ISIS Siege takes Iraq by storm

When President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, this column described his action as playing "Big Casino."

"President Bush could see that old-fashioned dictatorial regimes in the Middle East were fragile and would be toppling sooner rather than later," I wrote.

"The only uncertainty was whether these countries would become democracies or be taken over by Islamists and turned into anti-American Iran-like theocracies. President Bush's long-shot gamble was that we could remake Iraq into an exemplary viable democracy."

History's roulette wheel keeps spinning, but it appears that Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive intervention and President Barack Obama's doctrine of apology and withdrawal are losing.

The black flags of ISIS — not the ancient Middle Eastern fertility goddess, but terrorist warriors of "the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham" — have swept like a storm from Syria across much of Iraq, erasing the border that a century earlier Winston Churchill drew as the victors of World War I carved up a defeated Ottoman Empire.

These ISIS Islamists use the tactics of Tamerlane (Timur the Lame), another Muslim conqueror who around 1400 A.D. also made piles of severed heads to terrorize opponents.

These Sunni Muslim fanatics may already inadvertently be creating a behind-the-scenes alliance between the West and Shiite Iran to stop ISIS before it can conjure a new caliphate bent on conquering the world with a doomsday version of Islam.

When Aldous Huxley, prophetic author of the novel Brave New World, visited a restored Israel during the 1950s, the experience inspired a remarkable essay titled "Usually Destroyed."

Huxley had hired a young Christian tour guide with an eccentric command of the English language. This guide would repeatedly use odd words that, as Huxley recognized, were at times amazingly profound.

"St. Helena built here a very vast church," the young guide said, "but the area was usually destroyed by the Samaritans in the year 529 after Our Lord Jesus Christ."

"Then the Crusaders came . . . and built a new church still more vast . . . In the 17th century . . . the Turks usually removed the lead from the roof to make ammunition; consequently rain entered the area and the church was thrown down," the guide continued.

"All these broken-down houses you see over there were usually destroyed during the war with the Jews in 1948."

"Usually destroyed," wrote Huxley, "and then usually rebuilt, in order, of course, to be destroyed again and then rebuilt . . . That vocalized tic had compressed all history into a four-syllabled word . . ."

"Usually destroyed — but also, and just as often, usually rebuilt. Like the rain, like sunshine, like the grace of God and the devastations of nature, his verbalized tic was perfectly impartial."

The wheel spins. Those we called allies abandon us when they see a weak American president renege on promises to defend Ukraine and Poland.

The person our mainstream media heralds as America's next president, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her new memoir "Hard Choices," reportedly refers to "life under the Israeli occupation" and criticizes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for not giving Palestinians land that Israelis conquered in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Israelis believe that their God-given claim to this land is several thousand years old.

The political wheel turns in America, too. FrontPageMagazine.com reports that in 20 of America's 50 states, the second largest religion after Christianity is now Islam — and Muslim-Americans can elicit large campaign contributions from oil-rich Islamic nations. (Is this the secret reason Obama opposes the Keystone pipeline, fracking, coal, and U.S. energy independence?) Our leftist politicians have begun abandoning Israel for Islam.

In Europe, Christianity is a fading faith, and nations such as France face demographic disaster from producing far fewer than the 2.1 children per couple needed to maintain their population.

Recent Muslim immigrants to Europe are having 3.4 children per couple.

Israel, meanwhile, has at least 400 nuclear weapons, with Iran and Saudi Arabia rushing to go nuclear. But the West may be "usually destroyed" as ancient Rome was, by another WMD, a weapon of mass demographics, our loss of passionate life, faith, morality, and self-confidence.

Lowell Ponte is co-author, with Craig R. Smith, of "The Great Withdrawal"; "Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse"; "The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back"; "The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us . . . And Seven Ways to Stop It"; and "Re-Making Money: Ways to Restore America's Optimistic Golden Age." Read more reports from Lowell Ponte — Click Here Now.