Too Much Dick

I wonder with a title like this one if I will get google search results for people searching for penis pictures. They will be disappointed. Sunday mornings I enjoy watching some of the political theater that is presented by the various networks as informative. Things like Meet the Press. I was surfing around the other day and happened across Fox News as they were interviewing one of my favorite idiots on the planet. That would be the ever popular and always lying Dick Cheney. Of course, THE DICK, was rambling on and on about how the current administration has no plan to deal with the crisis in the Middle East. THE DICK always thinks that the military option is the best and by god we should be supplying arms, sending troops and bombing the hell out of those ISIS bastards. After all it has worked so well for us in the past. Let's start with a few of THE DICK's bigger lies.

Weapons of mass destruction. THE DICK sold us and the UN and anyone else who would listen the bullshit story that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. We invaded because their ruthless dictator (THE DICK's designation for Hussein) would not surrender those weapons. He couldn't, of course, because he didn't have any. So the ruthless dictator told us the truth while THE DICK lied to us. When they didn't find the weapons it became clear that the war was about oil. THE DICK said that wasn't true. Consider this fact. North Korea has a ruthless dictator AND weapons of mass destruction. Those facts are not in dispute unless you are Dennis Rodman. What does North Korea lack?  The simple and clear answer is OIL. If we were concerned about weapons of mass destruction getting into the wrong hands it would seem North Korea would be someone we would want to take to task. Why don't we? There are two very obvious reasons. First, no oil. Second, the crazy fat kid in charge has nuclear weapons and we are sure he would use them. If you want to throw in a third reason there are about 1.3 billion Chinese in the area who would most likely take offense.

THE DICK went on to claim that if left unchecked ISIS would cause "Hundreds of thousands of casualties in the homeland", He stated we would suffer terrorist attacks at their hands worse than those that occurred on 9-11-2001. Well I have to give THE DICK credit for being creative. If you are going to try to scare people into thinking your way you should use really big numbers of dead and wounded to sell your point. He offered no rationale for choosing a number in the hundreds of thousands so it would appear he just pulled it out of his ass. It would fit in with the other lies THE DICK has been spewing for years. If you want a Middle East solution this approach might work better.

I'm going to start with something President Obama said and then move on to a workable strategy. "Our objective is clear, and that is to degrade and destroy ISIL so that it's no longer a threat not just to Iraq but also the region and the United States." He later added the following. "We know that if we are joined by the international community, we can continue to shrink ISIL's sphere of influence, its effectiveness, its financing, its military capabilities to the point where it is a manageable problem." The Obama administration is taking a thoughtful approach to the problem of ISIL instead of a quick reaction like trying to bomb it out of existence. Thomas Friedman made the following comments which make more sense than anything THE DICK has said recently and perhaps ever.
"To defeat ISIS you have to address the context out of which it emerged. And that is the three civil wars raging in the Arab world today: the civil war within Sunni Islam between radical jihadists and moderate mainstream Sunni Muslims and regimes; the civil war across the region between Sunnis funded by Saudi Arabia and Shiites funded by Iran; and the civil war between Sunni jihadists and all other minorities in the region- Yazidis, Turkmen, Kurds, Christians, Jews and Alawites. When you have a region beset by that many civil wars at once, it means there is no center, only sides. And when you intervene in the middle of a region with no center, you very quickly become a side. ISIS emerged as an extreme expression of resentment by one side: Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis who felt left out of power and resources by the pro-Iranian Shiite regime in Baghdad and the pro-Iranian Alawite/Shiite regime in Damascus. That is why Obama keeps insisting that America's military intervention must be accompanied, for starters, by Iraqis producing a national unity government- of mainstream Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds- so our use of force supports pluralism and power-sharing, not just Shiite power. But power sharing doesn't come easy in a region where kinship and sectarian loyalties overwhelm any sense of shared citizenship. Without it, though, the dominant philosophy is either: 'I am strong, why should I compromise?' or 'I am weak, how can I compromise?' So any onslaught we make on ISIS, absent national unity governments, will have Shiites saying the former and Sunnis saying the latter. That's why this is so complicated."

The answer is not bombing and military intervention now. It is not appeasement as many have accused President Obama of attempting. The answer is nation build and coalition formation. If we look back at what we have done so far our efforts to destroy terrorist groups has been ineffective. They have simply morphed into larger and more dangerous groups. Groups who capture and behead foreign citizens. THE DICK has even caused us to lose the moral high ground. Reports have indicated that prior to being beheaded the two journalists were subject to being water boarded. None of the news networks as referred to that as torture since we have used it and claimed it was not torture but instead "enhanced interrogation". ISIS says we did it to people we held so it must be ok for them. We allowed other countries to do far worse than that for us so let's hope that doesn't haunt us in the future. We can once again thank THE DICK for that.

ISIS may gain some ground in the short term. They may cause some problems for us around the world, but if we take a measured approach rather than jumping into troop use and bombing the problem will be managed and addressed without the formation of another group even more dangerous and evil than ISIS. The first step in the process is to stop listening to the lies and bullshit spouted out of the pie hole of THE DICK.