Border Guards Then and Now by Mark Steyn
http://www.steynonline.com/6438/border-guards-then-now
Eleven years ago, a few weeks after the fall of Saddam, I drove from Amman through the eastern Jordanian desert and into Iraq, where I stopped in the westernmost town, Rutbah, an old refueling stop for Imperial Airways flights from Britain to India, and had a bite to eat at a cafe whose patron had a trilby pushed back on his head Sinatra-style. (It was the first stop on a motoring tour that took me through Ramadi and Fallujah and up to Tikrit and various other towns.)
In those days, the Iraqi side of the border post was manned by US troops. An “immigration official” from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment glanced at my Canadian passport, exchanged a few pleasantries, and waved me through.
That same border post today is manned by head-hacking jihadists from ISIS:
Fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaeda breakaway group, took all the border crossings with Jordan and Syria, Hameed Ahmed Hashim, a member of the Anbar provincial council, said by telephone yesterday. Militants took Rutba, about 145 kilometers (90 miles) east of the Jordanian border, Faleh al-Issawi, the deputy chief of the council, said by phone. Anbar province in western Iraq borders both countries. The Jordanian army didn’t immediately respond to a request for information about the situation on the border.
I should think not. The Jordanian official I met was charming if somewhat bureaucratically obstructive, and wound up asking me about how difficult it was to emigrate to Canada. More difficult than emigrating from Syria to Iraq:
Rutba gives ISIS control over a stretch of highway to Jordan that has fallen into infrequent use over the past several months because of the deteriorating security situation. The town has a population of 40,000, but it has recently absorbed 20,000 people displaced from Fallujah and Ramadi.
ISIS now controls much of the Iraq-Syria border. Taking crossings such as the one in Qaim allows them to more easily move weapons and heavy equipment. Rebels also control the Syrian side of the crossing.
The Iraq/Syria border no longer exists: ISIS has simply erased the Anglo-French settlement of 1922. Jordan has just one border post with Iraq – the one I crossed all those years ago – and it’s asking an awful lot of these lads to be more respectful of Jordan’s sovereignty than they’ve been of Iraq’s or Syria’s. This thought has apparently just occurred to Barack Obama, who thinks that sounding presidential is largely a matter of stating the obvious:
Obama told CBS in an interview that will be aired in full today that the fighting could spread to “allies like Jordan.”
Gee, thanks, genius.
In her interview with Dick Cheney, Megyn Kelly mocked that line about how we’d be “greeted as liberators”. In May 2003, I wasn’t a liberator, but I was pretty much greeted as one by the majority of the fellows I encountered in the Sunni Triangle. The towns were rundown but intact, with only two signs that anything dramatic had happened: The giant portraits of Saddam mounted on plinths at every rinky-dink roundabout had been removed. But they’d been very neatly, almost surgically removed: it was an act not of vandalism, but of political hygiene. A few weeks earlier, you’d have noticed the dictator; now you were supposed to notice his absence. In Rutba and Ramadi and the other western towns, you’d also see the occasional fancy house with decorative stonework and gates and doors hanging off the hinges with the odd goat or donkey wandering through the compound defecating hither and yon. These were the pads of the local Baathist bigshots, who’d taken off in a hurry, and they were the only scenes of looting I saw.
The picture of Ramadi above was taken on Saturday. I saw nothing like that in 2003.
If you had asked me, in that cafe in Rutba 11 years ago, as I was enjoying what passed for the “mixed grill” with mein host, what utter defeat would look like in a single image, it would be the scene that now greets you in the western desert: An Iraqi border post staffed by hardcore jihadists from an al-Qaeda spin-off. The details are choice – the black flag of al-Qaeda flies from buildings built by American taxpayers, they drive vehicles paid for by American taxpayers, they shoot aircraft out of the sky with Stinger missiles donated by American taxpayers – and thousands of their footsoldiers are nominally Britons, Frenchmen, Aussies, Canucks, Americans and other western citizens for whom the open road in Iraq, decapitating as they go, is the greatest adventure of their lives. But, as I said, these are details. The central image – the al-Qaeda man at the border post – is in itself an image of complete and utter defeat.
Where next? With Syrian refugees expanding the population of his country by 25 per cent, I wonder how Jordan’s King Abdullah feels about being an “ally” of Obama’s. Perhaps he nodded his head at the reported comments of the Polish Foreign Minister – that being a US ally “isn’t worth anything” and is “even harmful because it creates a false sense of security”. No matter how secure that false sense is, waking up to find yourself sharing a border crossing with ISIS is apt to shatter it.
The roots of ISIS do not lie in the actions America took in 2003. Bush made mistakes in Iraq, and left a ramshackle state that functioned less badly than any of its neighbors. Obama walked away, pulled out a cigarette, tossed the match over his shoulder and ignited a fuse that, from Damascus to Baghdad to Amman and beyond, will blow up the entire Middle East.
Back in America, the coastal sophisticates joke at those knuckle-dragging rubes who believe Obama is some kind of “secret Muslim”. But really Occam’s razor would favor such an explanation, wouldn’t it? That a post-American Middle East divided between bad-cop nuclear Shia and worse-cop head-hacking Sunni was the plan all along. Because there are only alternatives to that simplest of simple explanations:
The first is that Obama and the Z-graders who fill out his administration are just blundering buffoons. And we all know from Michael Beschloss that he’s the smartest president ever, so it couldn’t possibly be colossal stupidity on a scale unknown to American history, could it?
The second is that his contempt for American power – a basic class signifier in the circles in which he’s moved all his life – is so deeply ingrained that he doesn’t care what replaces it.
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