I suppose we should all get familiar with Palmyra before the Islamic State militants destroy it.
Thanks, Bush.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Engel saying that for ISIL, they’re following the belief that anything before the advent of Islam is called the ‘dark time’ and is irrelevant. The beauty of the ancient city is like time travel and beyond irreplaceable.
I’m a Muslim convert. But I understand the inner teachings of the religion (at least well enough to point myself in the right direction). These brutes are in no sense Muslim. They are thugs hiding beneath a cloak just as the KKK hid behind the cloak of Christianity. I find it sickening and appalling.
Never a doubt in my mind that you join the ranks of all but ISIL in that sentiment.
OT:
About Ms. Mosby in Baltimore:
Just wanted to also say, that another reason why they dislike Ms. Mosby- look at the timing of this case. In and out. She went in, presented the evidence, got the indictment.
We were constantly told by the apologists for McCullough and that incompetent in the Eric Garner case, that we just didn’t ‘understand’ how the wheels of Justice were supposed to work. That them hemming and hawing and drawing it out for forever and a day – well, that wasn’t them trying to NOT get an indictment, and how dare we question their ‘ integrity’.
Then comes along Ms. Mosby.
Bringing charges – DONE.
Going before Grand Jury – DONE
Getting an indictment – DONE
All, within, pretty much, a blink of an eye.
Which only points out what was obvious to all of us out here: that McCullough and the incompetent in Long Island DID NOT WANT TO GET INDICTMENTS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
That “incompetent” on Staten Island in the Garner case just got hisself elected to the United States Congress as the next corrupt politician representing the fine people of Staten Island because their previous Rep was forced to resign. His tanking the case was the “price” to be paid to secure hisself the nomination and election.
I will admit that much of my knowledge of Palmyra comes from my old wargaming days, especially when reading up details on miniatures because Palmyra fielded a force of special cataphracts, the late antiquity version of today’s special forces, mounted on armored camels, not horses. It was also one of the border cities between Rome and Persia, sometimes a vassal state of one or the other, often independent, a mesmerizing swirl of cultures since it lay along the one good route through northern Mesopotamia. The idea that a group of no-nothings will destroy irreplaceable acts of the human mind just makes any thinking person want to weep. These people really are a blight on the human race, although I suspect iconoclasts of all stripes have been over the eons.
Why some crazy people desroy anchient statues and whay some website toleartet that?
Now, let’s see: didn’t the US shock and awe Baghdad for a few days running. The library of ancient Korans was DESTROYED even before the US entered the city. And the archive of Iraq going back through the Ottoman Empire: DESTROYED. We saw on television how the documents lay burning in the street. The site of ancient Babylon driven over by tanks and heavy equipment, destroying the underlying strata. They destroyed it intentionally when they knew what it was. Or didn’t they know what it was? I don’t know what else. No one can say that the US set a good example even though their ‘intentions were good’. Right. Sorry about that guys, you didn’t play be the rules. And then there is Gaza, I couldn’t leave that out. But Gaddafi got a fair deal. Stupid, vulgar violence. I’ve twice spent time in Palmyra and have studied the past. It would be horrible if it things get so out of hand that IS indeed destroys the site. I’m not making excuses here for what is happening. I’m just reminding myself that no one anywhere in the US called Bush and his crew savage monsters for their lying, hypocritical destruction of Iraq. The Clinton Duo can be thrown in for good measure. IS has no good intentions as far as I’m concerned. Neither die the US, though for very different reasons. Oh the US doesn’t bead people, it does really groovy torture … You might say wat goes round, comes round. The head of the Arab League then said that the US invasion of Iraq would open the gates of hell. I then found the statement very colorful and over the top. Here we are today.
Excellent points. And yet two wrongs don’t make a right. I find this development incredibly tragic and sad. But, yes, the U.S. committed enormous carnage in Iraq. This is why we must work hard to prevent another Republican from getting elected (I mean appointed).
No one said two wrongs make a right. I said that the lying hypocrisy of the US is disgusting. Its high opinion of itself is based on hot air. That’s the essence of the nasty vulgarity it wallows in. And the Democrats have their share in the carnage, definitely. Just remember that Madeleine Albright’s conscious was not troubled by the death of 500,000 children in Iraq because she and her boss—the Democrat Clintons — imposed brutal sanctions. These people cannot be allowed to rest in peace before they die.
There’s a difference between negligence/military exigencies vs. controlling a site then actively wrecking it yourselves.
Yes there is. But you better have legitimate legal and ethical reasons for the military operations in the first place and in Iraq there were none. It was wanton destruction. No one can yet tell us why Baghdad was shocked and awed. Why? Can you say? If so, tell me. You’d became famous overnight.
Sure. Cheney and NeoCons were sick of ‘managing’ the ME. They sought a big transformative event that would send shockwaves through the region and cement pro-American policy. Now obviously they were delusional about the results but they gambled on a bold move and lost.
More than anything else, oil, or revenge for dad, or whatever that’s why Iraq.
My current sense of the state of Syria and Iraq is that Iraq is devolving in the direction of a more brutal version of Yugoslavia and Syria is moving in the direction of Cambodia.
Obama’s gamble on the Iraqi army has failed again because the political foundation is just not there to end the conflict and US troops just make it worse.
Really it is 25 years of war in Iraq, the war that was to keep the military-industrial complex relevant after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Should have chosen the peace dividend instead. The trap was Colin Powell’s successful PR for the First Gulf War that made it look like the military knew how to achieve victory again. But the Dolchstoßlegende bunch did not go away; they wanted more, much, much more–and still do.
George W. Bush now joins Richard M. Nixon in the list of American Presidents whose folly generated genocide.
And Obama’s don’t look back, stay the course moderation now seems to be a folly that compromised the ability of his administration to deliver anything but delay of catastrophe. The collapse in Vietnam and the intervention of China in Vietnam and Vietnam in Cambodia eventually ended the bloodbath there. I don’t see Saudi Arabia ready to play that role in the Middle East although Iran might succeed in providing some shelter to the Iraqi Shiites.
The doctrine that the only role of government is police and military has proven the conservative’s facile argument about government. If you want more crime hire more police and build more prisons. If you want more war, hire more soldiers (and contractors) and build more weapons. The US failure to rapidly build civilian infrastructure (which creates local jobs if you don’t contract it to US contractors) and the rampant corruption of working through the local governments meant that Afghanistan and Iraq were doomed from the start of there respective wars.
It is no longer clear politically what undoes strongmen like Assad, Mubarak, and even Putin nor is it clear that people in the West can accept the obligations of democratic citizenship any more. We are at another moment like the 1930s. Instead of high-tech destruction (there is still enough of that), it is low-tech brutality and psychological warfare that is creating the new Guernicas. And unlike the 1930s, the US is behaving like the Weimar Republic in advance of its Hindenberg.
The TPP and PATRIOT Act kabuki is unfolding right on cue. In which Rand Paul proved that he is under Mitch McConnell’s thumb. And the Oregon-Washington quartet proved that shippers are more special to them than progressive voters opposed to the TPP.
Laurie Penny had a reflection on the UK election in the New Statesman that argued that injustice either creates anger or despair and that the results outside Scotland were evidence of despair. Angry people act; despairing people retreat into silence and inaction. It seems the policy of the United States of America in all three of its branches to take all action and turn it to despair. That continues to be a bipartisan project. A presidential candidate who shows that structurally they can move towards peace and prosperity (remember when those were cliche and the assumed core of public policy goals) might get more than a yawn in 2016. But right now it’s like being strapped in a theater watching a powerful enactment of Titus Andronicus with no intermissions and no certainty that the perfomance will end.
More and more of my personal network are withdrawing into very limited personal concerns. The sort of “tending to one’s own garden” that the play Pippin foreshadowed in 1972 that was essentially the arrival of the mood advertisers called the “Me” generation. They are withdrawing and hanging on tight.
And looking around all you see are so many wasted opportunities to do things right.
Yes, Americans do learn geography only from their wars. But now they are tuned out. Too many new places. But some folks might pay attention because it’s the name of their church Palmyra Baptist Church, Palmyra Bible Church, and so on. Or the name of their own small town, and they will be mortally afraid that the Islamic State is coming after them there in Palmyra, whichever state.
As more people die and another carefully tended historical site gets reduced to rubble by either the iconoclasts or US weaponry.
Monday is Memorial Day, you guys. Put out your flags. And remember. To. Stay. Conscious. And to take care of yourselves so you can continue to stay conscious without frying your brain. And act to help others stay conscious. And remember. Remember the truth.
Obama had no good choices. He’s played his hand about as well as one can.
According to some analyses, I’m been much to pessimistic and that there is an Iranian-Sunni alliance emerging in Anbar that bypasses the Iraqi Shi’ite Islamic Dawa controlled government.
That Mosul is effectively surrounded.
That in taking Ramadi, ISIS stretched too few troops to thin.
That ISIS can rapidly strike and take settlements, make grandiose spectacles of terror, but fundamentally their force structure requires them to keep moving. They are failures at actual governance and administration. Because the areas they control are under total martial law, no one can independently establish to what degree they can actually administer those territories.
That their treatment of Anbar Sunni recruits has dried up that pool of recruits for actually holding and governing Anbar.
And that it is just a matter of time before they are kicked out of Iraq completely.
New Turkish-Saudi Thaw Helping Rebel in Syria and Worrying Washington
Because the partnership is fueling the fire instead of seeking a partnership with Iran to put the fire out.
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel could act together to bring stability to the region — if that is what they wanted. It seems that sectarian dreams or sectarian wedge issues are still alive.
And it looks all the worse for the Kurds mainly.
It managed to survive largely intact for 2 thousand years and may be gone in the blink of an eye. Very sad.
I admit I know nothing about Islamic State, etc. But obviously they are big and successful. They are reported to be taking huge amounts of territory.
So who is funding them? And why?