Arabs must take the lead

There was a brief period of time, after the 9/11 attacks, between October of 2001 and March of 2003, when we had the Taliban and al-Qaeda on the run with both forces crumbling before U.S. pressure.

And then we let up to go topple Saddam Hussein, a man we had bottled up and could have just let wither on the vine. Instead, we opted for "regime change."

Let's get something straight. Our military forces are very good. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who could stand up to them in a heads-up fight.

But for a very long time in this country, going back through multiple administrations and parties, we have not been able to successfully end a war politically. The last time we pulled that off was at the end of WWII, which is now ancient history in high school textbooks.

Maybe we should have taken a page from the British colonial model, at least for a while. We were a little too quick to give the people of Afghanistan and Iraq democracy, a difficult (sometimes maddening) form of government that takes a strong cultural tradition of personal independence mixed with a belief in majority rule to make work. We handed Karzai and al-Malaki the keys to the car without any time in a driver's ed program.

The result has been the disaster we are now reaping. ISIS is putting the Rwanda genocide and Pol Pot Cambodian killing fields to shame -- all of course, in the name of God (who is constantly appalled at what people do in his name). ISIS is a pestilence, worse than any plague of locusts, that has descended on the Mideast, carving its gory path of slaughter and oppression through a power vacuum we helped create. Even al-Qaeda thinks ISIS is extreme.

No one wants to go back to Iraq. But we helped make this mess and it's clear the Iraqi government and armed forces aren't remotely capable of stopping them.

Airpower is one of the few options we have to hurt ISIS, but it can't take territory back, where people are trapped, dying in job lots in the cruelest of ways.

We spent hundreds of billions of dollars training and equipping the Iraqi army, only to see it disintegrate in just a few brief years to a joke of a force, lacking training and hamstrung by rampant corruption. Their armored forces couldn't stand up to ISIS pickup trucks. They can't do the job.

In fact, the only people doing any real fighting are the Kurds, the red-headed stepchildren of that region that no one wants to recognize, and which are horribly -- by design of the U.S. and the Iraqi government -- inadequately armed.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government of al-Malaki is pulling military forces away from the fight to "protect" him in Baghdad from his internal political opposition. While the house burns around him, al-Malaki is more interested in his personal power than in his country -- the true mark of a dictator.

Yet ISIS must be stopped. To call it brutal is to be gentle. Every member of its group should some day face a war crimes tribunal for crimes against humanity.

There's been a lot of hand wringing about this while little has actually been done (even U.S. reinvolvement this week as been pretty limited).

But ISIS won't go away. Only a coalition of forces, preferably from Mideast nations themselves, can stop this plague -- which is worse than Ebola -- from spreading.

And somewhere, some how, some one of sufficient stature to be heard in the Islamic world, must stand up and declare that God believes in peace, not killing, and that all of his children must learn to live together.

-- Kelly Everitt