Islamic State

[Anomalocaris]

This topic is really starting to enrage me. People are right to condemn ISIL, but what is said of Saudi Arabia beheading people for non-violent crimes, including sorcery. Our reaction to SA; buy oil and sell them military equipment. The entire region is filled with barbaric religious lunatics. What to do?

You recommend supporting Assad, but our disastrous track record of supporting different regimes gives me concern about supporting anyone. I know this will sound inhumane, but I think we should totally walk away from the region. Let them wipe each other off the face of the Earth.

We don't want to impose an regime of unfettered evolution by violent selection upon the Middle East, and at the end find ourselves facing the fittest that emerges. In fact that had been the single unifying theme of the whole western policy towards the Middle East since 1918. Break up the Arab world in such a way that secular sphere of influence clashes with ethnoreligious spheres of influence, and then beat down whichever appear to gain ascendancy over the other. Inserting a Jewish state into the middle can be seen as part of this effort.

One might argue a dominate theme of internal political development of Arab world had been to push back on the arbitrary division of Arab world along conflict inducing lines, and unify the Arab world into a power block on the world stage. First it was the secular panarabism, of which Baathist parties of Syria, Egypt and Iraq were the champions. They were discredited by their failure to root out Israel. Now it's the turn of ethnoreligious forces to try to redraw Arab world along ethnoreligious lines.

I doubt that would change now.