On the other hand, you might want to note that SCANDAL spelled backwards is . . . LADNACS. LADNACS? LADNACS, of course, does not make sense, but then, neither does Thomas Friedman's latest Times op-ed entitled "ISIS and SISI" (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/opinion/thomas-friedman-isis-and-sisi.html?ref=opinion&_r=0), in which this would-be Middle East expert explains how the Arabs can escape the tyranny of ISIS (also known as ISIL) in Iraq and of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt. Friedman concludes his erudite opinion piece by observing:
"We tend to make every story about us. But this is not all about us. To be sure, we’ve done plenty of ignorant things in Iraq and Egypt. But we also helped open their doors to a different future, which their leaders have slammed shut for now. Going forward, where we see people truly committed to pluralism, we should help support them. And where we see islands of decency threatened, we should help protect them. But this is primarily about them, about their need to learn to live together without an iron fist from the top, and it will happen only when and if they want it to happen."
"It will happen only when and if they want it to happen"? Or something akin to Dorothy just having to click the heels of her ruby slipper three times. Or Ray Kinsella building a baseball field in his cornfield, knowing that if you build it, they will come.
Or, if you wish it long enough and hard enough, it will happen. You know, the profound philosophy underlying that 2006 self-help masterpiece entitled "The Secret."
However, there is a fly in Friedman's ointment. More than 10 million Egyptian women are illiterate. More than 90 percent of Egyptian women have undergone genital mutilation. And this is not because of Sisi. This is because more than 80 million Jew-hating Egyptians do this to themselves.
Unless Egyptians choose to free their women from tyranny, this country is headed for the dustbin of history.
Iraq? An incohesive entity whose borders resulted from the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France. Sykes-Picot was intended to carve up the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, but failed to take into account centuries-long enmity between Shiites and Sunnis. Iraq today? Pure pandemonium, and there is no chance of this chaos abating until Shiites and Sunnis learn to live together, which is not in the cards anytime soon.
But never mind: Listen to Friedman! After all, Obama read Friedman, and look where it took his foreign policy . . .
