This week I heard an interesting program on the BBC in which an interview was done with a former British intelligence officer whose level of expertise seems is in ISIL.
He made some important references to U.S work in Iraq and the errors that were made in dismantling the former presidents state machinery. His view was that those who had formerly served the Iraqi president had now coagulated and gathered around the new core (ISIS). This made sense because I was beginning to see a revival of Baathist tendencies especially with the attack on Yazidis. In my view therefore the former president was not dead...not in the complete sense.
One could see the same happening in Libya even if the forces that displaced the Colonel in that country seem to have been more home grown. What one should therefore follow is the after effects on Libya and if marginalized groups will begin to suffer abuses from the past as in the case with Iraq. If the same happens, then one might as well rewind all the way back to 2011.
The conflict here rises out of what we can loosely refer to as established authority and the broad subject of Change. What I have also found and what I ascribe to is a belief that nations are just like people. When they are hurt or wounded, they often cease to grow or at least begin to limit resources to those areas that are wounded until those parts are healed.
If they have unanswered questions or dilemmas, these often cause deep questions which after a passage of time will result in a loss of confidence in their systems or a birth of doubts and fears and negative attitudes.
So the natural flow of questions in this regard then is this? Are Americans ready for change and what does this mean for the next administration?
Will it take the rapid form as it did in the early 1900s so that suffrage predates the struggle of the sixties with the civil right movement?
Was Hillary meant to be first and is America ready for the return of the Clintons to the white house (after the primaries we can see how the Clinton family played the role of king maker in B.H.O's election).
As power begins to centre more along family lines, will we see the return of the larger Bush Family to the white house too? Is Florida going to play a significant role in the elections? What role if any will the new dynamics in the U.S-Cuban relations play in the coming elections. Do these changes benefit the republicans or do they favor eye democrats?
Have recent development in the petroleum brought about a sea change in the machine that is government? Are we going to see something similar to what happened in the Seventies when the Saudis tightened the note on foreign relations?
The Christian faith calls these strongholds, or you can call them mindsets.
You could say, that the sixties were a prime example of this challenge on the American Psyche. The Vietnam war, the Kennedies and Martin Luther on one hand and the drive to the left which was characterized by the Jesus Movement, the hippies and the rise of experimental drugs.
While we are still dealing with the subject of our relations, another group has arisen whose prime focus seems to be on the elimination of western education.
In my most recent post (trends and prediction) I wondered aloud why we seem unprepared for an event which we for such a long time had predicted.
Could this be the case now too?
Do we now have a solution to the problem of endemic corruption?
A forceful return to faith (sharia) and a complete revamp of the education system?
Have you ever silently cheered for someone who challenged authority even if you did not approve of their actions. Did you ever wish that they succeeded and fought for a position once they did even if you were unwilling to engage as deeply as they did?
There are some aspects of this in the faith struggle that seems to accompany all major faiths especially those that have proselytization as part of their doctrine or that insist on some sort of hell fire message.
In addition to this there are some references to what Zacharias calls man's responsibility versus God's sovereignty which in summary questions, tries to differentiate between those activities for which men must act and those for which God bears full responsibility.
The result of this is the creation of two distinct groups of believers those who act and those who wait for God to act. Maybe some groups draw inspiration from the book of Genesis in which God places men at the heart of his garden and commands them to subdue and dominate the earth.
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