Iraq and ISIS in brutal crisis

In June of 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (commonly referred to as ISIS) went on the offensive in Northern Iraq. Cities won with the blood of American combatants a decade ago are now back in the hands of a brutal insurgency bent on establishing an Islamic state. In fact, they claim to have created the state and refer to themselves simply as the Islamic State. So brutal that Al-Qaeda severed ties with them, they have overrun a great deal of Northern Iraq, and are accumulating a massive amount of equipment and wealth. After capturing the central bank of Mosul and its reserve of currency and gold bullion, ISIS now has assets estimated to total two billion dollars, making it the best-funded insurgency group around.
The conquest of Northern Iraq not only yielded money, but equipment. America has sent huge amounts of weapons and gear to Iraq, and now it’s in the hands of ISIS. Combat footage shows ISIS in American gear and helmets, carrying American rifles and driving American armor.
How nobody in leadership saw this coming is completely beyond me. The idiocy rampant in Washington is the only thing to blame for this, creating a pro-American, anti-Sunni puppet government in Iraq will invariably create a pro-Sunni insurgency. If sectarian violence is to end, one side cannot be supported more than the other, equality and compromise must be reached.
There’s an old saying about those who don’t know history being doomed to repeat it, but it’s those who know history who are doomed to sit around and watch everybody else make the same mistakes over and over. Policing the world hasn’t worked anywhere in the last 200 years, and nothing about the Middle East is any different.
There is no clearer example of the failure of American “representative” government than America’s meddling overseas and engaging in these pointless wars. Americans don’t want war, we don’t want our soldiers to be sent overseas to fight and die only to have those fights rendered meaningless, and we don’t want to spend trillions and trillions of dollars to pursue the bleeding edge of blowing-people-up technology.
Obama promised change, but there is no change. The same tedious repetition of insurgency, funding one rebel group over the other, toppling regimes and installing the friends of politicians in power goes on and on across the region. Mostly the only thing that has changed is the anti-war left, Americans vocal against George Bush the second and Pax Americana, those who held demonstrations and rallies and marched against war. The anti-war left has in fact left. No more huge demonstrations against Obama’s drone strikes, against Obama’s direct funding of Al-Qaeda, and the short-sightedness that turned Fallujah from a symbol of American determination in battle into another Hanoi, another failure and waste of life.
The same old song and dance hasn’t worked before and the DJ doesn’t seem inclined to change the record. Politicians haven’t changed, policies haven’t changed and outcomes haven’t changed. Change cannot come from the promises of presidents, but can only come from the citizens, the majority, those of us who are alleged to be the underpinnings of democracy.