https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/isis-is-blowback-with-a-vengeance/

When innocent people are being killed, wounded and driven from their homes as refugees and nowhere to go, it is very painful to have to say “We told you so”. But it’s necessary to say it because what’s going on today at Kobani is rooted in the past, and in that past it’s American war-making in Iraq and elsewhere in the war on terror that has spawned ISIS, even its weaponry.

ISIS is blowback with a vengeance. The libertarian non-intervention and anti-war position has been totally correct for a very long time. The war and intervention position of the U.S. government has been totally wrong for a very long time.

The U.S. is unable to contend with the complex politics associated with its wars. Complicated politics interfere with every U.S. intervention and the ISIS case is no exception. The politics of Turkey, Syria, Kurds and ISIS alone seriously thwarts attempts to defeat ISIS.

Politics is not the sole factor that always stands in the way of the success of U.S. war making. The U.S. political leadership, both parties comprising one war party coalition, seriously and consistently over-estimates what can be accomplished by its military forces, which are designed for wars of the distant past. Even in those wars, the methods used involved unbelievably huge numbers of deaths, civilian and military, and this won’t be tolerated by today’s public. The U.S. military is a crony capitalist construction ill-designed to fight and win fourth-generation wars. It lives as a superior force only in myth and hot air, only as a force capable of huge destruction and disruption but without meaningful victory or success.

To quote one blog:

“This is so pathetic. The journalists reporting on this intervention are so chuffed about all this hardware and blowing-up-stuff. My god, the Europeans even have a cruise missile named after a GI Joe character (Storm Shadow! What’s not to like?!) How can they not be devastating? But the sad fact is that ISIS have pick up trucks, and dudes with attitude. Spending a quarter of a million pounds to blow up a battered technical and a dude with attitude is not efficient. Nor is it going to help the people fighting those dudes. ISIS are fighting a classical war of movement, and given their numbers and the tools they’re using, it’s ridiculously inefficient to try and destroy them using modern air warfare. Boots on the ground, or go home!

“The sad reality is that there’s nothing we in the West can do from afar to stop this monster. ISIS is the Middle East’s Khmer Rouge, and they have arisen from the same hellish swamp: just as the Khmer Rouge seized power violently in the aftermath of the US destruction of Cambodia, ISIS are seizing power violently in the aftermath of the mess created by the US in Iraq, and by the US and Europe in Syria. It’s an object lesson in failed states: create them, and the psychopaths will come. The best way to stop ISIS was to stop the second Iraq war, but our leaders (of all political stripes) were so stupid, vain and cruel that they thought the second Iraq war was a grand idea. ISIS is the brainchild of Tony Blair, John Howard and George Bush. They made it, and their inheritors cannot stop it unless they are wiling to expend the lives and blood of western soldiers that they were so loathe to shed in the past war. Of course that’s not going to happen, so instead they’ll spend millions of dollars blowing up pick-up trucks for a year, until they have trained a force of rebels who will enter Syria just to die. This is what our ‘civilized’ society created, and what our leaders refuse to commit to fixing.”

I do not know what this blogger wants to see done in the way of “fixing”. But I know the modern libertarian, anti-war and non-interventionist position, and it has been consistent for 50 years. That is the only way I know of even to begin to fix up the murderous mess that the U.S. government has created. This route requires abandoning the pretensions of power employed through military, economic and financial means to control the politics and economies of other nations.

Leadership, if it is to be exercised by any nation on earth or by any cluster of nations or by all nations each in their own ways, cannot any longer be through power and dominance. It must be through peaceful means of work, invention, communication, science, giving, art, education, building, diplomacy and example. In short, there is no fix except through all these and other of the numerous peaceful means known to mankind that have been shunted aside, suppressed and become mere appendages to the warring mentalities that now make policy in Washington.

U.S. politics has to shift to non-intervention if a fix is what is wanted. This means that the empire must be contracted and ended. If this is not done by Washington, then it will be done to Washington. Washington’s own blunders and follies will lead to the empire’s downfall.

8:08 am on October 5, 2014

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