To the literally [insert very small number] of Americans who depend on TUAK daily for its incisive reporting on the ongoing crisis in the Middle East:
I can’t keep these names straight, and I don’t even try.
The “Khorosan Group” is al-Qaeda. It is simply a faction within the global terror network’s Syrian franchise, “Jabhat al-Nusra.” Its leader, Mushin al-Fadhli (believed to have been killed in this week’s U.S.-led air strikes), was an intimate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the emir of al-Qaeda who dispatched him to the jihad in Syria. Except that if you listen to administration officials long enough, you come away thinking that Zawahiri is not really al-Qaeda, either. Instead, he’s something the administration is at pains to call “core al-Qaeda.”
“Core al-Qaeda,” you are to understand, is different from “Jabhat al-Nusra,” which in turn is distinct from “al-Qaeda in Iraq” (formerly “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” now the “Islamic State” al-Qaeda spin-off that is, itself, formerly “al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Sham” or “al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant”). That al-Qaeda, don’t you know, is a different outfit from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula . . . which, of course, should never be mistaken for “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” “Boko Haram,” “Ansar al-Sharia,” or the latest entry, “al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent.”
Got that? Good! Please don’t try to explain it to me.
Sure glad America spent all that time killing all those people, or the region could be in real trouble.
I never did try to keep it straight and don’t want any explaination either. A good friend of mine is, however, seriously confused because he keeps saying stuff like: “We” HAD to fight the terrorists, of course, and it’s too bad a lot of wrong things were done, but now “we” have to stay there and continue to fight to make up for all the wrong things… and, besides, “we” have to make sure those countries learn democracy so the people can be free…
I just keep telling him I’m not any part of his “we.”
A modern version of ‘Who’s On First’ basically then . . . no wonder all of them look so angry, they don’t even know what to call themselves . . . business card reprinting cost must be outrageous . . .
😛 What difference does it make? Apparently they all wear masks!
Yeah, Mama, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to the folks trying to justify us getting involved, and it usually rests on the “sunk cost” fallacy. You know the one – you’ve got a POS old car, and the transmission breaks, and you spend good money to put a new tranny in it, and now you’ve got to keep spending money to fix it, because you just damn well spent good money on that new transmission, and you can’t give up now!!!
The fact is, you’ve got an old wreck of a car, and you need to stop dumping money into it, no matter how much you’ve already dumped.
The thing is, I try not to get too “I TOLD YOU SO-ey” about Iraq, specifically, because I was 24 when we decided to invade, and I was 100% for the invasion, because, like I said, I was 24.
24 year olds are morons.
The funny thing now is that we’ve got more justification, in my opinion, to intervene and start a war with ISIS than we ever did with Iraq. After all, if it isn’t a valid function of a government to track down and kill barbarians that behead it’s citizens, what, exactly, IS a valid function of government?
Just sayin’.
“what, exactly, IS a valid function of government? ”
NONE that is legitimate. The politicians have “authorized” something like 60 trillion in debt, to be paid for with property and lives stolen from generations to come – just for starters. Governments have murdered many millions of their own people just in the last 100 years. From where do they get authority to do anything at all? Who are the barbarians???
What the folks in Iraq or anywhere else do is their own problem. If they decide to come to your door to attack you, then it becomes your problem.
Anyone should certainly be free to offer their services to go fight the beheaders or help defend their neighbors… but not expect to get paid with stolen goods. Would keep the “wars” down to a dull roar.