"The Most Deadly Middle East Conflict is Shia vs. Sunni"

Brief Commentary: 

During October 2019 President Trump made what was viewed by some 'talking heads' as a controversial decision to remove almost all US troops from Syria.

During the 2016 election campaign Trump had promised to take the US out of the continuing conflicts in that region.

On 10/21/19, Newt Gingrich, appeared on Fox News at noon and pointed out that the Kurds have been seeking their own country since 300 years before Christ and that the Kurds are spread all through Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.

During the last 2+ years the Kurds and US forces joined in efforts to evict ISIS from Syria. This has now been done and the President and many citizens believe that we should not continue with un-ending support of the Kurds. US forces should not be seen as the military arm of the Kurdish movement.

It is entirely appropriate for a US withdrawal so as to avoid placing US service members between Turkish and Kurdish forces. For over 2,000 years the Kurds have been trying to secure a homeland. It is not reasonable to expect that minor assistance now to the Kurds will resolve this nation/state issue.

President Trump made the correct decision and fulfilled his earlier campaign promise.

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10/21/19

Misc 1.  This is a relatively 'old' blog but despite all the ISIS news these days I won't be updating it with any frequency.  My opinions have not changed from two years ago when I put up the site.

Misc 2. The Smerconish Show on CNN of 5/23/15 had guest Michael Scheuer the author of 'Imperial Hubris' *.  This 22 yr veteran of the CIA and head of the Bin Laden desk up to 2009 had very similar ideas to mine and pointed out several things Bin Laden wanted to accomplish, all these efforts are ongoing at this time:

1)  Drive out US and Arab tyrants,
2)  Destroy Isreal
3)  Establish a caliphate**
4)  Settle scores with Shia Muslims

Mr. Scheuer also echoed my own thoughts and said:  "Since we can't beat them with our military we should let them klll each other."

My comment is simply that they are doing a good job and we should not get in their way.

* Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror (Brassey's, 2004; ISBN 1-57488-849-8)

**  A caliphate is an Islamic state. It's led by a caliph, who is a political and religious leader who is a successor (caliph) to the Islamic prophet Muhammad. His power and authority is absolute.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

"The Most Deadly Middle East Conflict is Shia vs. Sunni"

I doubt that Muslims have much interest in the schism between the Catholic Church and the various Protestant groups and correspondenly we 'Christians' have little interest or understanding of the divide between Shia and Suni in the Arab and Persian world.  Islam is a religion frozen in time and not interested in change.

A good summary of this issue by Dr. Kedar in his November Op-Ed piece is found at: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14132#.UsrDXptVsVU 
in his article titled:  "The Most Deadly Middle East Conflict is Shia vs.Sunni".

1300 years of conflict between the sects is hard to summarize but one quote is telling:  

"The struggle between the two groups has led to the development of great differences between the two in every area of religious life: religious laws are different, the theology is different, and even the basic scriptures are different".

Recent reverses in Syria and Iraq, which undermined what the US and its allies accomplished in taking control of the region, have brought home to us the futility of involvement in the Arab/Persian theater.

US and Western casualties seem to have been for nothing and at this late date it seems to finally have occurred to our leaders that we should not invest any more lives in this conflict.

The radical calls of the Muslim fringe to attack the Great Satan and the West in general make a mockery of their supposed 'peaceful' religion.  The only positive thing to note is that the 13 century long divide between Suni and Shia keeps Muslims from even greater efforts to attack us.

As long as the radical anti-US Muslims are busy killing each other they have less time to take up their Jihad against the West.

The best course of action for the West is to simply stay out of it.

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 9/28/14 

  So you don't have to wade through the below to find out my opinion - here it is in brief summary:

Stay the Hell OUT of Syria!

Here is a message to the House which they should take to heart.

We have no friends in Syria and few in the Middle East.

Arab Spring or not, most of them hate the West and in particular the USA.

We don't know which side is the 'Good Guys' and which are the 'Bad Guys'. Almost certainly both are anti-West, so how can we support either side?

We are NOT the worlds Policeman. It is a bad situation which won't be made any better by our dropping some bombs.  With all the waffeling by Mr. Obama even our allies have no idea what our plan is and his 'drawing a red line'  makes us a joke in the Middle East.

Just reading the press reports we know that a former signifigant anti American and Isreali military force in the middle east is tearing itself apart and leaving their country in ruins.  It will take 10-12 years for them to rebuild what they have destroyed in the last 2+ years.  

If they are determined to kill each other then we should have enough common sense to keep out of it and let them get on with it.

We should just sit back and watch the radical nut cases kill each other.  While they are busy with this they won't have time to also attack the West and there will be fewer of them for us to kill later.

A poll, conducted after U.S. officials claimed Syria's government killed thousands of civilians with chemical weapons, shows: 
25 percent of Americans now support air strikes to aid rebels in Syria, while 
41 percent said they are opposed. Another 
34 percent said that they're not sure.

Friday, September 6, 2013

Just my opinion - Syria, Islam and the West

Readers 40 years of age or younger will, during the course of their lifetime, have to deal with a world where 1 in 3 people are Muslim (now it is 1 in 5). In 40 years there will be 10 Billion people on the planet, 3 1/2 Billion Muslims.

This is generally bad news for non-Muslims, particularly in light of the radical elements within that religion who hold the view that all non-Muslims are infidels and should be either converted, killed or enslaved.

Keep in mind that Islam is not the only religion to espouse the idea that they are the 'true' religion and that non-believers will never reach heaven. What other religions hold this view? Try the Catholic Church and the Jewish faith. So Islam isn't alone, at least in that respect. 

What then should we 'do' about Islam? 

In the short term I suggest we not further involve ourselves in Islamic countries. We have not done a very good job so far, why would we believe that we will do better with further meddling?

I note that there are humanitarians who are agitating for the US to get involved in Syria and help to depose the current regime. True 100,000+ have been killed so far. So from a humanitarian perspective it would seem that some action should be taken.

Examine this a bit further. An entirely hostile country, one that was a sworn enemy of Israel and had no relations with the US, is now in the process of reducing itself to rubble. Where is the downside to this? The country is self destructing and will not in coming years be capable of posing a threat to Israel, Lebanon or us. We should simply stay out of it, there is no upside to any meddling, both sides will turn on us, any weapons we provide will probably end up used against the West by the radical Islamic elements who have poured into Syria.

Put bluntly, while they are killing each other they are not killing us. A harsh statement but how is it wrong?

Possibly the only things that we (the West) have going for us in the coming 40 years is that Islam is not one great monolith. It is fractured and may well come apart without any necessity for conflict with the West. 

Consider that:

1)  The Persians and Arabs have been great rivals for well over a thousand years, they just don't like each other, 

2) There is a deep divide in Islam between the radicals and the moderates, the radicals for the moment are in the ascendency but are far outnumbered by the moderate Muslims who see little being gained by their barbaric brethren,

3) Since the founding of their religion the Shia and Suni branches of Islam have been at war with each other, this isn't going to change, each side views the other as being blasphemers and apostates of their religion.

The short term recommendation is to stay out of social engineering in Islamic countries, there is no 'good side' to be found. 

Long term we may find Islam so divided and fractured that they pose no threat to Western interests.

 Q)   What should be of concern to us?

 A)   China

7/6/16

I will put this article down the blog and not at the top.  It simply shows that the Saudi's are now getting to find out what bombs going off in their country are like.  Their people like to create terror and fly planes into buildings, now they are getting a few bombs going off in their sand pile:

TERRORIST ATTACKS

   NEWS ANALYSIS

IN SAUDI ARABIA, RADICALS RAISE STAKES

Attacks put Saudi forces on alert while posing challenge to royal family’s role as protector of Islam

Oren Dorell @orendorell USA TODAY

   A wave of suicide attacks Monday in Saudi Arabia, especially one near the burial site of the prophet Mohammed, shows that radicals are increasingly challenging the Al Saud royal family and its role as official protector of Islam’s holy sites.

   Suicide attackers struck the security office at Al-Haram al-Nabawi, a mosque in the western city of Medina that was built by Mohammed and where he is said to be buried. Mecca and Medina are Islam’s holiest sites. Another suicide bomber blew himself up near a Shiite mosque in the eastern city of Qatif. And a suicide bomber struck near the U.S. Consulate in the western city of Jeddah.

   While there’s been no claim of responsibility, attacks hitting multiple places at once bear the hallmarks of the Islamic State, which has called for strikes against “infidels” during the month of Ramadan that ends this week. The extremist group, which aspires to create an Islamic caliphate across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, also is suspected of bombings in Iraq and Turkey in the past week that together claimed hundreds of lives.

   The attack outside Mohammed’s burial site in Medina “is like challenging Al Saud’s claim as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” said David Ottaway, an analyst on Saudi Arabia at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “The caliphate has always wanted to expand to the home of the two holy mosques.”

   Whether the attacks show the Islamic State is gaining traction in Saudi Arabia is unclear, but “the challenge to the Al Saud family has always come from the extreme right-wing Islam,” Ottaway said.

   The low death toll from Monday’s attacks — four security officers in all — shows that Saudi security forces are effective, he said.

   “They’ve been one step ahead of the Islamic State, so far,” Ottaway said.

   The terrorist threat in Saudi Arabia, which is participating in the international coalition fighting the Islamic State, has been on the rise in the past year, according to Ottaway and David Weinberg of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy.

   There have been 26 attacks in the kingdom that have killed more than 200 people since the start of 2015, and Saudi security forces have arrested 2,800 suspects in that time. The attacks, attributed to the Islamic State and its rival terror group, al-Qaeda, often targeted Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority, according to Maj. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki, a spokesman for Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of the Interior.

   Saudi Arabia is a mostly Sunni nation. Members of the Islamic State are, too, but the group counts among its enemies Sunni Muslims who work with the West, whom it considers apostates.

   “The fact there is a proliferation of attacks in the kingdom in the last two years and there weren’t any four or five years ago, suggests something is emerging in the kingdom,” Weinberg said.

   Saudi Arabia has endorsed the Jeddah Communique, an international agreement to combat the Islamic State and radical extremism by cutting off funding, blocking foreign fighters and repudiating the ideology that undermines extremism.

   Yet, Weinberg says, the kingdom, which regularly condemns terrorism, “is still grappling with what it means to stop intolerance and extremist speech that incites terrorism.”

   When in 2014 Saudi Information Minister Abdulaziz Khoja shut down a television channel, Wesal, which had a record of incitement against Shiites, he was fired within 24 hours by now-deceased King Abudullah.

   Last year, when Saad bin Ateeq al Ateeq, a Saudi preacher at a state-controlled mosque, urged followers to destroy all Jews, Christians, Allawites and Shiites, he apparently faced no consequences, Weinberg said.

   The Saudi government continues to embrace preachers who preach religious intolerance, against LGBT people, embracing or condoning Osama bin Laden, “sending a message this type of speech is OK,” Weinberg said.

   Since Saudi Arabia in the Jeddah Communique identified cracking down on hate speech as an element of fighting the ideology of the Islamic State and other extremists, “I would say the Saudis have fallen down on their commitments,” he said.

   Saudi politicians “are reluctant to speak against the clerics because it backfires,” and could lead to more terrorism, said Hassan Hassan, an analyst at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and co-author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.

   Cracking down on popular radical Saudi clerics who’ve been spewing hatred for years “could push them toward extremism,” Hassan said. The Islamic State “didn’t come out of thin air. These things existed before (the Islamic State).”

SAUDI PRESS AGENCY, EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Smoke from a bomb pours explosion near the hammed Prophet Mo-the Mosque holy in city Saudi of Medina Arabia , in on Monday. (sorry photo no longer available)

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This site is one of about 250 sites I have put up and it reflects just my own opinion, probably of interest to no one but myself.

If you feel the driving need to contact me you should go take a long nap and when you wake up hopefully you will have forgotten all about it, but if not then you can reach me at:   consumerissues@aol.com


My political views are stuck in the 1960's with Barry Goldwater and they have not changed over the years.  I was, am and always will be an original 'conservative'. 

Note that is not the conservative ideals of today.  The term was hijacked about 10-15 years ago by the nut cases of the right wing of the Republican party.  I am still an original conservative, but it seems that the goal posts were moved on me.

Some of today's 'conservatives' are just as nutty as the wack jobs of the Democratic Left, like Michael Moore and Mr. Soros. 

What else do I find to bitch and moan about?

http://www.atlantajournal-constitution.blogspot.com/
A local newspaper who litters 26 counties

http://kennesawpawnproblems.blogspot.com/
A local Pawn Shop that had to relocate

http://scottwhiteheadsucks.blogspot.com/
A former attorney of mine, now in jail

http://westernworldinssucks.blogspot.com/
A rip off insurance company

http://aumsucks.blogspot.com/
A rip off utility company

http://concordsucks.blogspot.com/
A rip off apt management firm

http://stoneharborsucks.blogspot.com/
One of many apt complexes run by Concord Mgmt

http://impeachobama2013.blogspot.com/
A political comment on the President

http://brotherspizzacompany.blogspot.com/\
A local restaurant

http://targetfiling.blogspot.com/
A poor retail company

http://georgekopoulos.blogspot.com/
Condo owners who have questionable connections

http://nautiluscondosrules.blogspot.com/
A condo I had a unit at for 5 yrs