How Long Is This Guy Planning to Live?

That's a tall order, Mohammed, even for a crown prince. A lot of people won't want you to live to see the day.

Mohammed bin Sultan, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, vows to return his country to "moderate Islam" once he gets his turn at the wheel.

In an interview with the Guardian, the powerful heir to the Saudi throne said the ultra-conservative state had been “not normal” for the past 30 years, blaming rigid doctrines that have governed society in a reaction to the Iranian revolution, which successive leaders “didn’t know how to deal with”.

“What happened in the last 30 years is not Saudi Arabia. What happened in the region in the last 30 years is not the Middle East. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, people wanted to copy this model in different countries, one of them is Saudi Arabia. We didn’t know how to deal with it. And the problem spread all over the world. Now is the time to get rid of it.”

Earlier Prince Mohammed had said: “We are simply reverting to what we followed – a moderate Islam open to the world and all religions. 70% of the Saudis are younger than 30, honestly we won’t waste 30 years of our life combating extremist thoughts, we will destroy them now and immediately.”

...

Central to the reforms has been the breaking of an alliance between hardline clerics who have long defined the national character and the House of Saud, which has run affairs of state. The changes have tackled head-on societal taboos such as the recently rescinded ban on women driving, as well as scaling back guardianship laws that restrict women’s roles and establishing an Islamic centre tasked with certifying the sayings of the prophet Muhammed.

At this point can Saudi Arabia really break from Wahhabism, the radical Sunni sect that has driven Islamist terrorist groups from al Qaeda to ISIS, al Nusra and Boko Haram?  Can this prince really purge radical Islam from his fellow princes, emirs and sheikhs of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States? Or will he end up like Anwar Sadat, gunned down by extremist assassins?

Justin's Folly - Selling Death Wagons to a Despotic Regime Going Broke

You remember the Saudi death wagon controversy when the Trudeau regime gave the go ahead to the sale of 15-billion dollars worth of armoured fighting vehicles to Saudi Arabia.

Well, what if those death wagons fall into the hands of the very people we've been over there fighting, radical Sunni Islamists? Justie would have a little egg on his face then, wouldn't he?

For two years now reports have been coming out about the Saudi's fiscal woes. Some say the monarchy is teetering on the edge of bankrutpcy, a function of profligate spending and low, low, low world oil prices. It's the old story - too much going out, not enough coming in. Even the IMF has predicted that the Saudi regime could be bankrupt within five years.

The Saudi royal family, the House of Saud, for whom the country is named, have managed to hold onto power thanks to what had been mountains of cash. Academics suggest that a fiscal crisis could mean the end of the monarchy and trigger anarchy and violence possibly exacerbated by Russia and Iran.


The consolidation of the Shia Belt and the destabilization of Saudi Arabia will have one of two outcomes for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In the first, it will be inevitably destroyed by the Syrian army, who will be bolstered by an increase in Russian and Iranian forces in the theater. With U.S. and Western attention being drawn towards a destabilized Saudi Arabia, the Russian Federation as well as Iran will be able to increase military operations within Syria, increasing the likelihood that Assad will remain in power and both ISIS and the Free Syrian Army will be crushed.

The second scenario would be the rise of radical Salafism in a destabilized Saudi Arabia. With Wahhabism being one of the most popular forms of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia, it would seem only logical as this would be the immediate threat in the Kingdom. ISIS would undoubtedly take advantage of the destabilization of Saudi Arabia in the same manner as in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. As radical Salafism is the widely practiced form of Sunni Islam in both al-Qaeda and ISIS, it would only be a matter of time before the two powers took a more active role in the country.

Iraq and Syria have taught us what it means when al-Qaeda and ISIS take a "more active role" in a country. We can imagine what form that might take in a country where they're basically the home team.

Could Syria Become the 21st Century Sarajevo?

There were plenty of proxy wars during the Cold War only back then the principals had enough sense to avoid direct clashes. That was then, this is Syria where today we find the rival superpowers circling each other inside the same phone booth.

You could search the world over and never find one place where so many players are gathered as Syria.

First up is the Alawite government of Bashar Assad.

Then there's the original rebels, Syrian Sunnis.

Then we have the Sunni Islamists - the 'moderate' al Nusra, an affiliate of al Qaeda, and the far nastier Islamic State, ISIS.

The United States and its minions have been waging a bombing campaign against ISIS, first in Iraq and later also in Syria. It's been the standard, ineffective "whack a mole" stuff.

Turkey finally got off the fence and began its own air campaign only they're less concerned about ISIS than they are at bombing Syrian Kurds.

The United States was supporting the Syrian rebels with equipment and training until it discovered the rebels were surrendering all that gear to al Nusra and al Qaeda. Can't be having that. So the United States is now supporting Syria's Kurds which is really pissing off Turkey's Erdogan.

Recently three more places have been set at the table of mass mayhem. Here sit Russia, Hezbollah and now Iranian forces all supporting Bashar Assad.  Latest word has it that Iran has not only sent in units of the Revolutionary Guard but also a contingent of warplanes. They seem to be focused mainly on the moderate Syrian rebels but they also take on the Sunni Islamists every now and then.

It's hard to keep track of how many nations are waging air wars in Syria.  There's the Syrian air force, naturally, its strength replenished by replacement aircraft from Russia. There's the US Air Force and the League of Vassals, America's aerial Foreign Legion that, naturally, includes a Canadian contingent plus strike fighters from France, Britain, Australia and other European states plus Jordan and a half-hearted effort from a few Gulf States.

We want to battle ISIS. The other side seems intent mainly on attacking Syrian opposition rebels. The Turks prefer to bomb Syrian Kurds, the very group the US is still supporting. Nobody is bombing Assad, the guy who sparked the original fighting, and, with the Russians riding shotgun, it's hard to imagine the Western coalition going after him any time soon.

Syria, which is almost the same size as the state of Washington (just over twice the size of New Brunswick), suddenly has an awful lot of warplanes buzzing overhead at cross purposes.  The Russians have also introduced their highly lethal  S-300 surface to air missile batteries. Turkey, meanwhile, is clamoring for the US and Germany to reactivate their Patriot missile batteries in support of their NATO partner. Eventually someone may fire one of those things.

The Americans have been snookered by Putin and this is bound to have geopolitical ramifications throughout the Middle East. Will the Saudis and the Egyptians tolerate Shiite Iran's military presence in Syria? Will they pile on?

Could Syria become the Sarajevo of the 21st century, the place where a proxy war becomes a shooting war between the West and Russia? Those expert in these matters warn these eyeball to eyeball confrontations are the sort of situations in which rival powers can back into direct conflicts neither one of them truly wants to initiate.

Deliver Us From Evil

Why do we tolerate Saudi Arabia when the kingdom, and its Sunni state allies, seems determined to deliver Yemen into the control of ISIS and al Qaeda?

Gwynne Dyer writes that, while we wage an air war against ISIS, the Saudis are undermining our effort with their war on the Yemeni Houthi.

They’ve all shown up for this war. Saudi Arabia and the other monarchies of the Arab world (Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and even Morocco) have all committed aircraft to bombing Yemen. Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Pakistan have offered to send ground troops. And the United States (which just pulled the last American troops out of Yemen) promises to provide “logistical and intelligence support.”

In practice, however, this coalition of Sunni Arabs and Americans is unlikely to commit large numbers of ground troops to Yemen: the country has been the graveyard of foreign armies from the Romans to the Ottomans. But if they don’t do that, the (entirely unintended) result of their bombing may be to facilitate the take-over of most of Yemen by al-Qaeda and/or ISIS

Sunni paranoia about the rise of Shia power has its roots in the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. So long as the Sunni minority ruled Iraq, it limited the influence of Iran, the paramount Shia power, in the Arab world. With the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the destruction of Sunni supremacy in Iraq, Iran’s power automatically soared – and so did its influence in Shia parts of the Arab world.

Iran didn’t have to do anything particularly aggressive for paranoia to take off in the Sunni countries of the Gulf. Of the 140 million citizens of countries that border on the Persian/Arabian Gulf, about two-thirds are Shias. With a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Sunni Arab monarchies felt terribly exposed and began to see Shia plots everywhere.

...The “coalition” is now bombing the Houthis all over the country. How intensively and how accurately remains to be seen, but if they really succeed in breaking the Houthi grip on central and southern Yemen, they will create a power vacuum that will NOT be filled by the “legitimate” president of Yemen, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, whom they are allegedly trying to restore to power.

Hadi’s forces have utterly disintegrated, and Houthi fighters now occupy the temporary capital that he established in his home city, Aden. (The real capital, Sanaa, has been in Houthi hands since September.) Hadi left Aden by boat on Tuesday, which suggests that he has left the country entirely – unless he plans to create another provisional capital on, say, the island of Socotra.

So if the coalition bombs the Houthis out of Aden, but does not commit ground troops of its own, the real winners will be the al-Qaeda forces that wait just outside the city. Much the same goes for Taiz, the third city, and even for Sanaa itself: it is al-Qaeda or ISIS jihadis who stand to profit most from a Houthi retreat.

Perfect, Mr. Harper.  Just what in hell have you gotten us stuck into?  One thing is sure, if you really do intend to "defeat ISIS" as your supposed defence minister claims, you're going to need a lot more than a sixpack of CF-18s.  And don't forget to bring your chequebook.

That Burnt Smell, That Hissing Sound? That's the Fuze.

Ready to Rumble

\Well, if nothing else, Stephen Harper might just have earned Canada a ringside seat to the outbreak of a Middle East regional war.  The way the International Crisis Group sees it, the Saudi air war on Shiite Yemeni rebels might just be the burning fuze that explodes the Sunni-Shia powder keg.

Obama and the Euros are trying to calm the situation, urging a negotiated peace between Yemen's Sunni government and the Houthi rebels but, according to the ICG, the mixed up gaggle of players aren't in the mood for talking.

No major party seems truly to want to halt what threatens to become a regional war. The slim chance to salvage a political process requires that regional actors immediately cease military action and help the domestic parties agree on a broadly acceptable president or presidential council. Only then can Yemenis return to the political negotiating table to address other outstanding issues.

The Huthi-Hadi divide is the most explosive, but it is not the only conflict. Tensions are also unsettling the recent marriage of convenience between the Huthis and former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who, after being deposed in 2011, has taken advantage of popular dissatisfaction and tacitly allied himself with the Huthis against their common enemies to stage a political comeback through his party, the General People’s Congress (GPC), and possibly his son, Ahmed Ali Abdullah Saleh. Divisions in the south, which was an independent state prior to its 1990 union with the north, are rampant as well. Southern separatists are internally split and suspicious of Hadi, a southerner who supports continued unity with the north. Then there are al-Qaeda and a nascent Islamic State (IS) movement, both determined to fight the Huthis and take advantage of the state’s collapse to claim territory.

...GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council - the Sunni Arab states] countries have lost faith as well and are increasingly committed to reversing Huthi gains at virtually any cost. Saudi Arabia considers the Huthis Iranian proxies, a stance that pushes them closer to Tehran. Throwing their weight behind Hadi, the Saudis moved their embassy to Aden and reportedly bankroll anti-Huthi tribal mobilisation in the central governorate of Marib and the south. They lead efforts to isolate the Huthis diplomatically, strangle them economically and, now, weaken them militarily. In turn, the Huthis denounce Hadi as illegitimate and offer $100,000 for his capture. They have conducted military exercises on the Saudi border and likely will harden their position in response to Saudi military intervention. They are less dependent on Tehran than Hadi and his allies are on Riyadh, but on today’s trajectory, their relative self-sufficiency will not last long. They are already soliciting Iranian financial and political support.

...Without minimum consensus within and beyond its borders, Yemen is headed for protracted violence on multiple fronts. This combination of proxy wars, sectarian violence, state collapse and militia rule has become sadly familiar in the region. Nobody is likely to win such a fight, which will only benefit those who prosper in the chaos of war, such as al-Qaeda and IS. But great human suffering would be certain. An alternative exists, but only if Yemenis and their neighbours choose it.

This is a perfect example of what's being called "new war."  It's a furball of state and non-state actors.  Governments, including outside nations, rebels, insurgents, militias, terrorists and criminal organizations.  It's a very fluid type of warfare that commonly features shifting alliances among the parties and widely differing and at times irreconcilable political and territorial objectives.  In the context of a negotiated peace, it really is the equivalent of herding cats.

We're not built for this stuff.  We like our combat "old war" style.  Good guys versus bad guys; winners and losers; war and peace.  We don't know what to do when peace is not a realistic option, certainly not an outcome we can dictate. That's when we do what we Westerners have been doing since Algeria and Viet Nam.  It's what we did in Afghanistan and Iraq and it's partially responsible for the hot mess that is the Middle East today.  We go into a place, toss it over, hang around for a decade or so and then leave.  We cannot accept, despite our persistent lack of success, that we're on a path to near certain failure.  It's right there in the user guide - our side gets to win.  End of story.  What, can't these people read?

UPDATE - The United Nations has thrown in the towel, pulling all UN personnel out of Yemen, a measure that's seen as dashing all hopes of a negotiated deal of any sort.

One other thought.  If this business in Yemen is the opening salvo in a grand, Sunni versus Shiite regional war, let's hope Harper has plans to get our people out of the Middle East on short notice.  If this thing blow up, everyone might start looking like the enemy.

Our Schizophrenic War on Terror

Ah, yeah, right.

It's tough to win a war when you have to ally yourselves with both sides.  That injects an element of schizophrenia in your policies and planning.  It results in a fatal lack of coherence, a narrative that is hopelessly confused.  And that is what confronts us in our struggle with radical, extremist, murderous Sunni Islam.

But it's unfair to blame the West for this incoherence when the major Arab players gave rise to it and were first afflicted.  They still are and they're dragging us down with them.

We associate our by now familiar enemies - al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, and similar groups - with radical Islam often known as Wahabbism.  That's fair enough.  Yet the monied branch of Wahabbism that funds the operational, murderous branch, is our ally.

On Thursday, The Middle East Monitor, ran an op-ed, "If terrorist groups are to be defeated, Saudi Arabia must stop funding those it favours."

...Perhaps contradictorily, the country is blamed widely for the rise of ISIS. Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the government in Riyadh has been funding Islamist groups fighting to overthrow President Bashar Al-Assad. It was these groups that gave birth to ISIS.

Saudi Arabia has a long and complicated relationship with Sunni terrorist groups. On the one hand, the kingdom, which denies outright that it funds terrorism, is engaged in a regional cold war with Iran, a Shia state, and as such seeks to strengthen opposition to Shia leaders in the Middle East. As Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6 has said, Saudi Arabia is "deeply attracted to any militancy which can effectively challenge Shiadom." The country practices and is run according to Wahabbism, an extreme interpretation of Islam that many Sunni militant groups also follow. On the other hand, Riyadh's rulers feel personally threatened by the ascendancy of groups such as Al-Qaeda in the early 2000s, or ISIS today. This is because they fear that these groups might seek to replace the Saud family with even more extreme Wahabbi leaders. Saudi Arabia is home to Islam's two holiest sites in Makkah and Madinah and as such is always a potential target for fundamentalist groups, which might seek to take over the cities. ISIS propaganda, for instance, vows "to liberate the 'Land of the Two Holy Mosques'."

As a strictly controlled police state with a wealthy state apparatus and an all-powerful monarchy, Saudi Arabia is far better equipped to tackle the internal terrorist threat than most of its neighbours are. However, the root problem will not disappear until Riyadh stops funding, encouraging and nurturing militant groups overseas whenever it suits Saudi interests to do so.

If you can't believe that the Saudis and their Gulf state cousins are playing both sides of this struggle and losing badly at both, you should read this eye-opener published by The Independent in mid-July, 2014.

Thanks to Wikileaks blowing the cover on Hillary Clinton's messages it's obvious that Washington has known since 2009 that the Saudis have been funding the worst terrorism the Middle East has seen.

Petro-states tend to breed incompetent, indulged leaders who sometimes sit upon vast wealth and wonder what to do with it.  Combine that sort of wealth and idleness with fundamentalist religious extremism and it breeds a succession of Islamist extremist terror movements such as al Qaeda and, more recently, ISIS.

The Gulf princes are like Dr. Frankenstein.  They unleash monsters to attack their perceived rivals but when those creations instead also turn on them well then it's time to call in the cavalry, the West.  In the result we'll battle al Qaeda for 15, 20, maybe 50 years, ISIS for who knows how long, and, if we do manage to knock them down, we'll be drawn in to tackle the next terrorist organization our allies, the Gulf oil princes, decide to fund.

So long as we dutifully collaborate with Sunni extremists like the House of Saud, we may never get out of this.  We keep boasting how we have no time for "state sponsored terrorism" and yet we keep showing that is simply untrue.  We know the very worst terrorism sponsoring states and we actually consider them our allies even as they spawn murderous gangs that would be only too happy to attack us.

You don't like monsters?  Then take out Dr. Frankenstein - all the Dr. Frankensteins.  If you don't, your war on terror is nothing more than pissing into the wind.

About That Islamic Terrorism, Who Are We Kidding?

Well those damned Muslims have us in hysterics now.  Rupert Murdoch says this is on all Muslims.  Bill Maher says ditto.

But wait.  There are two strains of Muslims - Sunni and Shia.  Our Muslims of choice, those we consider our allies, are Sunni - Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, that bunch. The Muslims we normally despise and distrust are those other guys, the Shiites.

So, let's step back and look at all this Muslim terrorism that has us in such a state. Let's start with Osama bin Laden.  Sunni.  Al Qaeda, Sunni.  ISIS, Sunni.  Those Muslims Obama keeps whacking with his drones, Sunni.  The Taliban, Sunni. All those wedding parties we brought to an abrupt and terminal end with our gifts of Hellfire missiles, Sunni.  Let's count that up - Sunni, Sunni, Sunni, Sunni, Sunni and Sunni.  So far it's Sunni 6, Team Shia no score.  That's a shut out in any league.  Wowser.

That 9/11 wrecking crew?  All Sunni. About three-quarters of them were Saudi. It's widely believed that the 28-pages redacted by the Bush regime from the 9/11 report fingered the House of Saud as in on the attacks.  Whatever is in those pages even Obama is keeping them under lock and key.

We know that the Salafist/Wahhabist extremists have been lavishly supported by the Gulf states, including the remarkably like-minded Saudis.  You might even call them the terrorists' benefactors.

When the ISIS problem got out of control (and not one minute before) some of these Gulf principalities pledged to - wait for it - stop funding them.

Now you might have thought we would bring the Hammers of Hell down on the heads of these potentates to repay their perfidy.  A hundred or so Tomahawk cruise missiles targeted at their royal palaces likely would have done the trick. But that hasn't happened, has it.

Harper loves the Saudis, especially now that they've inked a $15-billion deal to buy Canadian-built light armoured vehicles to meet their democracy-suppression needs.  And, besides, it wouldn't be seemly for one petro-state to get uppity with another petro-state.

Well we have to whack somebody to avenge the Paris massacre.  Hmm, the Sunnis are out - at least those right at the core of this.  I guess that just leaves the Shia.  I know, let's attack Tehran.

p.s.  That scary banner being carried by the angry mob in the picture above? That could have been written by any crown prince of the House of Saud.

What Are We Getting Ourselves Into?

Before long the Middle East will look like a parking lot for Western jet fighters. The place will be awash in Hornets and Super Hornets, F-16s, F-22s, Eurofighters and Rafales and Tornados.  They'll be flying about over Syria and Iraq searching for something, anything to bomb into rubble and pulp.

Nobody thinks that airstrikes are going to win this "conflict" with IS or ISIS or ISIL or whatever they happen to be called this week or next.  We'll run out of targets first. Then what?

The job unfinished, we will probably succumb to "mission creep."  Airpower didn't do the trick, let's switch to the ground game.  It will be sold to us as a choice in which we have no other choice.  We'll do it because we must.

At this early point it's timely for us to dwell a bit on just what we've gotten ourselves into.  Is this a war or, as I suggested a few days ago, just a bunch of battles strung together a bit incoherently?  Do we have an actual enemy or are we just banging away at the group fronting for the actual enemy we work so hard to avoid recognizing?

Are we standing, unaware, on the very edge of WW III?  That's not my question but it is being asked in some very high places.

Dr. Anthony Cordesman, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, rebukes the US in a paper he published on Thursday.  On the great difficulty of implementing coalition-based strategy, he writes: "This is particularly true when the US fails to honestly address its own problems and mistakes, minimises the costs and risks involved, and exaggerates criticism of its allies."

...But ask him about that Franz Ferdinand moment and suggestions pour out of him.  Syria could shoot down a Turkish aircraft; the humanitarian dimension could be messed up; human displacement - "you can surely count on people to not understand that intervening to deal with a few thousand people can displace hundreds of thousands"; if IS advanced to a position from which it "threatened all of Iraq"; Iraq's Sunnis could refuse to co-operate with the new Shiite dominated government in Baghdad; if violence broke out between Turkey and its Kurdish minority and Iraq's Kurds attempted to join in; if the Assad government in Syria was to stop up its bombing of rebel forces "it could become a political problem too big to ignore"'; and lastly, if IS was to lash out with a campaign of terrorist attacks that would provoke demands to escalate the coalition campaign.

"Fully agreeing" with the idea that the conflict has been miscast as war in two countries, rather than as a regional or even bigger conflict, veteran White House adviser and CIA analyst Bruce Riedel's response to questions was a dire email in which he posits the current crisis in a seriously global framework.

"Al Qaedaism, the ideology, is stronger today than ever, thanks to the failure of the Arab Spring [which we welcomed] and the battlefield has expanded from Mali to Pakistan and beyond to Australia and Europe," he writes.

"The worst nightmare for me is a terror attack that provokes Indo-Pakistan war; second, is a Mubai-like attack in a Western city."

Another veteran observer of the region warns this is going to take years, possibly decades to play out and during that interval could well spill out across the Middle East/South Asia region.

"There is a serious risk that the entire region will blow up," Lakhdar Brahimi warned in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, in which he predicted dire consequences for Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. "The conflict is not going to stay inside Syria.  It will spill over into the region.  It's already destablising Lebanon [where there are] 1.5 million refugees."  

Analysing the global misreading of how events might unfold in Syria, Brahimi harped back to an earlier assignment in his career": "It reminds me a lot of 1999 - then, I resigned from my first assignment as a UN special envoy to Afghanistan, because the UN Security Council had no interest in Afghanistan, a small country, poor, far away.  I said one day it's going to blow up in your faces - it did [and] Syria is much worse."

And as for the notion implicit in the rhetoric of Obama and his coalition cheerleaders, that Syria somehow is to be rescued by and into the civilised world, Brahimi thinks otherwise - "It will become another Somalia.  It will not be divided as many have predicted.  It's going to be a failed state, with warlords all over the place."

Justin, Tommy - Here's Your Talking Points

Look, if you can't nail Harper on this ISIS business, you're not fit to govern anything much less our country.

What you need to do is pry the lid off ISIS.  Show Canadians what lies beneath, who stands behind.

Start with the notion that this seemingly well-organized, well-trained, well-equipped and obviously well-funded ISIS army didn't rise magically from the sands of the Arabian deserts.

ISIS is an armed force that was quite carefully and skillfully manufactured. Somebody, with a lot of money and know-how, raised ISIS.  That sort of undertaking leaves traces - all over the place.

Western intelligence scours that region.  We know the Dr. Frankenstein who created the ISIS monster that now rampages through Syria and Iraq.  We've known all along.  Why not name the fiends?

When Obama refused the Saudis' orders to attack Assad, their chief of skulduggery, prince Bandar bin Sultan vowed to raise an army in the deserts of Jordan to attack Syria. He did precisely as he'd promised. We did nothing to stop him.  We watched him recruit, train, arm and fund an army of religious extremists that would become ISIS.

Let's name the countries we're really up against while we're trying to "degrade" ISIS - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar.  Those are the states who created and funded and armed ISIS.  They're the states that will create and fund and arm the next ISIS too.

It's called "state sponsored terrorism."    We're very, very familiar with that term. We've been using it since the Reagan era as a justification to bomb people we don't like.  Regan used it, so did GHW Bush and Clinton.  Shrub Bush used it big time when he castigated Saddam for being in league with al Qaeda.

This time it's our supposed allies that are the states sponsoring this most diabolical terrorism of all.  This isn't their first kick at the can and, judging by the past, it likely won't be their last either.

Ask Harper, straight up, who created ISIS?  Where did it come from?  Who raised this army?  Who trained it?  Where was it trained?  Who equipped and armed it?  Where did the weapons originate?  Who funded it and who directed it?

Ask Harper how we're going to prevent the people who created the ISIS monster and the monsters that preceded it from creating the next monster?  What will that be?  Where are we going to be fighting next?

A decade ago Canada got swept up in the fight against al Qaeda.  Now we're getting swept up in the fight against ISIS.  What iteration of this same degenerate monstrosity are we to fight ten years from now?

Ask Harper how a conventional force, especially an air force, can ever make a real dent in an unconventional force that can morph at will from a conventional, fighting force into an insurgency or even dissolve into gangs and individuals to be reconstituted somewhere else into the next al Qaeda or the next ISIS?

Ask Harper if it's worth attacking the snake, wouldn't it be even more worthwhile to cut off its head and end this once and for all?

We're never going to wipe out the legions of extremists willing to enlist in outfits like ISIS.  They're a dime a thousand.   In fact, the more of them we kill the more of them we recruit to their cause.

We can, however, wipe out the directing minds who stand behind the curtain pulling the levers.  We've been doing their dirty work and covering up for them for way too long and look where that's brought us.

Granted they're the same bunch that just placed a juicy 15-billion dollar order with us for armoured vehicles but, hey, we castigated the French for agreeing to sell helicopter carriers to Vlad Putin during the Ukraine fiasco.  It would be more than slightly hypocritical for us to deliver weapons of war to the Saudis, wouldn't it?

So Justin and Tommy, start asking Harper a few pointed questions.  Then ask him why we keep getting dragged into inconclusive wars fighting Frankenstein's monsters when we could be going after the evil doctor himself?

Yeah, But at Least They Like the Idea of Bombing Iran

Oh, those wacky Saudis!  Guess what?   According to a leaked U.S. diplomatic communique, the Saudis are the biggest financial backer of al Qaeda.  Still Numero Uno.  I guess they're just not able to kick the habit.

Imagine that, the Sauds and al Qaeda.  That's a strange combination isn't it?  We're talking America's main Arab ally in the war on terror.    Whats that?   Those Arabs on 9/11 who hijacked those airplanes?  Almost all them Saudis?  Really?  But what about that Saddam guy?  Wasn't he the link?  No?  You sure?

So let me get this straight.   In 2002/2003, the United States staged its army in Saudi Arabia to invade Iraq.   Why didn't they just stay there and topple the Saudis?  I don't get it.

From Bad to Worse - Al Qaeda Eyeing Gaza

Asia Times reports that al Qaeda is considering Gaza as a base from which to launch attacks against both Israel and Egypt.

Asia Times Online investigations, including interviews with people associated with al-Qaeda, reveal that the central leadership of al-Qaeda, sitting somewhere in the tribal areas straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan, sees the Gaza conflict as a major opportunity to inflame the war theater in Gaza and make it a permanent trouble spot for Israel and Egypt, just as al-Qaeda-led areas of conflict have created seemingly intractable difficulties for Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Capitalizing on the Gaza unrest would be consistent with al-Qaeda's vision of reviving a caliphate to centralize Muslim resistance in its capacity as a non-state actor. The crucial issue is how long Hamas' estimated 25,000 fighters in Gaza can resist the Israelis.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KA07Ak01.html

McCain Scores New Endorsement - al Qaeda's

McCain may not "pal around" with them but he's the president of choice for al-Qaeda.

The story surfaced a couple of days ago that a password-protected web site known as a vehicle for the Islamist terrorists has openly endorsed John McCain as their choice for the next president of the USA.

Why McCain? Because George w. Bush has been the best thing that every happened to al-Qaeda and McCain is the candidate most likely to repeat every Bush blunder. They need each other, it's as simple as that.

Nicholas Kristoff of The New York Times notes that the al-Qaeda endorsement of McCain comes as no surprise to the experts:

"...the endorsement of Mr. McCain by a Qaeda-affiliated Web site isn’t a surprise to security specialists. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, and Josephy Nye, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, have both suggested that Al Qaeda prefers Mr. McCain and might even try to use terror attacks in the coming days to tip the election to him.

“From their perspective, a continuation of Bush policies is best for recruiting,” said Professor Nye, adding that Mr. McCain is far more likely to continue those policies.

An American president who keeps troops in Iraq indefinitely, fulminates about Islamic terrorism, inclines toward military solutions and antagonizes other nations is an excellent recruiting tool. In contrast, an African-American president with a Muslim grandfather and a penchant for building bridges rather than blowing them up would give Al Qaeda recruiters fits."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/opinion/26kristof.html?em