ISIS on the offensive in Iraq

[Seamus Fermanagh]

How come there is never an effort to bring back the Beirut of the 1960s as a model for change.

You've got your iron-heeled dictator types willing to be the center of the universe, plenty of would be caliphs desirous of ruling by shariyah, a few zionazi seeking to make everything from Damascus to Sainai into a kibbutz writ large, and, I have no doubt, a fair number of folks scamming any and all while playing middlemen to the mayhemists and stuffing their numbered Swiss accounts absolutely full.

So why does nobody fight to become a place for commerce, or tolerance, or even as one American pol put it, "a chicken in every pot?" Why do all the current crop of power seekers want to rule a wasteland?

Have they even thought about what they want in human terms?

During the Cold War, some of our more cold-blooded analysts were aware that the USA, by pre-empting without any warning, could have "won" the war against the Soviets (too many liquid-fueled rockets, too slow a command and control reaction time because of their centralized decision practices, greater stealth ability among our boomer subs, etc.). We'd have lost millions and taken major hits to our infrastructure, but the USSR would have been decapitated, its strategic forces gone and its tactical ability smashed. Eastern Europe would have broken away and much of the USSR would have been facing civil war and breakaways from the 'stans etc.

Somebody decided that 10s of millions of dead along with who knows how many in the USSR wasn't a cost worth paying -- whatever the more bloodless analysts thought about doability.

Why aren't more in the Middle East willing to make an analogous assessment about the human costs of all this? I begin to wonder if Jordan somehow acquired all of the people who believe in sanity.

Oh well, had to vent that.