Dick Cheney, Meet Your Future Sidekick, "Jihadi John" ( And Yes, You Two Really Are on the Same Side)

  

ISIS was created by the disintegration of Iraq during the United States invasion.  This phenomenon of war is called unintended consequences.   Thoughtful foreign policy and intelligence analysts pleaded with the White House not to go to war with Iraq, however much we despised its leader. But alas, America is a bully and thought it could "whip Arab asses" and any ones would do (even those of his sworn enemy -- Saddam Hussein) since Osama bin Laden couldn't at the time be found . So, I will begin this post with the good news.  It is that ISIS has not beheaded 133,000 innocent civilians, which would have included women and children. Their gruesome execution list still hovers in the dozens.   I did not pluck that number out of a hat. It's the most conservative figure being given by U.S. and European sources for the civilian deaths in America's 8 year invasion of Iraq.  Since that war was as meaningless as the ISIS killings we are now watching on Youtube, it would seem that the only real difference between the two slaughter-fests apart from scale is cinematography.  Nobody bothered to film all the dead mothers lying in the streets, clutching limbs and pieces of their equally dead children killed in our bombings.  Then too, no cameras captured the rotting corpses of countless civilians slaughtered in the collapse of Iraq's central authority and all that it has entailed including the rise of ISIS.

I'm not writing this blog post to offer a simplistic solution to an insoluble problem.  I'm really just here to make an observation.   Maybe being the world's sole superpower means never having to say you're sorry, regardless of what havoc you have unleashed upon the world.  Unfortunately for the rest of us, it doesn't mean that innocent civilians will not bear the brunt of those unintended consequences.  On a more individual level, psychopaths parading as vice presidents, defense secretaries or religious zealots often bond with one another through a ritual interchange of innocent dead bodies.