The Winds of War

It is not often that I post a link to a website which offers advertisements for a subscription service, but the first link offered such valuable commentary that I am attaching it for readers of this blog to consider. The title of this post is taken from the link, which is a free commentary mailed out to individuals who sign up for the free emailings at Money and Markets. This site is directed by Dr. Martin Weiss, who is a well-respected voice in the American financial and investment community and who has been interviewed on a variety of American mass media outlets.

His commentary about the dangerous “Winds of War” blowing in the Mideast are entirely consistent with the viewpoints and analysis that I have offered about the Sunni-Shiite divide in the Mideast and the possibility of a major war breaking out along this Islamic sectarian line. His analysis does not include the biblical contexts that characterize my posts, but his warning about a possible Sunni-Shiite war in the Mideast strongly parallels what I have been warning about for some time. This link includes a very enlightening set of two maps: one showing the situation in the Mideast five years ago (when Barack Obama took office) and the present. These maps show how warfare, chaos and the threats of a wider war have greatly increased in the last five years. Americans are not being informed in our establishment mass media about how serious is the threat of a major Mideast war. Perhaps the governing elites don’t want people to panic. The best news sources on the deteriorating situation in the Mideast that I have found are the internet, the BBC news reports aired most nights on PBS-TV in the USA and daily programming on Al Jazeera America. If you interested in Mideastern news updates and analysis, I suggest you include regular attention to Al Jazerra America if your cable or satellite TV system offers it.

As this link affirms, the warnings that I have made on my blog are very real. It also affirms that there are radical Jihadist groups on both the Shiite and Sunni sides. As I am writing this post, reports out of Iraq’s Anbar province are murky at best. Some media reports are stating that Sunni tribesmen and local police forces are trying to oust the ISIL Jihadis (an Al Qaida-aligned group) from two major Iraqi cities, and that their efforts have apparently been more successful in Ramadi than in Fallujah. However, other reports (see second link and third link) indicate that the rebels who took over those two cities were Sunni forces opposed to Iraq’s Shiite central government and not Al-Qaida aligned at all. The Sunni forces seem poised to forcibly resist any effort by the Al Maliki-led Shiite central government to retake these Sunni cities. What we may actually be seeing is a Sunni effort to break off the Sunni provinces in Western Iraq from the Shiite central government in Baghdad. Most interesting is that some Iraqis from the embattled regions are fleeing to the Kurdish-held automonomous zone in Northern Iraq for safety. Since the “Kurdistan” region in Northern Iraq has no desire to be ruled by the Shiite central government either, I think it can be safely assumed that the Iraqis seeking shelter in Kurdish territory are Sunnis. A previous post some time ago at this site documented that the Kurds had made a major move toward aligning themselves with the Sunni side of the Shiite-Sunni split in the Mideast.

Take another look at the two comparative maps in the first link to grasp just how quickly warfare and instability is spreading throughout the Mideast. It has reached the situation where any spark could ignite a region-wide war which will likely drag in many other nations. The “winds of war” are blowing ever-stronger.