Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Contributing to Chaos

There is an old folk song by the Kingston Trio that cheerfully describes all of the strife and chaos in the world, and then says that we don’t have to worry because we have a nuclear bomb and someday someone is going to set it off and blow all of us away.

We still have that bomb, of course, and now we have climate change to boot, so I don’t know why I am so stressed out over the United States inviting Turkey to join us in fighting the Islamic State. They have been refusing to assist us because they wanted Assad gone more than they wanted to destroy the IS, in fact they have been assisting the IS, and we seem to have forgotten that when we were in Iraq they kept invading that country to attack the Kurds, which is really the only force effectively resisting the IS on the ground at this point.

So when Turkey crosses its southern border, it is going to be attacking pretty much everything in sight, including Syria and the Kurds, both of whom are fighting against the Islamic State. So much for “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” or “my friend is the enemy of my enemy”
or whatever. In fact, on its first day in the war, Turkey air strikes hit two IS locations and five Kurdish locations.

Turkey says that hitting the Kurdish locations was a mistake and that they have some nice oceanfront property on which they can offer you a bargain price. Today only, though, the price returns to normal tomorrow. They will reduce the price again the next time they mistakenly hit some more Kurdish locations. Or some Syrian ones.

This whole Islamic State thing is not getting any better. It is, in fact, getting worse because we seem to be doing everything we can to make it worse.

No comments:

Post a Comment