ISIS and Adultery

We’ve all been watching the conflict in Syria and Iraq involving a group called ISIS, or ISIL, or IS, the Islamic State. They are a group of literalist fundamentalist Muslims. According to a recent article in The Atlantic, literally literalist, as in every exact word in the Koran interpreted as if we were living in the 8^th century. They emerged out of the centuries old Sunni-Shia conflict combined with Saudi financing and the anarchic power vacuum created by Western intervention. Iraq went from being governed by an oppressive Sunni minority to a vengeful Shia majority, while the Alawite Shia government in Syria got weakened by a Sunni rebellion. Chaos plus revenge plus opportunity plus absolutist religious schism equals bad craziness.

My guess is that eventually even the backers of ISIS will realize that the movement has outlived its usefulness. A slowly growing consensus among Arab states is emerging, that they need to engage in some collective action. And ISIS will find, as we did, that conquering Iraq and governing it are two different things.

In the meantime, a lot of pixels have been dedicated to the debate over the religious justifications of ISIS, the inherent violence in Islam (or not), and who determines the proper interpretation of a religion.

I’d like to point out that it is a damned good thing that we don’t have any literal Christian literalists in the U.S. Sure, we have people who claim to be biblical literalists, but they ignore great swathes of Deuteronomy and Leviticus that would get them punted into a secure psychiatric facility. Give those two books a read sometime and imagine some suburban megachurch-goers burning entrails on the front steps of their drive-in cathedral or sprinkling blood (seven times with the right forefinger, facing east) on the altar. It would add an edge to those “gospel of prosperity” sermons, but would probably get them a psychiatric evaluation as well. Read “The Year of Living Biblically” for a funny take on trying to be a literal literalist.

The table manners of the Old Testament are one thing, but then there’s the smiting. From just a cursory reading a literal-literalist would find it necessary to kill:

Blasphemers

Sabbath Breakers

Disobedient Children

Teachers of a foreign religion

Apostates

Adulterers

I mean, Moses had his people stone a guy to death for picking up sticks on the Sabbath. Picking up sticks? It doesn’t bode well for millions of convenience store clerks, restaurant employees, and factory shift workers.

For the moment I’d like to focus on the last one, adultery. The lowest numbers I can find in national polls are a 14% infidelity rate for married women and 22% for married men. Given about 120 million married people in the U.S. that works out to 10.8 million adulterers. Talk about an epic slaughter. It got me thinking about the logistics.

Let’s say it takes about 100 fist sized rocks to properly stone one of these sinners to death. I might be understating the case, but it’s a round number. That’s about 1.5 cubic feet of stone, so to do the whole job properly would take about 600,000 cubic yards of stone. That’s 60,000 10-yard dump trucks. Owners of heavy equipment and gravel pits would be way into Christian literalism. You might say, “People could just pick up stones off the ground,” but try to find 100 fist sized stones in one place in Manhattan or L.A. Or the sandy regions of Georgia, for that matter. I suppose people could wash the stones off and reuse them, but 1) ew, and 2) it would really slow down the process.

It would be labor intensive as well. 10.8 million stonings would overwork even the most ardent Christians. If you are a literal-literalist Christian, be prepared to spend your evenings with your pitching elbow in a bucket of ice. Stock up on Ibuprofen. You’ll end up with bone spurs, eroded cartilage and probably a torn rotator cuff.  I could see “Stoner’s Elbow” becoming a thing. But hey, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, right?

Of course, if a group of Christians went literally literalist on us I can imagine a coalition of blasphemers, adulterers, Sabbath-workers and other-religionists (including non-literalists) organizing to oppose them. “Everybody Must Get Stoned” is kind of funny when Dylan sings it, but not when actual rocks start to fly.

It would be like present day Syria and Iraq. Except Christian. This is one of the few instances when I am perfectly happy about hypocrisy.

Getting Played, Again, and How to Predict the Future

ISIS, ISIL, IS, Khorosan, and so on. It’s time for bombing again. Time for just a few boots on the ground again. Time for aid to doubtful “allies” again. Time for completely mishandling the situation, yet again. It’s time to get played again, by the propaganda masters in the deserts of the Middle East and offices in Washington, D.C., for they are symbiotic. Both need a legitimate enemy, the more hateful and frightening the better.

The timing of our about-face on Saddam Hussein (remember him?) was not random. We lost our legitimate enemy, the Soviets, and needed a new one. Hence our message to him, through Ambassador Glaspie, that “..your Arab vs. Arab conflicts are of no interest to us. We view them as an internal matter.” This, when he was massing troops on the Kuwaiti border, a week before invading.

This is why we never pressed our agreement with the Taliban government of Afghanistan to cooperate on the killing of Osama bin Laden back in 2000.  The military industrial complex and its servants needed bin Laden. He was so much more valuable out there somewhere.

Well, Hussein was hanged and bin Laden was shot, so what is the military-security-fear industry to do? 12,000 Sunni rebels have flowed into the vacuum created by our Shia-ization of the Iraqi state (de-Baathification, meaning purging Sunnis from the Iraqi military) and the near destruction of the Syrian state. They face 195,000 Kurdish fighters and a similar number of Iraqi soldiers, plus the Syrian military. And they are, somehow, an existential threat to us. So we are told. Billions of dollars surge into the accounts of bomb, missile, and aircraft manufacturers. Security firms get their share of the take. Looks as if the war on whoever is next in line will go on forever. 

How to predict the future of U.S. foreign policy: It will be done in the most expensive way possible. Effectiveness is irrelevant. Capital intensiveness is the predictor. This includes intelligence, military operations, humanitarian foreign aid, the works. Most of this money will be stuffed into the accounts of large corporations.

Bombs are the ultimate in planned obsolescence; make it (in secrecy), transport it, drop it, buy another. Political negotiations are labor intensive and capital light, and therefore undesirable to the military industrial complex.

This ties into the whole concept of supply side versus demand side solutions. The corporate conglomerate that runs this country prefers supply side solutions. Drugs? Spend billions trying to interdict the supply and imprison users and dealers. Oil? Spend billions protecting international supplies and developing domestic sources (even though we only have 3% of world reserves). Terrorism? Spend billions on weapons and surveillance.  Fail, fail, fail. If we spent a tenth of the money on demand side management, meaning drug treatment, energy efficiency, humanitarian aid, plus some effort at political reconciliation, we’d get better results. The problem, in the eyes of the CEOs, is that we’d spend a tenth of the money.

So, we get played again. The debate in the corporate media isn’t about a range of responses to ISIS, it’s about the range of *military* responses.

Here are a couple of ideas, thrown into the public debate like a pine tree air freshener into a sewage treatment plant.

Tell the Iraqi government to get some Sunnis into real positions of power and to rein in the Shiite militias or we’re out of there. No money, no weapons, the Green Zone empty. Reconciliation, REAL reconciliation, or they are on their own. If they don’t reconcile their factions the whole place will implode no matter what we do.

Tell the auto makers that they will double their fleet mileage in five years or we’ll nationalize them (in the case of U.S. manufacturers) or ban them. When they scream, point out that we are having a serious crisis and refer them to the companies that converted from typewriters to rifles in 1942. That would eventually lower worldwide oil demand by about 5%, which in turn would temporarily collapse the price of oil, leaving the Russians and the Middle Eastern monarchies extremely short of cash. Work out the knock-on effects for yourself.

Ban speculation in energy commodities. If you buy the futures, you have to take physical delivery from the tanker. That would knock 20-40% off the price of oil all by itself. See Russians and M.E. royalty, above.

Defund a few gold plated weapons systems and sink the money into nationwide energy efficiency programs. Aim for a 20% reduction in oil use. See R’s and M.E.R., above.

But this won’t happen. Go back to the link under, “Billions of dollars surge into the accounts of bomb, missile, and aircraft manufacturers.” Look at the timing of stock price increases of all the major players in the military supply chain. Middle East chaos isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Everything I write on policy comes back to corporate power and money in politics.