Enigma

Just when I thought I could tell the opposing Muslim teams without a scorecard, I am thrown a curve ball. Saudi Arabia has just captured 400 ISIS militants who had already attacked and were planning further targets inside Saudi Arabia ... see: AP News Story? Now, as I understand it, Saudi Arabia is predominantly composed of Sunni Arabs ... as is ISIS ... so why would they be at each others' throats?

Sunni ISIS has generally been attacking the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government and Bashar al-Assad's Shi'ite government in Syria ... both Iran funded. Even though Iran is not an Arab state, it, as Persian, has been the prominent Shi'ite force and has, for over a thousand years, been a deadly foe of Sunni Arabs ... yet ISIS is now strangely acting as its proxy against Saudi Arabia ... while at the same time attacking the Syrian government. Weird!.

I guess I will never fully decipher the Middle East enigma (or, for that matter, our Shi'ite-tropic president and his Svengali adviser, Valarie Jarrett.)

Hot Potato

I have previously referenced a posting in the Diplomad which was a first-hand account of how Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons were transported into Syria during the many months run-up to Bush 43’s invasion of Iraq … see: The Diplomad Blog.  Now it seems that Bashar al-Assad of Syria is returning the favor and shipping his WMDs and WMD-making capabilities back to Iraq … see: Jerusalem Post Article.

I think this is called tossing around the hot potato.

I would love to believe that the current Putin/Obama alliance has forever solved the chemical weapons use issue in Syria.  But I didn’t just fall off of the potato … er, turnip truck.

Oh the Humiliation!

Part of the justification that John Kerry offered in his House of Representatives hearings yesterday for United States’s military actions in Syria was that the Arab States (read Saudi Arabia) would pay for the entire “unseating of Bashar al-Assad.”  Notice he didn’t just talk about a “shot across the bows” (President Obama’s term) but he clearly implied a full scale invasion “the way we’ve done it previously in other places” … see: Washington Post Story.  In other words, that dove of doves, Secretary of State Kerry, is suggesting that the youth of America should now become the expendable mercenaries in that bloody centuries-old war between the Shia and Sunni Muslims.  Oh the humiliation!

As long as we are then slatterns, perhaps we might also go, hat in hand, to the Al Saud dynasty there and ask for recompense for our past efforts on their behalf in Iraq and throughout the Middle East?

Shhh ...

(Reuters) - "President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing U.S. support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government ..."

Some secret!

As it turns out, the current White House is transparent where it should be opaque ... and opaque where it had promised to be transparent.