by brute force (they're unlikely to capture Baghdad proper or other Shia strongholds) they can and likely will still train others to come after us. Count on it. While it would be nice to keep the bad guys "over there", I'm afraid we're past that.
Make no mistake, this is not an American failure. It's an Iraqi failure. We set them up with every material advantage they could possibly need to succeed. What we can't give them is new gray matter between their ears.
So what do we do? (Q: Why does the entire world look to the USA when something "needs to be done"?) IMHO, and as seen through my pragmatic eyes, here's what I think we should do: Get some chips and dip and maybe a few beers, sit back, and if we're lucky watch the militants on both sides annihilate each other. While we should pray they spare the innocents, it's simply out of our hands.
LATE NEWS: It was just reported that the US will soon send 275 Special Forces to "advise" the Iraqi Security Forces. So the 150,000 troops we once had there couldn't "fix" Iraq, but now these 275 can?
DUH! Even rocks are smarter than that.
S
