Monkeys, the IS and the US
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But this is a rerun, right? Oceania, Afghanistan … That strange sense of deja vu you are feeling now - congratulations, it simply means you remember what happened to Saddam and Najibullah when the zookeepers were replaced. In particular, the example of Najibullah must strike a chord - despite being a fellow Pashtun, the Taliban had him castrated and dragged behind a truck over the streets of Kabul to his death before his body (and that of his brother, who was given the same treatment) was left hanging in the town center to announce the establishment of the "emirate".
IS may have considered the folks they crucified last weekend as the sort of people who could benefit from the US$500 million or so that President Barack Obama sought from his lawmakers to arm the "moderate" folks fighting both the Syrian regime and IS. Whether they were any of those things, we will never know: all that IS wanted to communicate to anyone even thinking about taking US money was - take a look at the corpses dangling in the town center.
Why all the barbarity accompanying regime change in the Muslim world? Did their mothers forget to teach them proper table manners? Perhaps, but the more likely explanation is that the acts of barbarity - Saddam, Najibullah and now those poor souls crucified by the IS - are all examples of effective announcements concerning regime change. How else would the populace accept that "sour apples" are now "bad" while "bananas" are "good", or, indeed, vice versa when the next regime pops up.
This is all very Orwellian, isn't it: the nightmares of populations living under mutually contradictory alliances in the totalitarian nation-states of Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia. For those in the Middle East, these three states are respectively the ancient dictators, US-backed "new" democrats and terrorist organizations like the Taliban or the IS. One cannot envy their choices.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-06-030714.html
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