Cowboy Confessional

Has Allah turned his back on Usama?

Being one of those rare critters who believes there is a God, but who also realizes mine is merely a belief, I shake my head at people who are frighteningly certain.  No mortal can prove or disprove the existence of a being beyond human comprehension – it is a logical impossibility.  Thus the atheist is as ignorant as the Pope, though the Pope’s line of work appears to be a bit more profitable.

You would think with all the Vatican’s money they could afford to buy the Pope a better looking hat.

Thus, every flavor of religious zealot postulating on God’s will is, ipso facto, an imbecile, charlatan or professional thief.  Pat Robertson’s claim that Haiti suffers due to an unprovable deal with the Devil assumes either God a passive aggressive with homicidal tendencies, or that the Devil actually has muscle.  Either way it is pure speculation designed not to increase enlightenment but to increase revenue.

Pat is a discount version of the Pope.

The inability of theologians to admit their collective cluelessness makes giving kudos to Islamic madmen painful.  Yet I am forced to acknowledge that jihadist psychopaths have the minor advantage of uncertainty.  While promoting their mass murder, they routinely utter “Allah willing,” a sign that they understand God’s will is both uncertain and indeterminable.

Which is why it is safe to say that Allah has abandoned Usama.

If we stipulate that there is a God and that he/she/it is active in the daily mismanagement of the human race, then Usama bin Laden’s latest radio rant is further evidence that Allah is unwilling to help Usama or his cruel cause.  While claiming to be behind the failed “underwear bomber”, and to be the sponsor of Palestinian violence, bin Laden says quite bluntly “God willing, our raids on you will continue as long as your support for the Israelis continues.”

So Usama, how’s that going for you?  Let’s tally a scorecard, shall we?  After 9/11 and your slaughtering 3,000 people who were guilty only of arriving at work on time, what has happened to your cause?

• Your base in Afghanistan was eradicated and your central command was cast to the winds, thrown into disarray.

• Allah willed that Iraq be invaded, and that by exposure to American soldiers, lies about Americans were unmasked.

• Your top field commanders have been killed or captured, including the stout Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (really, given the desert diet he was on before capture, you would think he would have dropped a few pounds).

• The kill ratio between soldiers and your men in Pakistan is 10:1 against you.

• Iran, the progenitor of Islamic revolution and state-sponsored terror, is surrounded by coalition forces and on the verge of being bombed by the Israelis.

• Your boy on the flight 253 couldn’t even ignite his britches correctly, scorching his junk (talk about a hot date).

So Usama, what has been Allah’s will?  Unless God is on a prolonged nap, it would appear that his/her/its will opposes yours.  Allah is whizzing in your face and having hearty laugh while doing so (well, if I were God I certainly would be).  If the Old Testament is anywhere near accurate, locust swarms exiting your arse will be next, and your 72 virgins will all be teenage male computer nerds with Star Trek fetishes.

Or if Allah has a really warped sense of humor, your own men will kill you in your sleep and dump your carcass into an unmarked grave.  Cold, inconspicuous death for the world’s most prolific living mass murderer has the subtle irony that only a divine being could carry out.

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Shortly after 9/11, I said that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Iran.

Being a strategist by nature, bin Laden knew that once the Twin Towers collapsed, he would be a hunted man. He also would have realized that hiding in the mountains of Tora Bora would make him findable and killable — no strategist would ever consider escaping into a wide-open dead-end alley or a place that could be nuked without regret.

However, slipping into Iran offered bin Laden both protection and production facilities necessary to continue the propaganda end of his global terror operation. In post 9/11 video tapes we see bin Laden in clean clothes, in climate controlled rooms and otherwise looking like your typical urban Arab. He was not hiding in a cave — he was hiding in a penthouse.

Today comes word that some of Osama’s closest kin have been seen in an Iranian compound. A wife and kid who were in Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks have been spotted outside Tehran, and they have contacted bin Laden family elsewhere. The most innocent reading of this news shows that bin Laden had an operational understanding with the Iranian theocracy, providing his immediate family shelter. A more strategic reading indicates that Osama scooted west, not east, after the towers fell.

And now Iran is making nuclear bombs.

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To the victor go the spoils, until such time as spoiled children set fire to the booty.

Like dysfunction siblings, San Francisco cannot be fully understood without occasionally examining near-by Berkeley, or as we locals commonly refer to the joint, Bizerkley. A volcanic center of free speech and psychedelic dissension in the 1960s, Berkeley has never since been normal. Like San Francisco, its abnormality is part of its charm.

Berkeley is also home to a branch of the University of California. Ever left leaning (despite College Republicans being the largest campus organization aside from Fabulous Frank’s Friday Beer Bash), students there will protest everything from war to the color of split pea soup served at the cafeteria (they wanted purple). In recent years a small horde of them perched like featherless fowl in some trees which they preferred the University not topple.

Being of the socialists metal caste (or is the proper spelling in this instance cast?), when anyone dares insist that Berkeley students pay for their education, another protest is certain. This week has seen any number of 1960’s style takeovers of public property, triggered by having tuition and fees hiked. Semi-violent altercations occurred between students too busy protesting to study, and other undergrads trying to get to class. Cops handcuffed a few to end their adverse occupation of campus buildings. Health Services sophomores, too stoned from experimenting with pharmaceuticals, left on their own and haven’t been seen since.

Others firebombed the chancellor’s house.

Near midnight about 75 suspects students surrounded the chancellor’s chambers, which is quite appropriately referred to as a mansion. Recycling, being mandatory in Berkeley, caused these obstreperous offspring to regurgitate decades old slogans such as “No justice, no peace” as their broke windows, smashed planters and attempted to torch the joint. Evidentially nobody from the campus ROTC or engineering department participated, otherwise the building would have fallen. See kids, stay in class and learn the proper way to destroy structures.

Berkeley kiddies went kooky due to perceived inequities. Because California is enduring a financial meltdown (primarily from overly generous and routinely gamed public employee compensation), the University system budget was cut and the number of new enrollees was reduced. To compensate, the regents (a word whose root is the same as regency) decided not only to increase student tuition and fees, but also their salaries along with as those of upper echelon managers and faculty.

The lords grew fat and the peasants decided to eat them.

In California and Washington D.C., the same play is performed with nausea-inducing regularity and perpetually bad reviews. People in power explain-away why their salaries should inflate after bankrupting their respective governments and agencies. Doing so in times of prosperity goes largely unnoticed because voters are too busy conspicuously consuming. In tough times, when paychecks have vanished, unemployment insurance is depleted, and homes foreclose, such action incites mobs. Berkley students are a little misguided, angry at having to pay a fuller portion of the full cost of their education. But as they exit their experimental drug haze, they realize that the true problem is that the game is rigged – that those making the rules do so in their own interest. Indeed Berkeley students may be leading a trend in aggressive management of the managers of public (mis)trust.

Welcome to libertarianism kids. It is quite enjoyable once the throbbing in your head dissipates.

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It bears repeating: Barack Obama is not the brightest bulb on the homo sapiens marquee.

Listening to local liberals one would think Obama was equal parts Einstein and da Vinci and that the next epoch of enlightenment will soon radiate from any of his immaculate orifices. Fact is Obama’s depth of policy knowledge is slightly shallower than the substance of his stump speeches, which is measured in negative increments.

(I will admit to experiencing fiendish joy in telling my left-of-center friends that Obama is an oaf. Confronted by the flipside of their religious beliefs, they are slammed into momentary silence, which in the San Francisco region creates transient political bliss.)

One need not look far or ponder deeply before Obama’s aurora is shown to be passing light and not passing for enlightenment.

Economics: In the opening months Obama confidently proclaimed his political payback slush fund (a.k.a. “stimulus bill”) would cause unemployment to peak at 8.5%, though it now stands 10.2%.

Foreign policy: He claimed open engagement with hostile nations and NGO warriors would stabilize the world, yet Iran is inches away from detonating their first atomic bomb and Obama’s March of 2009 Grand Strategy for Afghanistan is now in shambles, being presently rethought and dithered.

Deficit: Obama claimed all bills he signed would be deficit neutral, yet the public debt has risen nearly a trillion dollars during his brief tenure and his anti-constitutional hijacking of health insurance promises another trillion.

When confronted with these demonstrable facts, Bay Area lefties retort that Obama is certainly smarter than George Bush, to which I reply “Setting the bar kinda low, ain’t ya?”

In most news cycles I conclude Obama could not present himself in a more ignorant light if he tried, and I am continuously proven wrong. But this week, in one decision, he made George Bush appear a genius by comparison. That’s one hell-of-a feat. Obama is wining a race to the bottom, making Bush the cream of the crap.

In his nonsensical zeal to close the prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Obama decided to bring the second most notorious (living) terrorist to the scene of the crime, downtown New York. Though perhaps poetic in appeal, the logistical non-necessity and potential for disaster are huge.

I fear blood will drip from Obama’s fingertips.

Anyone who has not been smoking crack for the last two decades (ala Eric Holder) recalls there were two attacks on the World Trade Center, the second of which succeeded in gruesome fashion. The prior pursuit involved detonating rental trucks in the underground garage, and though terrifying, did relatively little damage. The jihadists (who incidentally were slightly brighter than Obama, despite trying to get their deposit back on a truck blow into a billion bits) were to be sentenced in a New York court on 9/12/2001, a day before the second attack.

Few people think the timing was coincidental.

Keeping in mind that the 1993 twin tower trouble players were pawns, you can imagine what mischief Osama bin Laden is planning when his lead co-conspirator is sentenced in the same city. Terrorists thrive on spectacle, and not the Hollywood musical variety (though the thought of bin Laden performing a tap dance in a sequined bodice is an amusing visual, surpassed in entertainment value only by the visual of his forehead intercepting a .45 caliber slug from my pistol). They deal in dead bodies and high population regions like downtown New York are what military strategists call “target rich environments.”

What al Qaeda is already cooking-up will make 9-11 look blissful.

Ignore for a moment that hundreds of years of military court history provides the legal means and methods for conducting afar fair trails and summary executions if required/desired (we might prefer to keep Khalid kicking for our amusement). This issue is about location, location, location. Gitmo provides interesting advantages, not the least of which is that the only two ways for rescue terrorists to enter the island is through U.S. Navy machine guns fire or a communist dictatorship. To reach New York they merely need Canadian passports or Mexican coyotes. Big cities are the easiest in which to hide. Try being of stranger of Middle Eastern descent in Shallow Water, Kansas instead. Odds are you’ll be noticed.

In short, the imbecilic illuminati decided to make security impossible and New Yorkers targets.

Assuming there is some strategic advantage to holding civil instead military trails (which there is not), Obama’s questionable location is a jaw dropper. The Federal Courts are flexible and the crimes in question are not location specific – the crime was part of a declared act of war against the United States, not the city of New York. A special and temporary Federal Court could be created in Shallow Water for this trial alone (and no doubt my former friends in Shallow Water are now using my name only in conjunction with four letter expletives).

With two very viable options – military court in Cuba or civil court in Shallow Water – Obama obviously made his decision on some other criteria. He is reaching for symbolism but grasping suicide.

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When multiple pieces on a chessboard move simultaneously, the game will soon end unpleasantly.

This is not a reference to old men in the park engaging in fisticuffs over misplaces pawns. This is about Iran, Israel and an intervention that would change the scope of geopolitics forever.

In the last twelve hours, three separate news reports – if at all are true – spell doom for Iran’s nuclear program and perhaps its theocracy. The question is if Mad Mullahs will molder under the stress of a seemingly inevitable and tolerated Israeli attack, or if instead they will stand their ground and be evaporated.

The news of the hour is that America and Saudi Arabia apparently will decline to intervene against Israel, and that more clerics are openly opposing the continued presidency of Mad Mahmoud. Trouble on the inside, trouble on the outside, and Iran’s enemies and allies alike are making room for the fight.

Discounting for a moment that Obama’s Vice Presidential proxy is coherent and coherently relating Obama’s foreign policy, his statement that “Israel can determine for itself — it’s a sovereign nation — what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else” lacks ambiguity. We should recall that Obama selected Biden to shore up the formers foreign policy credentials. On such matters Biden often slides into idiocy, as he did during the campaign when proposing to partition Iraq by religion.

We know how well that has worked for Pakistan and India.

But his utterances cannot be dismissed due to his previous simplicity. His were blunt statements of stance about a current and well analyzed foreign policy moment. It is doubtful that even a man with perpetual hoof-in-mouth disease would wing it. Nope, this is Obama policy and a naked green lighting for an Israeli strike.

Saudi participation is a different matter. America has long defended Israel, right or wrong. Stepping aside while Israel attacks is expected even from Obama, a man who seems intent on holding talks with every radical on the globe. The Saudis however have been the epicenter of Arab outrage against Israel. Though less directly involved than Iran in instigating proxy wars in the Holy Land, they have traditionally been more ideologically aligned with their Persian neighbors than their Jewish bogymen.

But the Saudis supposedly lack nukes. A better armed Iran poses perpetual threats not only to Israel, but to the Saudi royal family as well. It is in Saudi Arabia’s interest to neuter Iran’s military might while not actually lifting a sword. This explains why a Mossad man who maintains a dialogue with the House of Saud claims that the King will ignore Israeli jets flying over his Kingdom if bombing runs are required.

For Arab instigators to suddenly cooperate with the Hebrew nation is one of those jaw dropping instances in history where you wonder if the world has gone terribly sane.

This has not gone unnoticed among Iran’s ruling Mullahs. Though the internal issue remains the lack of legitimacy of the recent Iranian election, some dissenting clerics openly questioning Iran’s Guardian Council is almost as atypical as Saudis and Hassidics sharing c-rations. Often in times of turmoil people seek survival by assassinating their own leaders, be it with AK-47s or calling their right to rule into question before seething mobs.

The cleric’s call-out is a confrontation against the same establishment that Israel wishes to obliterate and an elaborate form of self preservation. A velvet revolution beats being bombed any day.

If you need a big grin, put yourself in the Mullahs’ turban. A nation that your anointed president has repeatedly called to be wiped off the map suddenly goes quiet, a certain prelude to action. A representative of their chief ally is in-country and claiming they won’t stop any attack. Your primarily ideological ally reportedly will turn blind eyes to the proposed strike. And if that were not stressful enough, your own religious institutions are questioning your very legitimacy – chiseling away your foundation while a fist is streaking toward your nose.

Being a theocrat is only fun when people are not betraying or killing you.

These incidents alone are unconcerning. The fact that they are occurring in the same news cycle is. It smells as if a decision to strike has been made and the players opposed to Iran’s ruling regime are being moved into or out of position. The real question appears not to be if Israel will strike, but when and what ordnance they will use. The time to tour Tehran is past … it is time to bug-out.

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