Transnational Peace 2014

(D)ude: Man! The American Press says it doesn’t get the access that Hollywood gets into the tactics of the Navy SEALs. The American Press ought to know better than to try and criticize the United States Military in this Hollywood versus the American press corps mentality that the Republican Party is pressuring upon the Affordable Care Act.

(M)an: Dude! You saw Martha Raddatz on This Week with George Stephanopoulos! You’re talking about films like the upcoming Lone Survivor starring Mark Wahlberg?   

D: Man! Yeah! The toxic mix of talking about the Military as portrayed by Hollywood and then stating untruths like the United States Military not sharing as much with the American Press as it shares with filmmakers is misreporting!

M: Dude! Or it could be utter nonsense not to be registered by our soldiers?

D: Man! Could be, but Marcus Luttrell’s account of losing his SEAL brothers and additional service members in June 2005 to the Taliban leader Ahmad Shah, is compelling because of the identity of the man who would save the lone survivor Luttrell from the Taliban, the Afghani villager Muhammad Gulab who risked his life and the lives of his family members to tend to the wounded Navy SEAL left to die that horrific day.

M: Dude! Muhammad Gulab? Reminds me of  N. J. Dawood, the Iraqi scholar who gave the Western World a glimpse into the Muslim soul with perhaps the best English translation of The Koran [In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful], Dawood’s translation available as a Penguin Classic since 1956. The line I recall is the one where Dawood translates how Abraham comes to realize his own prophetic insight and informs his father, “Father, things you know nothing of have come to my knowledge: therefore follow me, that I may guide you along an even path.”

D: Man! Things that the American Press knows nothing of come to the knowledge of the United States Military second-by-second. What Hollywood attains as classified is simply historical truths that have aged by the speed of light with all the technology that is being produced via constant utilization by the trained intellectuals/soldiers, both men and women. And the American Press needs to realize that women are doing tremendous work inside the United States Military but that there is the risk of sexual battery by the opposition in remote places like where Luttrell’s team was massacred. What if Luttrell had been a female? Would a woman in his position be left to die or further assaulted?

M: Dude! Peggy Noonan from the Wall Street Journal and David Ignatius of the Washington Post were very insulting in their treacherous sound bites about Senator Harry Reid and, later on, the state of affairs in Syria and Iraq following the Iraqi government losing control of Fallujah to Al-Qaeda militants.

D: Man! You saw Noonan and Ignatius on Face The Nation with Bob Schieffer! How about if we deconstruct the superfluous nonsense Peggy Noonan and David Ignatius spoke on Face The Nation yesterday?

M: Dude! I’ll be Peggy Noonan and you can be both David Ignatius and David Sanger! Eh-hem!

D: Man! Any day now, Ms. Noonan!

M: Dude! There’s a little jujutsu going on there. He [Harry Reid] thinks the government shutdown would be really terrible. I think he [Harry Reid] would love it. It would not be good--It would not be good for the Republicans and I-- I think they would try hard, actually, to-- to see that that didn’t happen but I thought the big thing about the Reid interview is that it was not full of reaching out in committee and we can do this together with the Republicans. It was those bad Republicans and that terrible historically bad Tea Party. So I consider that quite suggestive of maybe a bit of a freeze in 2014.

D: Man! Ms. Noonan, you have deliberately misplaced Harry Reid as anticipating another shutdown when you know that the Republican Party membership is the entity that chose to shutdown the United States government in the first place due to its own deliberate miscalculations and obstructionist agenda. And as far as jujutsu, the origin of the Japanese martial art is that you must discipline yourself to defeating an armed opponent without a weapon or, more recently, a small weapon, and redirecting the armed opponent’s energy against himself instead of directly pursuing and attacking him in return.  

M: Dude! Sounds like Peggy Noonan doesn’t even know what she’s talking about. Realistically, aren’t Secretary John Kerry and the President of the United States basically engaging countries around the world in a game of jujutsu without the need for weaponry and subsequent attacks? I think diplomacy is very much like jujutsu, but what would Peggy Noonan know? She’s staunchly against the current Administration’s attempts to negotiate and actually hold onto a path toward peace and equity at home and abroad.  

D: Man! Peggy Noonan is a war enthusiast, I think. Like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham of the GOP, Noonan wants US to be engaged in all-out transnational warfare, as David Sanger described the alternative to the peace talks that John Kerry is engaging in abroad despite the Fallujah setback. I think the GOP Super PAC money goes to fund troublemakers that rouse terrorist groups. That’s the future of the United States Military that the GOP has anticipated since Reagan and Bush. Otherwise, how can you justify the destructive and annihilating war policies of the GOP in Iraq and Afghanistan and the brutally exhausted economies of the two warred countries?

M: Dude! I think this is a good time to quote the absurdities of Ignatius and Sanger. First, David Sanger: What’s happened here is that as America left Iraq and as leaving Afghanistan and as many perceive the U.S. to be pulling back some from the Middle East, something I think a contention that John Kerry would-- would argue with as he’s there now, you have seen a power vacuum develop. And power vacuums get filled in that region by extremist groups. And in this case the extremist group is the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria which is basically an al Qaeda-Sunni affiliate that wants to not only take back Ramadi and Fallujah but the erase the barrier, erase the border between Iraq and Syria, make the Syrian conflict into a trans-national one. The big question is what could President Obama have done differently? And so we went in to Iraq with the concept that we would somehow change the state, and I think we’ve all concluded that there was a fair bit of hubris to that. But when President Obama came out his view was that a light footprint strategy could keep fighting back against al Qaeda and its affiliates. And I think what we’re seeing now, Bob, is that the light footprint which was basically the use of Special Forces, of drones, of cyber, these weapons that don’t involve Americans to go in on the ground very much or stay very long that’s running out of gas.

D: Man! Wait a minute there, Mr. Sanger! Iraq and Syria are two separate but landlocked nations, and you cannot throw onto them the title Islamic Republic because they are respectively the Syrian Arab Republic and the Republic of Iraq. Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, are the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The term Islamic Republic implies that there is a combination of religious and secular elements in governance and there are no monarchies.   

M: Dude! The GOP doesn’t even have the temperance to read and comprehend government documents within the United States, how can they possibly know any of what we are talking about here? Take sharia law, the term used to describe Islamic religious law, not necessarily derived to override civil law and common law. It is a third of the componential parts and consists of two branches itself, the fiqh and the Qanun, and came to truly exist after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE.  

D: Man! The caliphs that reigned after the Prophet’s death, Abu Bakr and Umar, were interesting personalities. Abu Bakr bought and freed slaves and was father to Ayesha, one of Prophet Muhammad’s wives who would become a political figure who spread the word of the Prophet and rebelled against Umar’s caliphate and even fought in a battle contesting the fourth caliphate Uthman.

M: Dude! But didn’t Ali and Umar encourage the Prophet to divorce Ayesha after Safwan brought her back home after her caravan left her behind accidentally?

D: Man! I think a lot of folks in the Prophet’s life were intimidated by Ayesha because of her intellectualism and passion. The Prophet treated her as an academic and equal.

M: Dude! And David Sanger’s totally out of his mind when he affiliated the Sunnis and al Qaeda. That’s how the GOP gets US Military entrenched in warfare with outrageous and deliberate lies that sound too academic the first time you hear them, but erroneous when you actually go back and read the transcripts.

D: Man! Al Qaeda is neither Sunnite nor Shiite! Sunnites follow the Sunnah, the teachings and practices of the Prophet Muhammad, not to be confused with the Shiites who are literally defined as “followers of the Prophet’s cousin Ali” who they consider the first Imam, the true caliph after the Prophet’s death, being a blood relative of the Prophet’s. 

M: Dude! And secondly, David Ignatius: Well, someone, some-- someone, some group of people is going to have to take on al Qaeda in the Euphrates Valley in Syria and Iraq both. And the danger is that we’ve had coalescence of al Qaeda forces that’s being done now by the Maliki government, the Shiite-led Iranian-backed Maliki government of Baghdad. In Syria it’s being done to the extent it’s being done at all by the government of President Bashar al-Assad and elements of-- of the opposition we’ve been trying to back. I mean while I understand David’s point about the big Spenglerian themes of American decline. As I look at the story, I-- I see little mistakes. It wasn’t inevitable or essential that people would stop paying the Sons of Iraq, the tribal fighters in Fallujah which was just overwhelmed this week, in Ramadi, in these cities to stand up against al Qaeda. That was-- it happened because Maliki let it happen and we basically acquiesced. Same thing in Syria. Secretary Clinton, General Petraeus, Secretary Panetta, all of our top National Security officials said in mid 2012, we've got to get started backing rebels who can suppress al Qaeda. We’re going to have a huge problem. The President decided not to do it. It was a-- it wasn’t a huge mistake, it was a small mistake but today that’s what we’re living with. And there’s going to be a new war against al Qaeda in that part of the world. That’s coming.

D: Man! Huh? What’s Spenglerian?

M: Dude! It’s a confusing mess that Wikipedia even acknowledges as having been misquoted by people who had not touched Oswald Spengler’s 1918 The Decline of the West which argued for German hegemony, a term meaning that the German writer believed Germany deserved to influence the European nations as it willed like a confederation.

D: Man! Was he a supporter of Hitler and the Nazis?

M: Dude! I think Hitler and the Nazis took Oswald Spengler’s perspective to an extreme that the pessimist Spengler could not have foreseen. But Spengler was held in esteem by the Nazis until 1933, when he openly sided against their racialist agendas in the book The Hour of Decision.

D: Man! Kind of like how the Brothers Koch and the Walton Siblings and Sheldon Adelson backed Tea Partiers in an attempt against any government regulation and oversight that paved the way to the present-day obstructionist Congressional Republicans.