We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, September 7, 2014

America, ISIS, and Syria: We have to bomb the jihadis in order to save them

Click here to access article from the blogger at The Polemicist.

Political analysis doesn't get any better than illustrated in this article. I hope that readers will not be satisfied with his lead-in short version; because the rest of the article carefully analyses, with a lot of supporting documentation, US foreign policy in this volatile region and leads to an understanding of its extremely devious and Orwellian character. 
 Saudi Arabia and Israel might have their reasons for wanting jihadis to replace Assad, but what are ours? Do you think it’s because our government consistently adopts the Saudi line? Perhaps the ISIS horror will reveal, to a few more people who think on these questions, how particularly pointless and dangerous it is for America to be playing this game, whoever’s it is.

To evoke yet another stated policy for which today’s jihadis are conveniently helpful, we should recognize that ISIS is finishing off the destruction and breakup of the Iraqi state that the U.S. began with its invasion in 2003. In Iraq, ISIS is executing an American plan, proposed by Joe Biden and Leslie Gelb in 2006, and endorsed by the U.S. Senate in 2007, to split into three parts—Sunni, Shia, and Kurd.30

That plan is itself uncannily similar—pure coincidence, I am sure—to an Israeli plan,  The Yinon Plan of 1982....