(8:21): “Terrorists and ISIS want to make this place just like all the others by killing and committing crimes here.”

VICE interviewer Danny Gold tweets as @DGisSERIOUS.

The web would seem to be coming along for near real time experience of the world’s war zones.  This environment from field signal to page makeup to Twitter publicity to blog to reader is not another generation’s evening network news: I’m not holding my breath but am waiting for the waves of live remote feeds to come marching over the virtual berms at any time.

Par for the middle east course and evident in the above clip: deeply shared Kurdish and Arab tribal animus, and that with each attempting to align the other with ISIS (of the two, I would suggest the Kurds have the more coherent view of the fighting and how it will play both to their autonomy, defense, and expansion).

The “love of the land” also plays in the Kurdish script as regards how things should be and, therefore, how events should unfold for the Kurds as a people free — self-determining — in their own lands.

We shall see how that motivation plays in the coming days.

ISIS appears to be its own wild and piratical machine.

In fact, ISIS reminds me of the al-Shabaab saga in Somalia in which Islamic anarchists, essentially, have long terrorized the state, at times controlling the bulk of it, at others finding their footprint reduced to their southern reaches.  To this day, they’re still part of the Somali landscape and proven capable of instigating or conducting attacks on targets in their vicinity.  One expects that even a smashed ISIS will continue spinning around Iraq’s landscape as a human version of the chemist’s “free radical”.

While ISIS makes progress in Iraq it has also gotten itself surrounded by either natural enemies or enemies it has been making on its beyond-all-limits killing spree in Iraq.  It’s presence has urged a nation to its feet, but the same today has many different kinds of feet, and they seem not to want to advance in the same direction.

Externals: the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei becomes now the dictator Khamenei-Assad-Putin driving a Russia-aligned Shiite bloc against the Saudi sphere’s NATO-aligned Sunni bloc, the same that was to have produced a modern people’s revolution in Syria.  Probably, that alignment has run its course, worn itself out, and pushed the White House into deep reconsideration of how to sort out the middle east for its own sake, for oil, and for NATO’s existence and the values it promotes.

Aside: America’s chief oil suppliers have been Canada and Mexico, and as American energy policy produces greater flexibility in access to crude, one may expect related politics to follow.

Back to Iraq: It turns out deposing Saddam the Tyrannical was the easy part.  Then too, perhaps the way in always is, for everything else having to do with the middle east has been twisted up, torn apart, patched back together, and totally fucked up beyond all repair (FUBAR).

Oh Bummer!

What next?

We shall see.

Soon.

Just about as fast as it happens.

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