Rubik’s Cube Puzzles in the Middle East

Who Is in the Middle East Lineup Card?

It came to me after reading Michael Gunter’s “Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War,” his attempt at explaining what was happening in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and two dozen other Arab and Muslim countries. Remember when we were trying to find some Syrian moderates to train and arm so they could fight Assad in Syria’s totally uncivil war? The CIA estimated there were about 1,200 “moderate” tribes or groups in Syria alone that were willing to fight Assad—or each other. It was a Rubik’s Cube of trouble.

Every Muhammad, Mahamid, and Bashar in the Middle East seems to be after power. In Jonathan Steele’s review of Gunter’s book in the New York Review of Books he emphasizes that 32 million Kurds scattered around the world are fighting for a homeland somewhere in the Middle East. They are the only large faction without a country, so they have been fighting Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and a dozen other countries for centuries for their own piece of territory.

But even the Kurds fight amongst themselves. Among the power groups are the YPG, PKK, Peshmerga, and a dozen other lesser groups. If confused, don’t ask one of our chickenhawk congressmen. They don’t know either. Remember Saladin? He was a Kurd back in the 12th Century who took Jerusalem back from our Crusaders.

Back in 2001 I would not have expected George W. Bush to know anything about the Middle East. He wasn’t dumb, but poor George was just too lazy and unfocused to learn anything. But one could expect that somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon some lowly Army colonel would have read a book about Arab tribes and cautioned his bosses about invading Iraq. Tribal camel drivers do not survive for 5,000 years because they are dumb.

Remember when Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney said we would be greeted in Iraq as liberators? Yah, right—with IEDs and suicide bomber-greeters. And a man who has gained the reputation as the worst Secretary of Defense in history, Donald Rumsfeld, declared at the Iraq invasion: “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.” We are still there, 14 years later.

Do You Offer Your “Friend” With a Rifle a Cup of Tea—or Do You Shoot Your “Enemy” on Sight?

Back in 1954 when I was in Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, a Marine colonel who had a Phd in history from UCLA asked the question: “Why did we defeat the British in the Revolutionary War?” After accepting numerous answers, he gave us a blunt answer: “Because we didn’t have uniforms, we hid behind trees and fence lines, we could target those red and white uniformed Brit bastards who formed battle squares, and we sniped them to death.

My lesson for the day: never get involved in a war against fighters who wear civilian clothes, carry rifles, hide behind trees and buildings where they can snipe you to death. You will lose.”

Think of the fact that we have lost every war since Vietnam because when we saw a “civilian” carrying a rifle we didn’t know whether to kill him or invite him to tea.

Some say: “But we won the Gulf War!” Tell that to the 7,000 families who lost sons and daughters, the 22,000 who lost limbs, and the 300,000 who have PTSD from war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tell that to Derek Farwell, Purple Heart winner in Iraq who writes a great “military” column in the Extra. His column about the shifting Middle East allegiances is illuminating where he describes fighting with Iraqis in 2007 who had ambushed his unit just a few months before. How do you train and fight with a group that might blow your head off the next week? A very revealing sentence: “We were supposed to be working together, but we never went anywhere or entered a situation without a plan to eliminate any one or all of them should their allegiances suddenly shift once again.” Welcome to uncivil warfare. “I have your back” has a completely different meaning in the Middle East. Everybody has AK-47s and knives.

Here’s my plan for the Middle East. There are 1,600,000,000 Muslims in the world and one must assume that the majority of them just want to be left alone and live peaceful lives. Within the hundreds of religious factions of Islam (32,000 in Christendom), primarily the Shias and the Sunnis have been killing each other for 1,400 years and indicate they are still not tired of it. (At the same time, let’s remember that some “Christians” have been killing each other for 2,000 years, although Christianity has calmed down somewhat.)

We lose every time we get involved in somebody else’s civil wars. How many Muslim countries have civil wars within their borders? Dozens. We should send diplomatic notes to all Muslim countries stating that when they get tired of killing each other we will be glad to give them some assistance. Maybe Muslim moderates will come to their senses and throw out the radicals and extremists ruling Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, ISIS in Iraq, Iran, and a menagerie of fundamentalist religious nuts fighting civil wars in African countries.

The Chaos of the Middle Eastern Rubik’s Cube Puzzle

To help understand the absolute mess we are in in the Middle East, let’s use the lives of two men who were “detainee” roomies at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo), our Cuban prison paradise where we spend annually about $2 million each to keep bad guys away from us. Some of the bad guys are crippled 80-year-olds and crying teenagers—but that’s another story.

Hajji Ghalib is a 54-year-old Afghan who started his adult life fighting the Soviets who invaded Afghanistan in the 1980’s in an attempt to turn it into a communist state. After helping to drive the Soviets out, he fought the Taliban for almost three decades before being betrayed to Americans by someone who picked up a $5,000 American bounty in 2003 for lying about him. Being a “dangerous” jihadist he was packed off to Gitmo. He was released in 2007 after we determined he was not such a bad guy because anti-Taliban leaders vouched for him—and also revealed he had helped our forces fight Al Queda at Tora Bora at the beginning of the Afghan war. He returned to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, where he has lost 19 members of his extended family, many of them women and children, to the jihadists.

At Gitmo Abdul Rahim Muslim Post was Ghalib’s roommate for four years. They used to call each other friends, but Post believes in jihad and is fighting for Islam and ISIS to take over the earth. (By the way, he was released to return home before Ghalib was.) Post is now leader of Islamic State (ISIS) and Taliban fighters in Ghalib’s home district. He recently pushed Ghalib’s tribal elders into a ditch and blew them up with explosives. After that episode, Ghalib said: “My family is finished. The Taliban is inhuman.” The Taliban beheaded his 70-year-old brother-in-law recently. Welcome to the various Rubik puzzles of tribal relationships in the Middle East.

The Insidious Purpose Behind Barbarous Cruelty

The world has seen beheadings, death by fire at stakes or in cages, crucifixions, systematic rape policies, tortures beyond imagination and innovation, and the wholesale slaughter of captives, including women and children by bullets, gas, bombs, drowning, burying, and tossing people off tall buildings, but rarely have we seen these horrors committed by one group as a matter of policy.

ISIS has a playbook called The Management of Savagery/Chaos which has three commandments: (1) “Hit soft targets (Egyptian resorts, Russian passenger jets, Paris, San Bernardino). Diversify and widen the vexation strikes against the crusader-Zionist enemy in every place in the Islamic world, and even outside of it if possible, so as to disperse the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and thus drain it to the greatest extent possible. (2) “Strike when potential victims have their guard down, sow fear in general populations, damage economies. If a tourist resort that the crusaders patronize is hit, all of the tourist resorts in all the states of the world will have to be secured by the work of additional forces, which are double the ordinary amount, and a huge increase in spending,” and (3) “Capture the rebelliousness of youth, their energy and idealism, and their readiness of self-sacrifice, while fools preach ‘moderation,’ security, and avoidance of risk.”

This is serious stuff because about 30,000 ISIS members have been successful at following the three commandments. That’s why ISIS pays TV and website creators three times what they pay fighters. So far, we have no idea when 1,599,970,000 Muslims will start getting rid of their ISIS extremists. It’s a tough task. Christians have failed to control their radical extremists, too.

If Religion Is an 800-Pound Gorilla in ISIS-Muslim Rooms, There’s Another 800-Pound Gorilla Called Economics Occupying Half of Them

TheOxfam International research department has announced just before the rich meet in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, that the top one percent in the world in 2016 will have more wealth than the bottom 99 Percent. The United States leads the sophisticated industrialized world in income inequality—but the oil monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Syria, and Oman are the most unequal on the planet.

The Arab poor are tired of seeing sultans, kings, and princes in the Middle East getting and spending untold wealth while they rot in ghettos and slums. This has resulted in economic civil wars called “Arab Springs” in many countries.

An example of unrestrained decadence and hedonism is the sultan of Brunei, another oil country dictator. He built himself a palace with 1,788 rooms, 257 bathrooms, five swimming pools, a personal mosque, a 5,000-person dining hall for banquets, and a 110-car garage. His extended family owns 17 airplanes, including a Boeing 747 and an Airbus 340-200, 9,000 cars, two custom-made Mercedes-Benz fire trucks, 150 homes in foreign countries, a private family zoo, ten watches illustrating sexual encounters worth a total of $8 million, a Jack Nicklaus designed golf course, gold-plated toilet brushes, and hundreds of thousands of Versace and Armani suits. The sultan’s brother spent an average of $747,000 a day for ten years until the sultan told him he was spending too much.

Can you imagine what members of the Saudi royal family in Saudi Arabia receive as monthly allowances now in 2015 when we learned from a leaked embassy document in 1996 what they were getting monthly 19 years ago? 60 children of King Ibn Saud in 1996 each received allowances between $200,000-$270,000 per month, 420 grandchildren of the king received an average of $27,000 per month, over 2,900 great-grandchildren got $13,000 per month, and 2,000 great-great children lived on a paltry $8,000 a month. And hundreds of millions of construction dollars went to princes who were building huge palaces for their families. What are they being paid now for being a relative of the king? Is it any wonder that ISIS and other religious nuts can recruit willing poverty-stricken jihadists to become martyrs?

President Obama is right to limit the attacks on ISIS and other fundamentalists in the Middle East and Africa to drones and manned air attacks. Every obscene and bizarre barbarous act of ISIS is clearly aimed at getting U.S. boots on the ground in Muslim territory so we can be accused of starting the 16th Crusade against Muslims. Let’s remember those boots are filled with human feet. Thus, extremists like ISIS can convince 1.6 billion Muslims to join them in throwing out the invaders of Muslim lands.

George W. Bush and Cheney and their Republican chickenhawks fell for that once with Osama Bin Laden and now have 7,000 cemetery markers to maintain. Don’t let chickenhawks who have never had more than a Boy Scout uniform on drive us to another war in the Middle East. Muslims must defeat Muslims in their own neighborhoods.