Remember the movie "Ghostbusters?" Of course you do. Well the other day, while musing about the latest "kinetic action" - as Pentagon brass like to call it - in Iraq and now Syria, I remembered a scene in that movie. It was when the self-righteous little bureaucrat inspector put the kibosh on the three bad-ass ghostbuster guys and released the "evil spirits" they'd captured and suppressed. All hell broke loose.
Now, don't get me wrong here, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Col. Kadafy and the Taliban in Afghanistan were hardly as admirable as the three fictional ghostbusters. Still they had served pretty much the same duty by holding the multitude of evil Islamic spirits in a containment, albeit, brutally.
When we unseated them through "kinetic actions" we also affected the release of a thousand years of evil spirits on those countries. And, of course, all hell broke loose.
In the movie the ghostbusters prevailed in the end. But who will round up the evil spirits in the Middle East that our arrogance and ignorance unleashed?
I listened to Obama at the UN today, justifying more "kinetic action," like a bar room psychiatrist advising a fellow drunk that the best cure for a what ailed him is just another stiff shot of the dog that bit him.
It's become a cliche, but it's also true: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome."
So, here we are doing the same thing in Iraq and, just for good measure, in Syria as well. The justification is that the latest evil spirits of our own making, ISIS, are so awful we have to unseat them now too.
And if we succeed in this latest endeavor, by doing the same things that created them in the first place, then what? Who will take their place? What evil spirits will arise this time to scare Americans - (See Bill Maher on that one.)
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