Militants accidentally set off their own car bomb Monday at a training camp in the countryside north of Baghdad, leaving 21 dead and resulting in two dozen arrests, Iraqi officials said.

Iraq: Militants Set off Own Car Bomb, 21 Dead – ABC News – 2/10/2014.

To even comment on the Islamic Small Wars anywhere would seem to require great aptitude for quadratic equations: extremists x moderates / Sunni vs Shiite / KSA vs Iran / USA vs (for now) Russia.

Make it stop!

No wonder Buddha laughs.

The headline snapshot tells the story: “ISIL” and others are doing their now familiar thing while their opposition struggles to contain their energies and deconstruct their motivations.

Not that the headlines say that.

🙂

However, one sees the meting of death associated with ISIL aggression and terrorism and the response in a) boosted contractor presence and deliveries of war fighting machinery and materiel all around, and b) appeals for chit-chat and threats against clerics that incite anti-government violence.  That “b” part may prove the more powerful route in that the fighting and its apparent penalties simply fail to quell surface religious and underlying psychological (narcissistic) motivations for violence as a means of assertion and channel to power over others.

The “God Mob” is never about God: it’s about itself and its own capture by a seemingly inescapable script — and one guaranteed to destroy its cast of players by hoisting them high on their own hubris.

* * *

I open all headers I list but no longer care to scrape quotes from all, and some just get a glance.  However, I recommend for reading the Assyrian International News Agency’s relay from Strategy Page, “Al Qaeda in Iraq Declares A Fight to the Death.”

I wonder if that might not turn out like Eve’s death, where God had promised her she would die if she ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, while the snake, contradicting God but animated by God as well, assures her she will not die.  Indeed, with the bite of the apple, our blithe and oblivious Eve disappear, as good as dead, but then becomes the woman human we know as aware, self-aware, possessed of conscience, and seductive, God bless her, which well He has.

To ask a man to disbelieve, modify, or reconsider tenets of faith that a) either excuse evil that for various reasons he may naturally wish to do, or b) actually motivate that evil, is like asking the sleeper to wake from his nightmare, or, here reverting to the account of the emerging consciousness of humanity, to wake up from oblivion, come down from his dream, and experience with great empathy a more common — yet also more noble — human condition.

So ye gods of war: wake up!

You are needed elsewhere.

______

Baghdad Urges KRG Action Against Clerics Inciting Violence – 2/10/2014.

Iraq: Calls for peaceful resolution in Anbar « ASHARQ AL-AWSAT – 2/10/2014.

Activists: ISIS top commander killed in Syria | Al Bawaba – 2/8/2014.

Al Qaida takes 3 more towns, expands reach beyond Anbar province | World Tribune – 2/6/2014.

Al Qaeda in Iraq Declares A Fight To The Death – 2/6/2014.

Role of U.S. Contractors Grows as Iraq Fights Insurgents – WSJ.com – 2/3/2014.

Report: U.S. withdrawal left behind an Iraqi government unequal to the challenge | World Tribune – 1/30/2014.

The Economist explains: What ISIS, an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, really wants | The Economist – 1/20/2014.

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