Stop terrorist attacks by stopping terrorist attacks

BY ED FELIEN

The recent attacks by radical Islamic terrorists in Brussels were horrifying.  Thirty-five innocent civilians were murdered.
The response by Ted Cruz on Easter Sunday, after coming from church and hearing the story of gentle Jesus’ Resurrection, was to carpet bomb ISIS.
Sorry, Ted, but we’re going to have trouble doing that.  According to the Air Force we’re running out of bombs.  We’re already bombing the urban centers that ISIS controls faster than we can replenish the arsenal.  We’ve dropped more than 20,000 bombs and missiles on ISIS cities and civilians in the past 15 months.
Do you really believe dropping more bombs on them will stop a suicide bomber from detonating?
Isn’t it, in fact, much more probable that the best way to bring suicide bombers to the U.S. is to continue bombing cities and civilians in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen?
People believe we should be fighting ISIS because they’re radical Islamic extremists.
But aren’t the Saudis radical Islamic extremists?  They behead more people than ISIS.  They’re terrible to women.  They’re a religious dictatorship.
But they’re our allies.
In Syria we are allied with the Kurds and Turkey, but they’re fighting each other.  We’re allied with Saudi Arabia, but many radical Islamic Saudis support ISIS.  We’re supporting Sunni rebel groups with guns and money, but many of them go over to ISIS because they feel that’s the most effective way for them to fight Assad and the Shi’a Syrian government.  We’ve agreed to truce and cease fire in that civil war to unite Russia and the Syrian government in our fight against ISIS.
It is way too confusing.
What are our objectives?  What do we want out of all this murder and destruction?
Wouldn’t it be best if we just stepped back?  Step back slowly and carefully.  Fire only to defend ourselves. And let the people who live there work it out for themselves.
But get out!
Every time we get involved we screw it up worse than it was before we started: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.
Murdering them and having them murder us makes no sense.
I don’t agree with the rules and restrictions on women by ISIS or by the Saudis.
But that’s something THEY have to struggle with.
We can’t go in and fight their battles for them.
Because that’s not what happens, anyway.  What happens is the war machine is trying to continue perpetual war and the best way they can do that is to wrap a war up in something that the left will eat up: oppression of women; oppression of minorities; genocide; etc.  If they can get the left to agree that this particular war is a noble cause, then they can get it through Congress and they can be assured of a continuing resolution to not cut their funding, ever.
And even if we fight a war and win and occupy a country for 10 years (look at Afghanistan, Iraq) we can’t just order the government to give women equal rights.  We have to do it slowly with bribes and a protection racket for the ruling elite so they can smuggle opium out of Afghanistan and oil out of Iraq.
And who is in charge of those operations?
“Well, you wouldn’t want a responsibility like that to fall into the hands of the government.”
So most of the really important decisions regarding making friends and winning influence in foreign countries is left to the private sector, and most of that budget goes to Halliburton, run by Dick Cheney and owned by the Bushes.
That’s who benefits from war.
That’s who benefits from the wars against ISIS and the Taliban.
And they drag us along, and put us in a uniform and tell us we’re going to fight for the very best reasons.  And they put a gun in our hands and tell us to kill someone.  And they make us pay for it.
It’s crazy.
What is ISIS?  It’s mostly a bunch of Sunni Arabs who were driven off their marginal farmland by climate change.  The Shi’a government in Damascus didn’t seem to care about their problems, and the Shi’a government in Baghdad didn’t care about their problems.  So, the Sunnis decided to secede and call themselves a Caliphate.  It’s really a secessionist struggle between the business class in Damascus and Baghdad and a dispossessed peasantry trying to survive.
It’s quite similar to the Peasant Wars in Germany.
After surviving famine and The Black Plague in the 14th century, the peasants of Europe got very spiritual and end-timey.  They wanted to establish the Kingdom of God on earth.  They based their ideology on the example of the Apostles who shared everything in common.  Needless to say, those of rank and privilege and those who owned lots of property felt threatened by this revolutionary attempt to change property relationships.  They crushed the peasant’s revolt and established Martin Luther’s more accommodating brand of Protestantism as the state religion.
I would suggest the Sunni Caliphate is similar to the Protestant Revolution begun by Thomas Muentzer that got crushed and co-opted by the Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther.  It is an attempt to establish the Kingdom of God on earth by an oppressed group that sees no hope of survival from the governments of Syria and Iraq.
The only sensible thing for the U.S. to do would be to stop bombing those people, recognize their legitimate cultural identity and need for survival and arrange for peace talks between them and the Syrian and Iraqi governments.
The military-industrial complex that’s been running our government since the end of World War II needs to be stopped.  We need to demand a new set of priorities for our government.
The greatest threat to peace and prosperity is not ISIS or Al Qaida.  The greatest threat to world peace and prosperity is us.